The fine football satirists at Every Day Should Be Saturday caught on to something that eluded me during NFL Blitz's launch back in January. Not only are late hits stripped out of the game, the playbook has been toned down considerably.

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.

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."

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…

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…

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.

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…

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.

For 18 months, Dave Ross surfed forums and blogs and dreaded what he'd find. He couldn't tell his kids what he was working on, lest they say something at school. Every day, when Ross booted up his computer at EA Sports, he clicked on the shared drive over the studio's intranet, and then on the folder marked MADDEN…

Lost in the shuffle with the announcement of NFL Blitz's return is the fact the game is actually rated more strictly than its Madden counterpart. As the inaugural hype video for the game shows, it's an E10+ for, among other things,"mild language."

Midway's classic game of over-the-top seven-on-seven football returns with online multiplayer and HD graphics this January, when EA Sports releases NFL Blitz, a downloadable game for the Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network.

Mark Turmell, the creator of the NBA Jam series that saw a revival last year on modern consoles, has left EA Sports for the social games developer Zynga, Kotaku has learned.

NBA Jam's critical success has led EA Sports to resurrect the beloved NFL Blitz series as well, Jeff Gerstmann reports over on Giant Bomb. Development is rumored to be underway, and the multiplatform game wouldn't release until 2012.