EA Sports Message Board

#stickjockey No sports video game—no video game, I'd argue—is as harangued as Madden NFL. Read any forum thread, read the comments to any story, including this one, and the list of gamer demands for the upcoming release is quite long and quite detailed. "New music" doesn't appear in any of it. More »

#madden On Friday, Mike Young, the creative director for Madden NFL 13 revealed that the game would feature the notorious "Tebowing" posture, whose namesake drops to one knee in a solemn and evidently religious celebration. Operation Sports today published the first screenshot of what that would look like. In fact, they said it came on a fake punt play. More »

#stickjockey It drives me nuts every time I hear it. A professional athlete delivers a gobsmacking statistical performance, whether for a single game or a longer span, and a commentator or a columnist inevitably describes him as "putting up video game numbers." More »

#nflblitz 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. More »

EA Sports Canada recently announced the feature set for NHL 13, which is due for release on September 11 in North America and September 14 in Europe on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Among the more noteworthy features listed are the additions of "True Performance Skating" and "EA Sports Hockey I.Q."

True Performance Skating is the latest in EA Sports' apparent efforts to introduce physics-based engines to player movement. Much like FIFA 12's Player Impact Engine, True Performance Skating promises to deliver the "explosiveness, momentum and top end speed displayed by today's NHL players," while utilizing over a thousand new player animations. The result, according to the team, should allow for more realistic and creative player movement.

NHL 13 also features EA Sports Hockey I.Q., and unfortunately it isn't a sports-themed quiz show. EA Sports elaborated on the shortcomings of the computer A.I. in last year's game, saying that "players were only aware of skaters in their immediate proximity and goalies could only react to the player in control of the puck." EA Sports Hockey I.Q. is expected to encourage, you guessed it, more intelligent decisions by computer-controlled players, who will now "read the whole ice."

The series' Be a GM mode, traditionally a single-player feature, will allow players to pit their teams against one another in a full 30-team online league in NHL 13. EA Sports Canada says there will be a "companion mobile app" for players to connect to their online leagues as well.

EA Sports also listed details on collector's edition versions of the game, which mostly includes Hockey Ultimate Team card packs. Both the standard and collector's editions of the game are available to pre-order now from the Origin store.

#easports Going on about five years now, EA Sports' FIFA and NHL series have been reliably acclaimed, strong-selling titles, a remarkable run for a video game genre and publisher so henpecked by hardcore gamer criticism. Both games have smart, motivated, multinational communities that greatly value evangelizing for their sport in North America and appreciate what these two video games have done in that regard. It's easy, from a distance, to get the sense these are perfect sports video games. More »

#scoreboard News and notes from around the world of sports video gaming: More »

#madden Hosting Saturday Night Live a couple weeks ago the New York Giants' Eli Manning implied his "ideal" celebration in Madden NFL 13 would be throwing a touchdown, making a sandwich, accidentally dropping the sandwich on the floor, making sure no one is looking, and then eating it anyway. It was part of a motion-capture skit that prominently name checked EA Sports. More »

#ncaafootball13 I've often felt that the recruiting simulation in NCAA Football could be a salesmanship trainer at some kind of corporate retreat. Unlike the free agency or trading periods in other sports video games, you're not sending contract terms back and forth with the CPU. Money doesn't talk here, you do. More »

#ncaafootball13 Career modes in sports video games do a superb job of helping you create the story of a single team or a player. Where even the best ones fall short is in making you feel part of something larger. Players are forced to hunt through menus for results and standings, and even then, it's hard to tell who is overachieving and who is having a disappointing year. More »

#madden In a series of revelatory Tweets spotted by Operation Sports yesterday, Hal Chapman Wingo III, better known as "Trey," the host of ESPN's NFL Live studio show, said he would be appearing in Madden NFL 13. More »

#madden The biggest irony in this Saturday Night Live sketch from last night featuring Eli Manning is the idea of him working this closely with Madden NFL on anything. Widely believed to be too expensive even for EA Sports, if the two-time Super Bowl champion, or his brother, had any intention of making a signature appearance in the game or on its cover, both would have done so long ago. More »

#tigerwoodspgatour Every main character needs a good nemesis. Seinfeld has Newman. McBain has Mendoza. And Tiger Woods has Scott Ratchman. More »

#stickjockey The NBA Live development team runs a weekly game of basketball at a rec center across the street from EA Sports' studio in Orlando, Fla. When I visited a couple of weeks ago I was invited to join them. Absolutely, I replied, but deep down I was still a little hesitant. More »

