Madden NFL 13 says the Baltimore Ravens will claim their second Super Bowl championship on Sunday, 27-24, handing San Francisco its first defeat in six visits to the NFL's title game.
Earlier this week, Metacritic bemoaned 2012 as a year of poorer review scores for video games than the one preceding it. Fewer titles surpassed the all-important 90—which practically guarantees job security to those who developed or greenlit the project—than in 2011. Interestingly, the three console platforms' average…
Rarely considered for overall video-game-of-the-year honors, the uncommon diversity of sports video games, and the unique demands placed on them to recreate both a real-world sport and the real-life experiences associated with it, support their own class of awards more than any other genre. These are Kotaku's Stick…
Around halftime of a game on an NFL Sunday is a good time to take the temperature of the Madden NFL crowd. It's like the water department analysis that shows everyone flushing the john when the Super Bowl goes to the break. In this case, online gamers, many of whom have their consoles running and connected to the…
Pat Tillman, the Arizona Cardinals standout defensive back who forsook a $3 million contract to enlist in the Army in 2002, and who was killed by friendly fire in an operation in Afghanistan, returns to the football field as a special offering within Madden NFL 13's Ultimate Team mode. Tillman's appearance in the game…
Nothing deleted from Twitter is ever deleted on time, and sometime between Monday and Tuesday, a disillusioned former Madden developer figured that out. By then, his unvarnished rant tossed a dripping slab of red meat to Madden's many Internet enemies, and it didn't win the author much support from his old friends.
An update to Madden NFL 13 rolling out tomorrow will deliver something called "Draft Duels" to Madden Ultimate Team, the game's hybrid fantasy team/card collecting mode. In it, players will open packs of cards, construct a team from their holdings—and their opponent's—and then duke it out in a standard multiplayer…
At no point during its E3 2012 keynote did Electronic Arts mention what it would be delivering when the Wii U arrived later in the year. There could be any of number of good reasons for this, but a major publisher's total silence on a new console was enough that I had to double-check with Madden NFL's general manager…
I've been playing around with Madden 13 for Wii U, which is a Madden game for the Wii U. If you have played a Madden game, you probably know what you are getting (football).
When it released, Madden NFL 13's new "Connected Careers" mode forbade the editing of any player. This was somewhat understandable, as the roster is used by others online and changes can affect the outcomes of games elsewhere in your league. It was still rather Draconian, as it meant you could not edit your own…
The good-news/bad-news tradeoff is that Madden NFL 13 is getting a ton of significant fixes and capabilities with a patch rolling out on Tuesday. Of course, consumers are right to say these features should have been in the game all along.
EA Sports plans to include real-life NFL referees in Madden NFL 14, according to two different sources close to the NFL Referees Association. One of them said the officials' facial features have been scanned into the game, with an eye toward making their calls and explanations a part of the broadcast presentation for…
A server-side update has returned the fantasy-draft option to Madden NFL under its new Connected Careers mode, but only for online leagues. Still, anyone present in a league before it begins is able to participate in a draft of all of the NFL's active talent, remaking and rebalancing each of the NFL's 32 franchises.
The official Twitter feed for Madden NFL 13 just announced that fantasy drafts—a mainstay feature of the game's franchise mode for nearly a decade—will return to the game's Online "Connected Careers" mode tomorrow.
The basic pass routes in American football are, off the top of my head, the post, the slant, the square-out, the streak, the hook and the wheel. Here, Kotaku's Jason Schreier introduces us to the Curli-Cue, the Zag-Zig-Zag, the One-Oar-In-the-Water and the Field Sobriety Test, all of which were improvised routes…
Through the first week of play in real life of the NFL, some 81.5 million games have been played in Madden NFL, according to this video commissioned by EA Sports. The teams taken online most so far are the San Francisco 49ers and the Philadelphia Eagles (rated No. 5 and No. 3, respectively, as "teams to help you…
No one I know seriously plays "Mascot Mashup" in NCAA Football, except for maybe the six-year-old son of a good friend from Oregon, who enjoys slamming the "GoDucks" into 11 of his dad's Stanford Trees. About the most I ever hear about the mode each year from EA Sports is when a developer jokes that they're pouring a…
The NFL is kicking off (checks watch) oh, about nowish. Time for a new season of wins and losses, touchdowns and fumbles, and nonstop clichés from analysts and commentators. One such word is "clutch," a word that seems to define a top performer in a pinch, but has no real objective measure.
Ten days ago, Marcus Thomas decided he'd had enough of being identified by some other Marcus Thomas' mugshot in Madden NFL and took to Twitter to complain about it. Two days later, he was released by the New York Giants.
I knew what was coming after I lost to Green Bay, 24-17, in Week 11 of my first season in Madden NFL 13. It was the same kind of thing that came in Week 2 after a gutwrenching 24-20 loss at home to San Francisco, in which I was cited for the lack of a "clutch gene."