How about some review of NFL Street?

NFL Street
Publisher: EA Sports Big
Developer: EA Sports Big
Players: 1-2
Memory Card Usage: 58 KB
Genre: Extreme Sports
Also available for: Gamecube, X-Box

This was a very anticipated title. The concept: NFL Stars and Legends get together to play some street football, just as you might play in the park... with a few unrealistic elements thrown in for fun.

As a sample to see whose available from each team, let me give you the Rams lineup for the game:

QB: Kurt Warner
RB: Marshall Faulk
WR: Isaac Bruce, Torry Holt
OL: Orlando Pace, Kyle Turley
DL: Leonard Little, Grant Wistrom
LB: Jamie Duncan, Tommy Polley
DB: Adam Archuleta, Aeneas Williams

So hardly a leaguewide game.

One of the most fun elements is a pickup game. The computer assembles a random pool of players and occassionally legends and you take turns picking them, just as you would picking teams as kids. The player that picks second gets the ball first.

Occassionally the game will add a couple of Legends to the selection. Usually if it adds one, it'll add a second, so I don't worry about picking first so I can get a legend, as I'd rather have the ball first. But be sure to look at everyone available before you make your first pick.

Legends in the game are:

QB: Ken Stabler
RB: Larry Csonka, Walter Payton, Barry Sanders
DL: Howie Long, William Perry
LB: Lawrence Taylor
DB: Lester Hayes, Ronnie Lott

One drawback is that the legends are the only ones in the game that can wear actual football jerseys. It's nice GETTING to wear other stuff, but I should still get to wear jerseys if I want. It's even odder given that one of the possible outfits is team colored basketball jerseys.

You can also compete in the "ladder mode", creating a team of your own and developing them through straight out games and special challenges against the NFL teams.

Gameplay wise, it's best described as an analogy... NFL Street is to NFL Blitz as NBA Street is to NBA Jam. Besides winning the game, style is a big emphasis. Success on the field plus style helps fill up your Gamebreaker meter. Once it's full, activate it, and you'll be in Gamebreaker mode until a change of possession. As the offense, you become near impossible to tackle or intercept. As the defense, you'll become hard to advance on at all, and if you control the player making the tackle, you'll cause a turnover.

Use them on defense.

Play differs slightly from NFL rules... there's no kicking game. The field is divided into quarters, and you start on the 1st quarter line and have 4 downs to make it to the next line. Wherever you end up after getting a 1st down, it's still only to the next quarter line to get a first down... therefore you can easily end up with 1st and 1, even when not at the goal. Touchdowns are 6 points. For conversions, if you run the ball in, it's 1 point, passing is 2 points, if the defense gets the ball and runs it back to the other end zone, it's 4 points for them.

It's not NFL Blitz... but it's a lot of fun... and if you don't like Madden, it's the only officially licensed alternative left in town.

I'll rate it ****1/2.

Tomorrow: The first part of DC's Countdown to Infinite Crisis

Why don't I get started on that whole review thing... right now?

V: The Original Miniseries
Year: 1983
Original Format: Television Miniseries aired on NBC
Running Time: 196 minutes
Cost/Source: Bought at Wal-Mart for under $10
Cover: Cardboard with plastic snap
Starring: Marc Singer as "Mike Donovan", Faye Grant as "Dr. Juliet Parrish" and Jane Badler as "Diana" amongst others

This is a great one that any sci-fi fan should have. Aliens arrive in huge motherships all over Earth. They profess friendship, claiming they desperately need a compound that can be fashioned out of humanity's waste products, and in exchange for help in making it, they will share all their technology and secrets with us.

Sounds too good to be true.

V is a story of people, who from all different walks of life, come to unite and fight the threat that the Visitors end up being. It's also an extraordinarily strong allegory to Nazism as the Visitors systematically villainize all scientists, take over the media, then take over control.

In addition to the stars listed above (Badler in particular just reeks with evil and perversion as Diana), several performances stand out strongly.

Jason Bernard (also known as Mr. Bracken in the shortlived Fox show Herman's Head and as Captain William Eisen in the video games Wing Commander III&IV) plays Caleb Taylor, industrial worker and father to two very different sons, Ben, a doctor, and Elias, a street hustler.

Robert Englund (most famously known as Freddy Krueger in the Nightmare On Elm Street series of movies) plays a far different role than Freddy as Willie, a very gentle and heroic Visitor.

Leonard Cimino (whom I don't know from anything else) puts in a very strong performance as Abraham Bernstein, a survivor of the Holocaust who most strongly sees the parallels, and is one of the earliest voices urging people to fight. His strongest scene comes at the end of one of the parts of the series where he finds kids on the street defacing Visitor propaganda posters with red spray paint. Abraham takes the spray paint away from them and tells them that if they're going to do it, to do it right. He then paints the iconic red V over the poster that is the logo for the series, and tells them it stands for victory, and to tell their friends.

The disc is double sided and flips over right after the moment described above. At a staggering 3 1/4 hours, it pretty much has to to stay on one disc. It's a steal for the low price, but the cardboard cases are always an annoyance.

Still...

***** (out of 5)

Tomorrow: NFL Street

Hey there, hi there, ho there, Oasikitteers! And welcome to the Futuristic Sci Fi world of 2006! I'm a little disappointed that we haven't gotten flying cars yet, but I did get a ride in a 2006 Ford Escape Hybrid today, and that was fun.

It's kind of an odd feeling that it's actually 2006 if you think about it. I mean it was still the 80's most of the time I was in high school. 2000 felt like this magical date that would never come. I mean, not only adjusting the hundreds digit in the year, but the thousands digit... the vast majority of the human population in history didn't get to do that... and now, we've completed 6 whole trips around the sun past then.

Heavy, if you think about it.

(And you may think I made a math error there, but if you think about it... 2000 was the first whole year I'm talking about, 2001 the second, and so on up until 2005 being the sixth.)

But since a new year is upon us, that comes chock full with new opportunities. I've never been a believer in New Year's Resolutions, but the door is open for some projects to make Our Oasis bigger, badder and better than ever.

First off, starting after RAW tomorrow, and after every subsequent RAW, SmackDown, Impact and PPV (or any other major wrestling show that may start during 2006), a poll will be posted in OO asking people to select the match of the show. Each match of the show for that week will go into a poll for match of the week, and each match of the week will go into a poll for match of the month (if a month begins between shows, we'll adjust the procedure as necessary)

The point... at the end of the year, we will have one last poll for an official MATCH OF THE YEAR from OO.

Also, I am going to try to start posting fairly frequent game, movie and comic reviews to the blog. These may be selected at random, or just whatever I feel like reviewing at the time.

The goal of this blog is to be the public face of OO. OO is a great place, lots of fun, and we hope to expand and grow. This blog is a great way to advertise the community while still striving towards our goal of being confidential. As such, I'm not asking the other members here to commit to anything, but to post what they can. We have the authors of the #1 and #2 blogs out there on staff. We can easily slip into the #3 spot, just as we're already far and away #1 as a forum.

Viva OO in 2006!