I’m not saying we confuse the realities, necessarily, although anyone who’s completed his third season of a dynasty in any simulation can be forgiven for wandering into an alternate reality. “My star linebacker, Rocky Doss, was lost for the season with a broken leg today,” my friend Dav, playing his fifth season as Air Force’s head coach, told me a few years ago. “And honestly, I really felt sorry for the guy. He was in the second game of his senior year.”

Andy Hutchins, who writes The Arena sees things in just such a way. I went to him a week ago with this Greatest Sports Moments idea. He immediately rolled off an AP-style lede, complete with a quote. And to be fair, if I took Northwestern to a national championship, I’d probably be hallucinating, too:

The nation’s top two scoring offences entered the BCS National Championship Game expecting pyrotechnics. But it was Tim Vincent and the Northwestern defence that proved more explosive, leading the Wildcats to a 17-14 win and their third straight national title.

Vincent, the NCAA’s all-time sack leader, harassed Oklahoma’s signal callers all game, sending two to the sidelines with injuries on his two sacks, and the Wildcats’ defence gave up no points after the first quarter, holding the Sooners to just 143 yards of total offence.

“I’ve been a part of three special teams and three special defenses here at Northwestern,” Vincent said. “What this defence did tonight makes this the sweetest win we’ve had.”

So in this spirit, I asked around for some folks’ top moments in sports video gaming. They follow below, with mine going last. Of course, feel free to share your own in the comments, and I’ll excerpt some of them into this column in an update later today.

Steve Noah, Operation Sports (MLB 09 The Show)

I like to create myself in a lot of games, just to see how accurate the game is, compared to my real life, uh, non-existent professional career.

This time it was baseball, playing MLB 09 The Show. Building myself into a cyber-steroid emerging uber-talent was hard. But after a few years, I was eventually plugged into the starting lineup of the San Francisco Giants. Even though I had a great average with good power and speed, I wasn’t what you’d call clutch.

It seemed like every imaginable time I had runners in scoring position, during the season or in the playoffs, when the team needed me the most, I would choke, crumble and let them down. Every single time. I’d dribble it off the plate, pop it up or just strike out at the most important time of the game.

That is, until Game 7 of the World Series. Steve Noah, “Mr. Choke Job” himself, stepped up to the plate, bases loaded, bottom of the ninth with one out, trailing 6-3. It was something kids daydream about when growing up. On a 3-1 count, the count that I would usually jump all over, only to see disappointment, I hit a 390 foot home run to win the game! I was jumping up and down, screaming and yelling like I actually did this in real life. Like I was a kid again, like a professional baseball player, living a dream. OK, maybe not. But damn, did it feel good, and to do it against the Yankees was icing on the cake.

Commenter “Michael Dukakis” (MLB 08 The Show)It all began as a baseball conversation among friends. With two Mets fans, two Yankees fans, and a Red Sox fan no matter how civil the discussion began,it always quickly devolved into something similer to the Dawn of Man scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey. So as our “discussion” continued it came to a bet. Me and one of the Yankee fans 1 on 1 MLB 08, $US10 to the winner and of course, bragging rights. I, the Mets and he of course, the Yankees.

Before I was even settled in the La-Z-Boy a Derek Jeter home run makes it 1-0. No biggie, Carlos Delgado immediately homered and I was right back in it. The 1-1 tie held until the top of the 8th, when Jeter smacked a two-run double (Pixelated Aaron Heilman, my starter, was just as bad as his counterpart apparently).

Mariano Rivera began warming up, due to face the bottom of my lineup. My first two batters were retired on strikeouts. But a walk to a pinch-hitter and a base hit gets me in business. Rivera goes to full count on my next hitter and then walks him. That brough up Carlos Beltran, with the bases loaded.

Now this was a year ago so I can’t quite remember the exact pitch sequence, but I remember the last pitch. Oh what a shot it was, clearly into the virtual parking lot. The gloating and $US10 mine. That is my greatest sports video game moment … and sadly, probably one of the biggest wins any Mets team has had in quite a while.

