'NFL 2K5' Edges Out 'Madden NF'
622211
The virtual football championship matchup this year pits "Madden NFL 2005" against "ESPN NFL 2K5" from Sega's ESPN Videogames division. Both E-rated titles excel at delivering the National Football League experience to your living room through a combination of excellent controls, online gameplay and improved defensive features.
233843
ABC's first choice for the infamous "Monday Night Football" dropped towel episode wasn't Terrell Owens &#151; it was announcer John Madden.
268941
Electronic Arts announced an exclusive licensing relationships with the National Football League and PLAYERS INC to develop, publish and distribute interactive football games.
385117
Electronic Arts announced today that it has signed a five-year exclusive licensing deal with the National Football League and the NFL players association, giving EA the exclusive rights to the NFL teams, stadiums and players for use in its football
594760
&quot;Madden NFL 2005,&quot; the latest version of Electronic Arts&#39; pro football video game franchise, sold more than 1.3 million copies in its first week of release, the company said Thursday, citing internal figures.
405248
For guys who prefer to sit on the couch âplayingâ football rather than sit on the couch watching football, Take-Two Interactive Software has enlisted 249 retired stars for its new game.
363132
Playground SDK to help casual game makers create multiplatform games.
242975
Tycho:  Sony hasn't been entirely clear regarding what their 1.92 update for the Playstation 3 actually does, suggesting that it "focuses on some PS3 compatibility and playability issues for select titles," but our own experience with the update has been conclusive.  In the Internet's dark places, aggrieved Lair fans are suggesting that this update improves the game's motion controls, and that each media outlet must rescind their previous scores.  I'm fairly certain this is magical thinking - neither Sony or Factor 5 will say with any specificity, and now that both our PS3s are updated it would be impossible to test.  Typically we don't take the traditional holidays off, nor do we take off non-traditional holidays, such at the Feast of St. Motherfucker - a holy day that I've only just now invented.  Gabe's father was around, though, and golf seemed like a good time investment.  Reading greens and choosing clubs for other people is about as far as I get, so for me the social aspects of the game are paramount.  Standing under the awning at the driving range, it's hard not to see where EA's Tiger series could improve.      This year's lobby system is much improved over last year's, but I'm not sure why the lobby itself couldn't be a driving range.  This is how virtually any actual round of golf starts, with every person hitting the bucket they bought and lamenting their performance.  A few of their minigames would work just fine in this context - don't create a custom game to play them, build all of the basic play into a casual, central experience.  From here, modes, courses, and wagers are established.  When new people pull in, carts can be heard.  Links for the 360 wasn't as complete as Tiger, but it had four player modes first - and it had a means to play Speed Golf that Tiger should loot from its fallen enemy.  Essentially, you play the round as normal.  Everyone else plays the round as normal simultaneously, and shots are keyed to a certain color so that the arc of each person's shot is visible to all other players.  They need to steal this - throw the name of each player on there, use the face, whatever.  This needs to be how it works.  You can play an entire course in a quarter of the time.  The RPG metaphor really worked the first few times I bought the product, but it's really lost its currency with me.  There's a point - and it may be with the '08 version of the product - where the number of courses are such that I don't actually want to pay sixty dollars again just to lose all of my character progression every year.  Gabriel's suggestion is to approach it more like a fighting game, which is to say like Mario Golf - with discrete golfer archetypes that have a suite of skills.  I'm wondering if Guild Wars doesn't have the answer - full priced expansions every year, with a perpetually tracked online experience where your prior purchase actually increases the value of the next.  Let all play - online and off - be a part of the core experience, let all play hone your ability.  Don't wall off online play into some purgatory as it is now, untracked, outside of the normal scheme of advancement.    With these thoughts in my head, excited by the sun-dappled future we had envisioned. we sat down to play a round online the next night.  After determining that one of us couldn't play at all or it would crash the game for everyone - a weird kind of crash where you can't play, but you're able to talk to one another about the crash - we were able to play eight holes, at which point it crashed before a victor could be determined.  They've only just made online Photo Game Face available for Tiger, for the first time since launch, but they had to deactivate online features for two other titles to do it.  So, no.  I don't have high hopes.
