What is wrong with you people? How could you not be excited about the release of this game? I can't play anything else at the moment, because I know its not Rugby League, and until I play that I wont be happy with anything else. I play Madden, and it just doesn't excite me very much, I played Rugby 2004, and returned it within a week. Nothing else will do until I get Rugby League.
I've never been so excited about a game in my life, really. I don't care what the release date is, I know it'll be out soon, so soon that I can taste it, and every day until then is painful, its like waiting for Christmas or a birthday when your a young fella, and you know you are getting an awesome present, but you have to wait until that day to get it.
If you aren't excited about the release of this game you probably didn't spend the hundreds of hours playing ARL that I did, editing Parramatta in practice mode to make them a decent side, putting my mates together in a practice squad and lining them up against Australia, heck, I even kept bloody scoring statistics in notepad for the games they played! You wouldn't have worn out a gravis gamepad solely playing ARL 96. You wouldn't have gone through ET's Rugby every year updating the teams and stats to the current season, and playing through it, even ten years after its release. You wouldn't have played the Mega Drive ARL to death, even though you knew it was a pile of crap.
You wouldn't have waited for six long years for another league game to get announced, sitting and dreaming about what could be in it, hoping against all hope that with all the AFL, Cricket and Rugby games coming out, somebody would pick up the greatest game of all. I danced around the room cheering when I read in the Sunday Telegraph one morning that a league game was in development, which was rather brave considering I was on a romantic holiday with my then girlfriend at the time. Funnily enough she couldn't understand my excitement.
You probably still don't play the demo, now 10 months old, nearly every day, even though you do the same thing every time. You wouldn't have spent an hour trying to figure out if you could kick 40-20's the other way. You wouldn't have a dual-boot to Windows 95 so you can still play ARL 96. You wouldn't own Super League Pro Rugby, let alone have finished seasons in it, despite how poor the game is. You probably aren't prepared to import Championship Rugby League Manager from the UK, despite knowing how bad it is, just because its rugby league.
Can you see why I'm more excited than ever now? This game isn't just a great version of Rugby League, this is something that I've waited, begged, pleaded and prayed for for seven years now, and its finally within a month of release. It's not a pipe dream, or one small press release, its not a 'fun game with over the should passes and grubber kicks', it is a full on dedication to rugby league, the best of its kind by a long way, and I don't care if Brent Sherwin has black hair, if there is no video ref, if there is a grab and shake tackle, that players can't bounce off the posts or if ESL field markings aren't accurate, I don't give a toss about any of that, because Rugby League is coming in a month now, just one month to go for something that, 18 short months ago, was only a dream.
So needless to say after all that, I'm very, VERY excited. And if you'd have looked forward to this game as much as I have, you'd be excited too.
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