#nbalive By the end of October 2010, everyone knew NBA Elite 11 was doomed. Though officially "delayed" that September, one week before the game was due to release, no one really expected it ever to ship, even internally. The ambitious makeover of the NBA Live franchise simply had too many problems to be published. That last Friday of the month, word spread from EA Sports' operations in California and Canada to Florida. NBA Elite would be canceled outright. More »

The Euro 2012 addition to Fifa 12 shall be DLC rather than a disc-based continental kickabout as has previously been the case. This we already knew. What I didn’t expect was for the DLC to contain a new mode which combines world conquering with foot-to-ball, namely the Expedition Mode. Travel the continent, crushing nations and stealing their best and brightest feet, along with the legs and torsos those feet are attached to. It hardly looks like grand strategy but I quite like the idea of constructing a team by conquering rather than by throwing wodges of cash at cigar smoking agents who, one day soon, will start to raise young boys like puppies on a puppy farm. The video below explains all.

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#stickjockey Though I wish I could say I was smart enough to think up this ruse in advance, I really did forget my backpack somewhere inside EA Sports' Tiburon studio during a recent visit. This became an opportunity to roam all of its upper four floors of development, though not unescorted. More »

#scoreboard News and notes from around the world of sports video gaming: More »

#madden When I chided him for seeding Detroit's all-galaxy receiver Calvin Johnson at No. 6 in the Madden cover contest, Anthony Stevenson didn't back down. "OK, who is it seeded above him that you would replace?" he asked. More »

#kinect In a title update scheduled to arrive on April 20, gamers with Tiger Woods PGA Tour 13 and a Kinect sensor will be able to face the screen as they execute a golf swing, a more natural way to play video game golf, and a feature whose absence at launch made for some nonplussed reviews and gamer reaction. More »

#ncaafootball13 At EA Sports, developers lug their consoles into conference rooms like you would with a laptop at your job. Larry Richart plugs in his, loads up a build of NCAA Football 13 and picks a game mode. Fittingly, we head to the practice field, the setting where he saw most of his action at quarterback in the 1990s. More »

#mobile Twenty years seems to be a good enough time to start selling back nostalgia to gamers. We've seen some old-school EA Sports 16-bit designs on T-shirts and other apparel, sold in the stores the label has opened at airports in Charlotte, N.C. and Salt Lake City. Looks like they're interested in putting Madden, NHL and NBA Live sprites on cell phone cases now. More »

#stickjockey Brent Nielsen has a corner office catching 270 degrees of Florida sunshine, and his face lights up whenever you tell him a good golf story. Especially one that happened inside the game he makes, Tiger Woods PGA Tour. More »

#ssx Yesterday, the official Facebook page for SSX tossed up that splash image, and the deliberately-worded caption underneath sounds very much like SSX Tricky has a hand in the snowboarding title's upcoming DLC release. More »

#kotakumelodic Today I wrote about "Augusta," the theme of The Masters Tournament television broadcast since 1980, and its inclusion in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 13's collector's edition. The emotional violin, piano and guitar ballad is instantly recognizable, and you're going to hear a lot of it this weekend as the tournament plays out on CBS. More »

#madden Nike is the new maker of uniform apparel for the NFL, and yesterday saw the unveiling of the new threads for all 32 teams. And they're ... basically the same as last year's for most teams in this tradition-bound sports institution. More »

#tigerwoodspgatour It took several seconds for the surprise to register when I started up Tiger Woods PGA Tour 13 on Saturday. The music is so familiar, I expect it on my television when I'm watching golf at this time of year. More »

#review Last year's sports video game of the year, the Tiger Woods PGA Tour series this year faces what NBA 2K12 did in October—a nearly impossible encore. Tiger Woods at last delivered The Masters, reviving a series that had plateaued and giving longtime golf fans moments and memories that were legitimately emotional. More »

#stickjockey I've played video games as 7-foot-centers and hulking first basemen, I've probably pitched to or hit against the virtual counterpart of every Hall of Fame ballplayer who has appeared in the last 20 or so years. The idea of playing a sport as someone famous has well lost its novelty in the modern era of video games. More »

#censorship Sports video games must license everything. League symbols, player likenesses, individual events, even certain stadiums. Then they must provide a soundtrack every year and, yep, those songs must be licensed, too. It is a neverending headache unique to the sports genre. More »