Jim Harris, Operation Sports (NHL 94)

As a teenager growing up in Winnipeg in the early ’90s, to say we were preoccupied with NHL 94 would be the understatement to end all understatements. We played it when we were bored. We played it when we were avoiding homework. We played it to determine our social standing and our own sense of self worth. My younger brother and I were especially transfixed. We spent hours and hours battling it out in one fictional seven-game series after the next.

Having played the game so much, we were essentially equally skilled. If we played 100 times, he might win 51 games to my 49 (but I’d probably win six of the 11 ensuing fistfights).

One particular seven-game series still stands as my favourite sports moment. Having gone back and forth over the course of a particularly tense series, we finally entered Game 7. Much to my chagrin, my brother got the best of me that game, building up a comfortable lead over the course of the first two periods. When the horn sounded to end the second period, the taunting began. He started ripping into me like only a younger brother could. I was finally getting my comeuppance.

Then something strange happened. Singing a happy victory song at the top of his lungs, he danced his way right out of the room. After a moment, I realised he’d mistakenly thought the game was over. At that point, I did the only thing that was right to do: I turned down the volume on the TV and played out the third period against an absent opponent. I called my brother back into the room to politely alert him to his oversight, just as the third period wound down.

As I recall, he didn’t take it too well …

Owen Good (Hardball!)

This is from 1992, after my freshman year of college. By now I had been playing Hardball! on a Commodore 64 with a Wico Command Control joystick for close to five years. We’d gotten it from our next door neighbour, who was the software buyer for the catalog showroom store in town. He’d been sent a bunch of samples and regularly passed them along to us.

Somewhere around my sophomore year of high school I began keeping box scores on notebook paper in a three ring binder. I could routinely log a 10-run, 20-hit game against the computer, and with the right pitcher, toss an 18-strikeout shutout.

But never a no-hitter. I was Hardball!’s Dave Steib – the Toronto Blue Jays pitcher who twice took a no-hitter to the final out only to lose it. In this case, I was convinced the game’s AI was rigged to assure you never threw a perfect game against it. Repeatedly – it must have been half a dozen times, minimum – I would record the first 26 outs and get to two strikes on the game’s final hitter, who would then drop an unplayable flare just over the third baseman’s head. No matter where positioned the infield or the outfield, they couldn’t get to it in time.

So that summer in 1992, I sat down to play Hardball! on a Saturday. I took the Champs’ screwballer, Pepi Perez (with the deceptive 5.47 ERA) up against the All-Stars (the only other team in the game.) Sure enough, I powered through the first eight innings without a runner reaching base.

In the ninth inning, after getting two outs, I figured the perfect game had been proven an impossibility, but I was not going to waste a no-hitter. So I decided to pitch around the final batter and see if I could get the next hitter.I threw every ball out of the strike zone, just to see how committed the game was to screwing me. The computer swung at two pitches and looked at the rest, running the count to 3-2. I delivered the final one low and outside, absolutely intent on walking the computer.

It hit the ball directly to my third baseman, who didn’t have to move. He caught the ball for the final out. I’d finally thrown a perfect game in Hardball! I turned off the computer and never played the game again.

Stick Jockey is Kotaku’s column on sports video games. It appears Saturdays at 10 a.m. U.S. Mountain time.

Sure, but getting the film made — and made right — wasn’t so simple.

Turbo follows 4D fighting game player Hugo (Justin Chon of Twilight fame), who hopes to join a pro-team by winning a Super Turbo Arena tournament.

“People,” Conway recalls, “looked at me like I was crazy.”

It wasn’t the story that was causing the looks of bewilderment, but Conway’s vision for how the film should be made: An effect-heavy film with a budget of $US100,000 USD.

This was Conway’s University of Southern California student film short. “It costs about $US400,000 to make an episode of Power Rangers,” says Conway. “So if you think about it that way, it’s really not that expensive.”

Student films typically cost a few thousand bucks — maybe the price of a sedan at most, not a fleet of sedans. Sure, Turbo was to be Conway’s thesis film, but it was to be more: atypical. It’s Conway’s calling card. This would be a two-years-in-the-making showcase showing he could use to tell a story and made a slick, effect-heavy film. And ultimately prove that this young, up-and-coming filmmaker gets gaming, the internet, convergence.

