JR Ewing

Yeah, it's really tough to see a backlash coming. Electronic Arts has been named the worst company in the world several times, and people really do hate them... but it's not exactly hampering sales of their products.

-I think the decent thing would be to return the money. -The owners have a very established history of not doing the decent thing.

I think that the integrity of these matters depends on us NOT awarding records to people that haven't actually broken them.

Let's put things in perspective: if not for Coronavirus, thousands more people would be alive and the world's economy wouldn't be teetering to the edge of collapse. The trials and tribulations of a young multi-millionaire (whom I bet isn't thinking about his lost 50 goals at this very moment) sort of pale in comparison.

I really shouldn't be entertaining this, because I think that calling this a half--baked plan is an insult to half-baked plans everywhere, but..... What's the magic cut-off number for when we don't pro-rate a player's stats? 70 games? 60? 50? Do we create a sliding scale for these arbitrary cut-offs? Do we pro-rate them based on minutes played or games played? Do we re-write the record book for some butthurt Leafs fans? Or do we just accept that sh|t happens and allow the record to stand as it is? I know my choice.

Great season by Matthews, but no, the NHL should not pro-rate anybody's stats any more than they should say that Leon Draisaitl scored 127 points.

Italy went from 366 dead eight days ago to almost 2,200 as of today, with their head of infectious diseases, Massimo Galli, saying that "the epidemic peak is not imminent". This is far worse than the regular common flu.

The umpires could sound good because they used a small number of sound samples. The voice engine for the player's names was a program called Amiga Say, and it was very cool stuff for the mid-80s. It had a lot of applications for use, for example with disabled people, as you mentioned, but with Earl Weaver Baseball, use could use it so that any player you created or edited would also have their name announced as well. This was also incorporated into AmigaBASIC, written by (you guessed it) Microsoft for the Amiga line of computers. If you typed something like SAY TRANSLATE$ ("The Habs suck") the computer would speak that phrase. Again, this is pretty heady stuff for 1987, and was far more than you were getting on an IBM-compatible 286 or anything in the Apple line. An IBM, which was capable of far less in terms of graphics and sound, was going for about $3,500. The Amiga ran you $600.

Hardball! was fun: played a good bit of it on the C64. My favourite baseball sim was Earl Weaver Baseball on the Amiga, from 1987. It was a realistic simulation of baseball from, shockingly, EA. It had real teams and rosters of actual players, both historic and current (for the time), and came packed with a ballpark editor, so you create any team's stadium from any period in history. Extra data discs were available, as well as a Commissioner Disk, for managing leagues.

My daughter saw me posting the Wayne Gretzky Hockey 2 video and laughed her ass off.

@WordsOfWisdom I played a lot of Face Off! at a friend's house, on his C64. Really fun game. Wasn't the absolute most realistic approach to hockey, but it had great graphics for the era, was really entertaining and had some features which were ahead of their time. You ran a franchise, could edit a playbook, and played a season. @lynxrattle Yes, the manual said something along the lines of "The loser is assessed a penalty as a result of his wimpy behaviour!" Another fun game from around that period of time: Superstar Ice Hockey. Good on both the C64 or Amiga, it was the Amiga version that I liked the most:

I loved playing Wayne Gretzky Hockey 2 on my Amiga. Was more realistic and far ahead of any other hockey video game at the time, and if you paired it with Hockey League Simulator, you had the all-around experience of managing your team and playing the games as well.

That's the sort of difference that will give our front line workers a better chance to help the rest of us through this pandemic. Perhaps you've heard folks on the news talk about how 70-80% of us will come down with this and think "Well, I might as well do what I do, then" but right now, it's all about delaying infections and flattening the curve. They can't help us if we don't help them.

You are completely off-base on this. In 1918, St. Louis cancelled public gatherings of more than 20 people. Philadelphia did not. Observe the difference in death rates between the two cities. Social distancing works. Crotch-chopping does not.

The things you're talking about are literally the opposite of what actual experts are saying we should do. It's not giving the finger to the Corona virus, it's giving the finger to everybody else.