Few sports video games are truly timeless. Even the best—MVP Baseball 2005, NFL 2K5—show their age and shortcomings immediately, and more than their contemporaries in other genres. It's the special burden of sports titles, tasked with reflecting both the state of the art and the state of reality inside a one-year…

Covering E3 always felt like going to a midlevel bowl game for me. It's a salad of over-produced photo opportunities with big props, costumed actors and nonplussed celebrities, and when you do get one-on-one time with the real players, they're on heavy guard to say nothing but the right things before the big game.

Getting an Internet signal inside LA's Orpheum Theater is always a crapshoot. For years, it's been both a daydream and a nightmare that I'd be liveblogging Electronic Arts' E3 keynote as Andrew Wilson or Peter Moore finished EA Sports' segment and then, pretending to forget something, turned and said, "Oh, by the way."…

Paul Goldschmidt fishes for the 1-1 slider way outside of the strike zone. He kicks dirt over the batter's box chalk, walks in a counterclockwise semicircle, fidgets with the brim of his helmet, and digs back in. Jon Garland rolls his shoulders and sweeps his foot twice over the pitching rubber. Now I may press X.

If it wasn't obvious at its launch in November, then this past week should have made it clear: The Wii U is functionally irrelevant to sports video games, and there is no reason for any sports fan to buy the console. The only question now is how much that will really matter to the fate of the machine.

In no rec league could I ever throw a no-hitter. Alone on a basketball court I'd need half an hour to score 69 points—and a trampoline to dunk. But I can do all of those things in my living room. If video games give us the conceit of doing the impossible, only now has one demonstrated how hard that really is.

If I learned anything this past week, it's that some people will find any context in which an ethnic slur is not an ethnic slur, or will find some justification for its use, from the name of a video game to that of a football team.

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…

Ten years ago I was demoted in my job at the now-dead Rocky Mountain News. The subject is not something I talk about much, but it happened, and I worked with plenty of people who knew the score. The situation wasn't handled well, by either me or my bosses. Ultimately, it ended my newspaper career.

For many sports fans, a number is as identifiable as a name. Growing up far away from a professional team, those numbers didn't really imprint on me until I covered football for four years at college. Ever since, I remember uniform numerals not with a name, but as a name.