It all started in 2007. No, actually it started before that with karate, anime and video games. The Last Dragon inspired a young Conway to take up marital arts in junior high, studying Shorin-Ryu style karate and kobudo until he achieved a black belt. “There weren’t many black action heroes that I was aware of as a kid,” he says, “so Bruce Lee Roy fighting Sho-Nuff the Shogun of Harlem on a bootleg VHS was my inspiration.” (The movie would even go on to inspire the final fight in Turbo!) By high school, he was got a gig as executive editor of game site PSXNetwork.com, going to E3 each year starting when he was 16. There was a stint working at Electronic Arts in marketing. And then there were movies, loads and loads of movies.

Movies took him to USC Film School and to a select motion capture performance class taught by Oscar-winning director Robert Zemeckis. The class got Conway thinking about the Uncanny Valley Theory, about avatars, about effects and even martial arts. But it wasn’t just about making a slick flick. “I wanted to find the story’s emotional core,” says Conway. For him, that was the relationship between the two brothers in the film. Conway was ready to go, Turbo was the picture he wanted to make for his master’s thesis. Then, road block. “I didn’t get a lot of support at USC for the project,” says Conway.

If he was to make the film using USC’s cameras and USC’s equipment, well, then, USC owns the film. Meaning? Meaning Conway could not put it online. How did you see Turbo? On the Internet. How did I see it? Ditto. This is an age in which, if it’s not on the Internet, it does not exist. And the only way for Conway to ensure that the film existed was to get it online, which meant raising the money himself.

He didn’t do it alone. Film is a collaborative endeavour — though the director is leading the charge. Conway and his producing partner, Garrett T. Thompson, set out securing money. Conway created a press kit — a press kit for a movie that hadn’t been made yet, but a press kit that showed the visual vibe of the film. “Neither one of us comes from money, so we had to take a basic grass roots approach to raising the funds,” says Thompson. Student loans, credit cards, fundraisers, matching gift donations, grants and any which way they could get the money they needed. “The challenge was convincing people that  we could get this ‘crazy Turbo’ project done.” The reward wasn’t some monetary pay-off.

Remember, Turbo is a student film — they were convincing the donors to give money just so the film could get made. That’s it. A donation of faith. “When people donate to a short film they are basically doing it out of the kindness of their hearts and pockets,” Thompson points out. “They will really reap no monetary benefit, so your passion truly has to convince them.”

With initial funds in place, shooting commenced on December 2007. For the next year plus, Conway and his team would be hard at work on this short film.  “I was never worried about it turning out great, I was just worried that it would take forever to get there,” says Justin Lutsky. “To be honest, I never expected this to be such an undertaking.  When I agreed to edit I was anticipating a several month commitment and couldn’t really believe we were still working on a short film a year and a half later.”

Lutsky had met as contestants on a Fox filmmaker reality show called “On The Lot” in May 2007. Both were eliminated, but became fast friends. Lutsky, a young filmmaker filmmaker in his right, was asked by Conway to cut the film. “Turbo shot on the RED camera, which was fairly new at the time,” says Lutsky. “There were no established post production or editorial work flows established.  We essentially had to create our own work flow from scratch and had a lot to learn along the way.” Learn as you go, learn as you go.

An effect-heavy film like Turbo needs effects. Lutsky introduced Conway to the folks at Ember Lab, a start-up digital effects house in Southern California. “With the large amount of VFX work that had to be done, Jarrett could have easily spent his entire budget on post production alone if he had used an established Hollywood studio,” says Ember Lab’s Josh Grier. “We wanted to propose a bid that fit within his budget and would allow us to sustain our selves for the duration of the project.” For the team at Ember, Turbo was their first complete project and the experience of working on this type of film was by far their biggest drive to get involved. That, and the arcade gaming.

“My brother Mike and I lived in Tokyo for about three years and we have always been fond of the Japanese arcade culture,” says Grier. “After watching the first cut of Turbo, we knew right away that we wanted a hybrid look, combining elements of the retro eighties gaming culture with Japanese arcade flair.” Those retro elements were massaged so that they felt futuristic and a look was developed that Conway agreed completed his vision. “The most challenging part of Turbo was not a specific effect, but the design work that went into developing Turbo’s game system,” says Grier. “The HUD, UI and the futuristic TV were featured in about 75 per cent of the shots and all had to be developed from scratch.”