183606
EA SportsÃÂ makes Devin Durant the second-youngest athlete to grace the cover of one of its video games, trailing only ex-D.C. United star Freddy Adu.
547442
PROVIDENCE, R.I.  - Was absenteeism a little high  on Tuesday among the guys at the office? EA Sports would like  to think it was because "Madden NFL 2005" came out that day,  and some fans of the football simulation are rabid enough to  take a sick day to play it.
761079
The company's stock is not as popular as Madden NFL 2005, with its top sales numbers. Yet.
598554
Tycho:  Last year's iteration of Tiger Woods had a fairly serious glitch in multiplayer, in that the game could not be played in multiplayer mode.  Or, it worked sometimes, but there was no way to know how or when - what combination of dances and burning herbs would right this aloof mechanism.  It was most likely the rush of new owners securing tee-times on simulated links, but after a week of trying to use the product without success I decided that I had better things to do than try and contextualize EA's grave miscalculations.    The few times we were able to jump on and actually get in there were the kind of epic, unadulterated "guy fun" one sees lionized in hilarious summer comedies.  Golf as a sport (and as a videogame) has the strong undercurrent of shared misery that one usually finds only in dive bars.  The recently released demo for this year's product - on both PSN and XBL, now - recalled those moments to us, independent of the rage that bookended each round of powerfully communal spirit lodge golf.  This year's product has a huge focus on Gamernet, a kind of user created content initiative that will hopefully see them approach the performance of their online infrastructure with more conviction.     GameFace, their face making thing, has seen a significant jump this year as well - it can take pictures from your console's camera and create actual face geometry, and I understand that photos can even be uploaded online and then brought down on the console for processing.  We were able to get some pretty good results with the earlier versions of the tool, but this is very much appreciated.  Of course, in the wrong hands, every tool is a weapon.     Ubisoft is now saying that Haze is an exclusive exclusive for the PS3, and not one of them timed or partial exclusives one might see in the lesser houses.  Truly monogamous games are rare these days, and this is certainly a surprise, but this thing has been hopping back and forth for months.  There was even a leaked document that showed this "exclusive" being released a week later for PC and 360, though all traces of the document were soon obliterated.  Assassin's Creed was (as you'll recall) a PS3 exclusive as well.  For a week, at any rate.        I'm really excited for Haze, but I'm not sure if that's a universally held belief.  The writer made a good impression on me at E3 several years ago, and Free Radical makes a good impression on me whenever they make a videogame.  It's also a four player co-op experience with a unique, asymmetrical multiplayer proposition that you've probably read about.  But, as with Bioshock, I'm really in it for the story - and, also like Bioshock, I think anything that limits its potential audience is a serious mistake.
221042
Blog: Once 'Madden' hits store shelves, the video game industry will awake from its slumber, and an avalanche of games will be hitting store shelves.
262810
Electronic Arts Inc.  , the world's biggest video game publisher, on Tuesday  began selling "Madden NFL 07," the newest title in its  best-selling sports series, which year in and year out has  delivered top-performing games.
250523
The N.F.L. has made protecting the quarterback a priority. But have they gone too far in insulating the quarterback from the often brutal contact that is the foundation of the game?
513127
The best that the NFL has to offer will take the field at Aloha Stadium on Sunday night, as the AFC and NFC square off in the 2005 Pro Bowl.
711304
By Josh Korr, St. Petersburg Times, Fla.  Sep. 4--It's time to take a stand against John Madden.   For more than 15 years, the football broadcaster/tailgate party meat  aficionado and Electronic Arts have been preying on what I call the Guy's Rain  Man Gene.