If they can live with themselves, NFL fans will be able to do some truly sick and depraved things this year with the new Madden video game. Like charge fans $30 for a beer. Like buy out the Green Bay Packers. Like drive that franchise down to Mexico in the middle of the night, and abandon it there.

Yesterday, EA Sports announced a $100 "Anniversary Edition" for Madden NFL 25 that will include a code offering buyers access to DirecTV's NFL Sunday Ticket—the channel that lets you watch any team outside of your local market—even if they aren't subscribers to the satellite TV service.

Around this time each year, Madden bombards us with the annual list of improvements they say they've made to the defense. And when the game gets arrives, I'm still usually playing it as I have for years: by calling a play and letting the CPU deal with it. But one new move does look useful for a tool like me.

U.S. Presidents—fictional or not—have a major impact on video games. When a game has something to do with the United States, there's a good chance the Commander-in-Chief is gonna show up.

For the first time since 1991, a Madden game will not be released on Nintendo's primary/current home console.

Theoretically, sports should be one of the safer gigs in video games today. These are series that come out every year, they're usually reliable sellers, the publishers have sunk a lot of money into a license, and often they're the only ones holding it. It isn't like taking a risk on a new concept that fails to catch…

Unless they settle beforehand, on June 10 a federal jury will hear some of the claims brought by one of the developers on the first John Madden Football, a lawsuit that alleges Electronic Arts owes him millions in unpaid royalties.

Barry Sanders may have once appeared on the cover of Madden, but until today he was, technically, never its cover star, subjected to the fame, celebrity and, yes, the curse that supposedly goes with it. Now he is, thanks to the fans.

Monday, Madden's publicity operation notified writers that its "playbooks"—the weeks in which they discuss features of the upcoming game—begin this week. In it, "Connected Careers," the mode introduced last year, was rebranded as "Connected Franchise." A GameStop listing sheds a little more light on what that could mean.