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Mark Little flicks the joystick and opens a special developer's menu in Major League Baseball 2K12. The screen jumps to an empty ballpark, with a few lines representing the trajectory of a pitch and the timing of the batter trying to hit it. Little starts fooling with some ratings, creating a situation involving a high-contact hitter with not much pop. More »
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Announced yesterday during EA's Spring Showcase, PGA Tour 13's Legacy Mode will let players of the publisher's next golf sim step inside the golf great's cleats at various points of his life. Including, apparently, Tiger's awkward yet fashion-forward adolescence. More »
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EA's upcoming Tiger Woods PGA 13 will feature a sort of "Jordan Challenge Mode", which will allow players to enter the shoes of its titular golf star and live out the major events of his career, starting at age 2. More »
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In past years I've used the Saturday before the Super Bowl to handicap the field for the next cover of Madden NFL. Since the last time I did that, EA Sports put the honors up to a fan-voted, 32-player tournament in 2011, and on Thursday announced it was doubling that field to 64 for 2012. More »
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His season may be over, but Tebow Time has not run out. And if last night's news about the Madden NFL 13 cover is any indication, get ready to see a lot more of the Denver quarterback during the off-season. More »
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At Madden Bowl XVIII, EA Sports' Anthony Stevenson just announced that the cover athlete for Madden NFL will be voted on by fans for a second year. This year's field will be doubled to 64 candidates, and the first round of voting will be a "play-in" round pitting NFL teammates against each other to determine their franchise's representative in the second round through to the finals. More »
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Wishful thinking is a common theme with conceptual EA Sports game covers; usually the artist is honoring a favorite player or another star he wishes would be anointed for cover recognition. Entirely imaginary titles, as conceived here by an artist and posted on Behance, are a little less common. No NCAA Lacrosse title by EA Sports exists and odds aren't good that it will anytime soon. More »
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Four teams of all-star competitors, including three Heisman Trophy winners (in their video game personae, above) and two Pro Football Hall of Famers, clash tonight in the Madden Bowl, the annual pre-Super Bowl throwdown EA Sports has staged for nearly 20 years. You can watch the action on ESPN3, which means if you have an Xbox 360, you can probably watch it on that. More »
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Things get sweaty in tennis, especially if you're playing on the clay courts of the Tennis Club de Paris. Hence, the proliferation of headbands on male players. This latest clip for EA Sports' upcoming serve-and-volley title showcases play on clay courts in the form of some of tennis' greatest rivalries. You'll get your chance to rock some headgear and gets your shorts dirty when Grand Slam Tennis 2 comes out on Valentine's Day. More »
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The New York Giants will claim their fourth Super Bowl title on Sunday, according to EA Sports' official Madden NFL 12 simulation, which has New York defeating New England 27-24 on a 40-yard field goal as time expires. More »
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Of all ironies, it's Electronic Arts now asking a judge to rule that some video game depictions of real-life names and symbols and products don't need a license. More »
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The Facebook games giant Zynga seems to have its eyes on a suite of sports titles now, registering several web sites that point to both a football game in the works and an umbrella brand called "Zynga Sports," reports domain registry watchdog Fusible. More »
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You may not know this, but my old man is a tennis umpire. He's done it for more than 25 years, which means he's had some pretty big assignments. Dad's worked two Olympics, numerous U.S. Opens (including lines crew of the most recent men's final), and has been called a fucking chickenshit bastard by John McEnroe himself. More »
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So much is made of NFL 2K5 and the blaze-of-glory conclusion to its rivalry with Madden NFL that it's easy to forget another title once threatened EA Sports' glamour franchise. In fact, the Madden team also feared NFL GameDay until the end. More »
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Four months ago, EA Sports opened up applications for a four-month fellowship meant to invite former college athletes into video game design careers. Today, the label awarded its first two, to graduates who played football at Colorado State University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. More »
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Finish off the "Blitz Gauntlet" mode in the recently released NFL Blitz for PS3 and Xbox 360 and you'll unlock a team full of zombies. And the logo on their jersey isn't that of the National Football League, but of another league, one from a future of decaying flesh and dismembered bodies. More »
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EA Sports has confirmed to Kotaku that NBA Jam: On Fire Edition will be getting a roster update. The publisher's preceding silence on the subject had led some to believe it had abandoned post-release support for the 2-on-2 arcade basketball game. More »
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A long-forgotten truth of NFL Blitz revealed itself to me as I looked to salt away my first victory: You don't salt away any victories in NFL Blitz. You want a time-consuming play? Unload a deep pass route, like the fondly remembered "Da Bomb." More »
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A walk-on running back; a dad who couldn't tell his kids what he did; a fat kid who started going to the gym and never stopped. A guy who came to know his sport's greatest venue in ways some champions never will. The top man at sports video gaming's dominant publisher, and a college student who considers himself a "virtual athlete," watching every out from his wheelchair. More »
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Pro basketball resumes on Christmas Day; college football will begin staging its major postseason contests eight days later. This has, perhaps unintentionally, engendered competing five-game simulations from 2K Sports and EA Sports, makers of NBA 2K12 and NCAA Football 12. Want to know who wins the big matchups? We've got the results predicted by these two video games, with highlights! More »
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Free agent signings are big news in sports video games, not just the leagues they simulate. Today, EA Sports picked up Kolbe Launchbaugh, a senior designer for Sony's universally acclaimed MLB The Show baseball simulation, and he'll start work on EA Sports' cornerstone Madden franchise in a couple of weeks. More »
