Sunday morning routine: Sipping coffee, with ESPN NFL Gameday playing in the next room; no fantasy research or line-up finalization; my team got shook and took partly due to injuries, partly due to miscalculating QB free-fall during the dynasty draft; another story, another time.

Highlight music playing on NFL Gameday? That iconic ESPN football highlight music used in NFL 2K5 when Chris Berman would narrate halftime highlights. As I have watched modern companies over the years attempt...

mcdowell31

Initially, 2K badges and MyLeague (now MyNBA) did not go well together. The heavy-handed badges took much of the basketball strategy and nuance out of 2K because Attributes were deemphasized. Upon introduction, Mike Wang in an interview envisioned badges contributing mightily to, the game within the game, team-building. Early iterations left me cursing as the AI would lose its mind and realistic games were ruined by arcade-like badge-fests. In the early years, it made better sense to disable the...

mcdowell31

This is a long watch. The bottom line: AI is a tool. Humans will still be responsible for editing and the final product.

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mcdowell31

JxmyHiroller's essays are a regular part of my YouTube basketball diet. A couple of years ago he pointed to a possible correlation between landing on one straightened leg after a dunk and knee injuries among NBA players. Now he has further food for thought on injuries in the modern NBA. In NBA 2K8, I played with the Injury slider at 100. I got an incredibly accurate total number of players on my league injury list total; if I recall correctly it was somewhere between sixty and eighty, which would...

mcdowell31

Just completed a massive dragon fight in Skyrim. I have a mod running that increases the number and lethality of the dragons attacking as they, as a faction of sorts, become "pissed" at your character taking out their faction members. I had just finished a couple of missions near Riften and was full of loot that needed upgrading and selling for mounds of gold septims that presented the opportunity to train my character and upgrade equipment, much like MyPlayer.

The aforementioned...

mcdowell31