EA teams up with ESPN, Madden on the way out? – Jan. 17, 2005

Crazy stuff. First EA grabs the 5 year NFL & NFLPA license, now they snag a 15 year agreement with ESPN!

Say goodbye to competition in the sports game genre (pun sortof intended).

Today I went into the local EB and put $20 down on a Sony PSP. What I found odd was that I had to kind of convince them to let me do it. They weren’t promoting the system, and the clerk had to really dig around in the system to find a SKU to use.

If this gizmo is really launching in March, it seems odd that Sony doesn’t have the hype machine cranked up.

The countdown is on for Xbox 2

More XBox 2 speculation. Biggest change from what we already new is that backwards compatibility is looking more likely than it was, thanks to Halo 2. We’ll see, though.

So my copy of MechAssault 2 Lone Wolf came with a free XBox Arcade disk. I was curious as to what it was so I popped it in the ‘Box.

Basically its a framework to give you an MSN Zone or Shockwave.com kind of experience on the XBox. It comes with Ms. Pacman, but there’re a decent selection of other games to demo or buy.

I actually ended up buying a Breakout clone for $9.99. It runs in high def and is just gorgeous to look at, and it comes with a lot of typical uber-breakout gizmos like power-ups, moving blocks, exploding blocks and the like.

The problem with the rest of the games is that they’re too expensive. Most of them are $19.99. To me, that’s a bit too much. Mind you, a game like Zuma or Bejeweled (both of which are available) will cost the same on the PC, but I think that’s too much there, too.

$10.00 is like the cost of a movie ticket and a soda, so I can see d/ling a little ‘lite’ game for that much. I’ll play it for a few hours right away and then once in a blue moon thereafter, but for $10 that’s ok. $20…well, I may demo some of them and if they’re really really great, who knows? But they’d have to be top notch for me to buy them.

And sadly, no strategy games yet. Maybe they’ll convert Settlers of Catan to XBox Live!

Oh, and the single player games have online scoreboards so you can see how you rank against the XBox Live community, or just the people on your Friends list.

Its a cool idea. They just need more games and lower prices. Heck, let me buy a 1 week license for $5.00 or something… I can see doing that, too.

Bare-breasted teen in video game sues to stop sales

Here’s an article on the girl who is now claiming she was 17 when she posed for footage to be shown in “The Guy Game.’

Call me a cynic, but I still think this is Night Trap all over again. The game is tanking, badly. So what better way to get horny kids to buy it than to get a juicy lawsuit going, saying Her breasts are exposed in a manner that is “sexually suggestive, lewd and lascivious,” Hell, suddenly *I* want to play this game! 🙂

So a temporary order takes the game off store shelves for a while, demand builds, and when the order expires, a bunch of people buy it all at once. That bit is important, because once they have bought it they’ll be online talking about what crap it is. Alternatively, they’ll buy it and not even open it, keeping it as a collector’s item just in case.

Back when the Sega CD game Night Trap came out, it too died. It was a terrible game. Then congress started using it as an example of how horrible video games were for kids, and suddenly it became a hot seller. There’s no such thing as bad publicity, folks.

Is EA/NFL deal a touchdown or fumble for gaming industry? – Dec. 14, 2004

I nice overview of the downside of EA’s getting the exclusive license for NFL and NFLPA. And yes, once again I post the link weeks after the article went online! 🙂

Check this out: ESPN.com – SPORTSBUSINESS – Shutout: EA Sports corners NFL video market

Basically, EA faced some competition this year from NFL 2K5, so rather than making better games, they just bought up exclusive use of the NFL & NFL Player’s Association licenses for 5 years.

Goodbye competition. Now EA can rest on its laurels rather than striving to make a better game every year.

Shame on the NFL and NFLPA for contributing to the squelching of competition in the marketplace.