Not only was the game system complete mapped out, but the game’s mechanics. “People sweat when they play DDR in arcades, right?” asks Conway. “That’s the same idea — Super Turbo Arena is a physical game. Kids want to be Turbo players, not basketball players.” The game and its moves was created in the minds of the Turbo team so that it would be possible to play if the tech ever existed.

That’s what sells the film — its authenticity. Whether it be the authenticity of Turbo’s characters or its video game element, it feels real. Even for a movie wrapped in a sheen of CG and special effects. It feels more real than anything than has come out of the traditional Hollywood system.

Turbo is not perfect, but it’s filled with promise. It’s a vision of a future when those who grew up playing video games start to make movies about them. Movies that don’t suck.

Turbo from Jarrett Lee Conaway on Vimeo.

Though one is obviously dwarfed by the comparison, both figures are impressive in their own right. And both speak to the health of their form of multiplayer gaming. For console games like Modern Warfare 2, multiplayer’s meteoric growth is commonly understood. But for LAN parties, still playing games like Counter-Strike, their resilience and persistence are most frequently seen among university-aged gamers on campus.

“If anything, I think it’s growing” says Nathan Etzell, a student at Oregon State University, whose 300-member OSU Gaming organisation has a prewired, 30-person LAN room at the bottom of a dormitory where at least two large parties are held per term. In January, his club will meet the University of Oregon in the second “Civil War LAN”, a gaming tournament named after the schools’ football rivalry.

But there is a sense that the PC LAN party — like all-nighters, streaking, whatever — are something whose time and place comes on a university campus. Out in the cold hard world, PC LAN and direct server support in new titles is dwindling in favour of console multiplayer and proprietary hosting services. Most notably, StarCraft II will not support LAN gaming as it shifts to Blizzard’s Battle.net. And dedicated servers are out under Modern Warfare 2, which is now running multiplayer with a combination of Steam and the recently created IW.net for Modern Warfare 2. Both sequels’ predecessors had a strong history in dedicated servers and LAN gaming, leaving some gamers feeling betrayed, and some LAN enthusiasts feeling marginalised.

LAN gaming is not gone from the off-campus civilian world. But annual convention hall events with big budgets, entry fees, prizes and sponsorships are different creatures from six people linking up to play Warcraft III. While the former will definitely still happen after you graduate, the latter is less likely. Those six-people sessions are most likely made among fellow gamers, who are likely to find each other in a class, or perusing a bulletin board in a student union.

“Their age group usually involves a lot of what PC gamers are,” says Keegan Gormley, whose Big City Gaming in downtown Eugene, Ore. offers constant system-linked gaming and monthly tournaments. “They’re mostly university students who, in their spare time, enjoy playing a game like Counter-Strike, or another game they’ve played for a long time.”

The players in his $US5-an-hour “stadium,” — eight consoles connected to high definition, Major League Gaming–standard panel monitors — are largely high-schoolers, Gormley said. Younger kids are less likely to LAN, he said, because of the accessibility of consoles and the desirability of their most current games.

“There’s much more deep-rooting in PC gaming,” Gormley said. “Someone who gets into a game on the PC can end up playing it for years,” he said. “On consoles, I’ve seen people drop Halo for Call of Duty, then drop Call of Duty for Flashpoint. For PC gamers, mostly, it’s whatever they originally clicked on and killed with.”

And that helps explain the persistence of LAN gaming. The standbys of a LAN party are usually real-time strategy games such as StarCraft, or WarCraft III, then shooters such as Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2 and Unreal Tournament. TF2 is the most recent of these, releasing in 2007, with others having roots going back to the late 1990s. There’s a reason for this.

“It’s what people are good at,” said Patrick Chinn, one of the University of Oregon organisers for the Civil War LAN, which will be held January 22-23. “One reason people want to play an older game like Counter-Strike is because they’ve played it a long time and they’ve gotten good at it. We’ve done tournaments for games that are brand new, and there’ll be some attendance, but they’re not as well played.”

Plus, by this point, the support histories for the games have either controlled for or patched out of existence most means of cheating. “The tactics in a game like Counter-Strike have become so refined that there’s no real dick move you can pull,” says Dylan Leeds, a senior majoring in digital art at Oregon. And for whatever in-game legislation doesn’t cover, LAN gaming offers another control: being physically in the presence of your opponent. It cuts down on ragequits and unsporting behaviour.