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EA Sports, which ended publication of Madden NFL for the PC in 2008, evidently had plans to return to that platform through a browser-based game sometime in 2010, according to mockups created by a former staff designer. The label was serious enough about the project to build a working, mouse-driven interface for the game's console engine. More »
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It doesn't involve a realistic roster or league licensing, so it's sometimes hard to remember that SSX is an EA Sports title. And the snowboarding reboot should be one of the bigger ones for the label in the coming year. But with a lineup crowded by more traditional fare in the first two months, SSX has seen its ship date move once and now twice, thanks to NFL and tennis products. More »
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Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice was voted the "cover star" for January's reboot of NFL Blitz at the Video Game Awards tonight. Of course, Blitz is a downloadable title, so this game actually has no physical cover. So that means Rice won't actually tear his ACL in the playoffs after the game releases on PSN and Xbox Live, right? More »
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For the past two years, Stick Jockey has, at the end of the season, used EA Sports' NCAA Football to supply an alternate-reality simulation of a postseason involving a true college football playoff, one that invites every conference champion. I've become resigned to the utter fantasy of this idea ever happening in my lifetime. More »
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Competitive Madden gaming, for the better part of a decade, typically involved a weekend of long drives, cheap hotel stays, and lots of standing, sitting and sometimes sleeping on ugly convention center carpet. It fairly assured that only the diehards and elites would show up for preliminary rounds. More »
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I had high hopes when EA Sports hinted a couple months ago that "figures recognizable to the sports world" would be playable golfers in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 13, due in March. That kind of longhand comment, as opposed to just saying "former sports stars" had me thinking the game might include some kind of celebrity pro-am event. More »
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Since October, we've heard anecdotal accounts of Xbox Live members finding suspicious purchases on their credit cards and learning their accounts had been recovered to another machine. Now it's happened to a games writer—just this past week. Dan Crawley of VentureBeat provides a detailed rundown of exactly what happened, and in the process asks some detailed questions of Microsoft. More »
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We may be closing out the hype cycle for 2011, but that means 2012's is already underway. SSX is still looking hawt for its Feb. 14 release, as this ski-porn gallery attests. Happy early Valentine's Day. More »
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Though not a retail release, the January reboot of NFL Blitz will still have a cover star, following a fan-voted campaign taking place during the Spike Video Game Awards next weekend. More »
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Calamity Jane, the fabled putter of the Augusta National co-founder Bobby Jones, graces the cover of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 13's special edition, along with the club's signature Green Jacket. Oh yeah, some decent golfers also share the packshot of the main product on PS3 and Xbox 360. More »
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Back in January, one of Lionel Messi's teammates on FC Barcelona let slip that the football superstar greatly enjoyed playing EA Sports' FIFA series. At the time, he was the three-time cover star of Konami's Pro Evolution Soccer, from its 2009 to 2011 editions. More »
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In between two of the most-watched college basketball games ever played in November, the NBA's Doomsday Clock inched closer to midnight when its players rejected a take-it-or-leave-it ultimatum and dissolved their union. It's the nuclear winter scenario analysts imagined when they pegged worst-case losses at $40 million for NBA 2K12, the lone video game caught in the crossfire. More »
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When NFL Blitz was announced in October, I asked the game's producer, Dave Ross, what kind of hitting action the game would feature, given the league's increased sensitivity to violence and head injuries since the last version of the game was released in 2003. Ross said at the time they were still working through approvals with the league, but promised it'd still "contain over-the-top, fast arcade action with big hits and guys catching on fire." More »
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For a short time this summer, Florida State was the rumored target of a Southeastern Conference raid on the Atlantic Coast Conference, in the protracted and sometimes absurd realignment that still is reshaping college football's landscape. Ben Haumiller, a proud Seminole alumnus, knew that change was unlikely in the real world. Florida State burned a bridge when it chose the ACC over the SEC in 1992. But on his Xbox 360, FSU was already lacing up in the nation's premier league. More »
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As tipped off yesterday, Fight Night Champion is being offered a la carte over PlayStation Network beginning today—gamers can buy the boxing title's "Champion Mode," the cinematic narrative of fictious boxer Andre Bishop, for $5. If they enjoy that, they can add other game modes on a piecemeal basis. More »
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Rarely considered for overall video-game-of-the-year honors, the uncommon diversity of sports video games support a class of awards unique to the genre. These are Kotaku's Stick Jockey Sports Video Games of the Year. More »
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A year after appearing in NBA Jam (with Vice President Biden, and eight other political figures of both parties), President Obama will not cameo in January's NFL Blitz, one of the game's designers said recently. More »
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Each time I see SSX, I'm a bit more impressed with the wide variety of challenges and map types that'll be in the game. From the avalanche-chase I saw at E3 to this latest video above, which details three of the locations in the game—Patagonia, Antarctica, and New Zeland. More »
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This March will mark the third straight year in which Tiger Woods is not the sole star on the cover of a video game named Tiger Woods. But that shouldn't suggest that the golfer, winless since an embarrassing marital scandal broke two years ago, is being eased out by EA Sports. More »
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