Author Archive
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A New Madden 2010 Cover Candidate Emerges
A couple weeks ago I listed out who I believed to be at the time the top five candidates for the Madden 2010 cover. The voting slanted heavily towards Redskins RB Clinton Portis with Saints QB Drew Brees as the runner-up. One name that has vaulted himself into contention over the past few weeks that I did not have in that group is Cardinals WR Anquan Boldin. Having seen him in person on Sunday only impressed me more. What makes his recent performances even more remarkable is that they com...
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EA and Gamestop Team Up For Season Pass?
Making the rounds today is a graphic that details an EA Sports Season Pass that would be available only at Gamestop. According to the details it would cost $20 and then provide 33% off the purchase of all EA Sports titles throughout the year. There are a couple things that seem off about this to me. The first is that the cost of the Season Pass would be equal to the savings on the first game purchased. Generally something like this would be used as an incentive to get consumers to buy mor...
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EA Sports Passes on AFL License Renewal
According to the Sports Business Journal, EA Sports has decided against renewing the license with the Arena Football League. That leaves the AFL without any gaming company to produce a licensed product on its behalf. It shouldn't come as a surprise that EA would pass on continuing their partnership with the AFL. They produced two sub-par offerings on the PS2 and Xbox and never showed any indications that they would be making a game for any of the current generation of systems. The Arena g...
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Another Test For 365 and Insider
What I previously labeled as the first test for NBA Live 09's 365 feature and NBA 2K9's Insider was the Allen Iverson for Chauncey Billups trade. 2K9 got the trade completed first and should get credit for doing so. With the 365 feature updating only after a player has appeared with their new team that means 2K will be able to implement player movement faster than Live if they choose to do so. The biggest story in the NBA this weekend was the emergence of an undrafted rookie for the Golde...
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Pastapadre on NCAA Strategies Podcast
Time for another podcast as I joined Chris Jacobs from NCAA Strategies to discuss NCAA Basketball 09 as it nears release. Topics were pretty wide-ranging and include general demo impressions, the perception of the game and apathy towards it, whether enough was done to pull in the abandoned College Hoops crowd, and how college games have a distinctive disadvantage compared to their professional counterparts. For all ways to listen to the podcast you can check out the posting on NCAA Strategies...
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Fight Night Round 4 Updates
The first official Fight Night Round 4 footage will be shown during the broadcast of Spike TV's Video Game Awards (VGAs). That is held live on December 14th at 9ET/6PT. If you haven't seen the footage that leaked out of a Gamestop convention a couple months ago you can check that out here. Some of the game's developers set up a Youtube channel. For a short time it actually contained a look at in-game Mike Tyson but that was quickly removed. As of now it doesn't have any game videos and pr...
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NBA 2K9 Dominates Basketball Sales
The full Top 20 in sales for October has been released by NPD. NBA 2K9 placed at #9 with the 360 version selling 202,000 copies while the PS3 version came in at #17. Not even the 360 version of NBA Live 09 was able to reach the Top 20. This is a huge increase year over year for the NBA 2K series. 2K8 didn't make the Top 10 last year meaning it sold less than 117,000 copies on the 360. While many sports titles haven't seemed to grow much with increased user base clearly this isn't the case...
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2K Looking At Micro-Transaction and Subscription Possibilities
Amongst discussion on how multiple companies including EA are attempting to combat the lost revenue from used sales comes more talk on the subject, this time from the head of Take Two Strauss Zelnick. The presentation at the BMO Capital Market's Conference was accompanied by the image above which uses the example of 2K Sports' MLB series and how they could benefit from micro-transactions. When EA Sports canceled many of the PC offerings for this year I predicted a move towards free-to-pla...
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