Sweet corn and butter biscuits it's good to be back! Yeah, I know I said that before but, this time, I really mean it. It seems like the Sports Beat required some more behind-the-scenes work than originally anticipated but, thanks to the hard work of our development staff--as well as my legion of overworked and unpaid interns whom I literally leave chained to their desks at night--we are back up again. Okay, I made the part about the interns up. They're not really chained to their desks.

　　Anyway, what's been happening since last we spoke? For one thing, I went to Japan for a very special assignment--one that you will be reading about here on the site in the very near future so do stay tuned. Boy do they love their video games over there, and they <i>really</i> love their sports games. Heading to a five-story Club Sega arcade in Akihabara, it's hard not to stand in awe at an entire floor of an arcade dedicated solely to tennis, golf, hoops, and driving games. Then there's World Club Champion Football--a fascinating amalgam of collectible card game (ala Magic: The Gathering), table top stratgey game, and a gigantic videoscreen that showed the action on the field. I couldn't read the Japanese text to make out how to play, but that didn't stop me from spending a few hundred yen on a pack of cards of my very own.

　　In the console world, it's all about soccer, baseball, and horseracing. Soccer seems to be especially hot (thanks in no small part to Winning Eleven 9 being recently released for PSP) and the variety of soccer games covers a lot of ground--from traditional on-the-field soccer games and management sims, to titles of a more esoteric fare such as "Soccer Life" which, judging from the packaging, dealt a lot with the off-the-field concerns of athletes such as girlfriends, children, and families. A gaming equivalent of the BBC show Footballer's Wives? Who knows, but it looked interesting. There was a similar variety of baseball games available--from traditional hardball sims, to cartoony arcade stuff, to a game that looked like a baseball title on the cover but actually turned out to be a baseball-themed casino game. Very strange.

　　Finally in the real world, while the White Sox were destroying the Astros in the World Series, a similar rout was happening in the Japan Series, as former MLB manager Bobby Valentine's Chiba Lotte Marines swept the Hanshin Tigers 4-0. What impressed me most was Valentine's excellent command of the Japanese language. I don't know if he's fluent but, judging from the post-game interviews I watched on TV, he's either well on his way or benefits from some great tutoring.