“You’re more likely to respect someone if you know you’re going to see interact with them after the game,” he said.

And that speaks to another quality of LAN gaming that, unlike its numbers, can’t be replicated or really improved: the human contact of it all.

“If you’re playing online by yourself, the hype’s really not there,” said Josh Bothun, an Oregon student majoring in computer science and music technology. “It’s like you have to intentionally create it for yourself, but you get a completely different experience when people are around you.”

LAN parties have an anecdotal culture that just can’t be replicated by solitary multiplayer gaming. Often stretching 24 hours or more, they’re salted with tales of inside jokes and hyper-caffeination. At major tournaments in the civilian world, bragging about casemods and your rig are their own sideshow, similar to a custom-car show.

“It’s more about community,” says Gormley, the game store owner. “It’s being able to shoulder-shove the person you just killed. It’s less about yelling at someone over a mic, and more about actually giving that person the evil eye.

“It gets so elitist online, sometimes,” he continued. “It seems like a lot of people don’t want to play online console games because they don’t get the game in its first week, don’t level up their character in time, and then they feel like they can’t compete.”

It might be easy to assume that anything other than gaming over the Internet, as opposed to a LAN or WAN, is redundant, a relic, or headed for obscurity. But system-linked games bring something to the room that proprietary multiplayer services can’t: One’s friends.

To use an apt college metaphor: “It’s like drinking online versus drinking with friends,” Chinn said. “Drinking a couple of beers and IMing with friends is not nearly as much fun as actually drinking with your friends.”

My chat with Patrice begins with me relating how at E3 this year I’d asked fellow Ubisoft Montreal creative director Maxime Béland to describe his game, Splinter Cell: Conviction, in just one word.

“Panther,” Maxime had said back then, without pausing to think.

I tell Patrice I thought that one word encapsulated everything that was different about Conviction, compared to the previous games. So I ask Patrice if he had one word for Assassin’s Creed II. At first, he looks a little surprised.

“Two,” he says, after a few moments.

Two? I repeat.

“No, really. Two. Because for me it’s my first sequel.”

I was surprised to learn that, after serving as creative director on Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Patrice did not work on any of that game’s successors. After Sands of Time shipped he went straight to work on the first Assassin’s Creed. So how did he approach making a sequel for the very first time?

“Everything that was in the first one is still there,” said Patrice. “We wanted worked on the pillars of the game, making them better, getting rid of the frustration, and we wanted to change the main character. It’s the real sequel; it’s not 1.5, it’s not more of the same.

“It really is Assassin’s Creed TWO,” he says, emphasising that word again, before smiling. “I’m sorry I don’t have as good a word as Max.”

Patrice then shoots down my suggestion that perhaps Assassin’s Creed II is everything he wanted the first game to be.

“No,” he says, firmly. “The first game was a game about a warrior monk during the Crusades, and that was the game we wanted to make. Going to Italy is not something we wanted to do in the first game. Did we learn? Did we come back with some ideas for which we didn’t have the time? For sure. But it’s not the game I wanted to make in the first place.”

The games industry can have a strange attitude towards sequel, and so can the fans. We see developers deliberately changing the mood or tone between sequels, as Ubisoft themselves did with the choice to make the Prince darker and carry more attitude in Warrior Within. Yet at other times, we see sequels arrive where, really, very little seems to have changed.

“Sometimes we react in the games industry a lot,” says Patrice. “You give the game to the world and you take the feedback. I wanted to do a sequel and so I said to the team, ‘Look, we’re going to change a lot of stuff, but it still has to be part of the overall [Assassin's Creed series].’

“I don’t know why in the games industry, we change so much between sequels. But not all of us do it. You look at the Japanese, once they establish something they like to repeat it. Look at someting like Metal Gear Solid and you can feel pretty confident about the pillars, but it is the story that will change.

“Here it is like that too,” he says. “The story will change, but the pillars are pretty much the same. The character moves the same, we kept the control scheme. We kept this idea of having an ancestor and we kept Desmond as the guy in the present. We kept the basic core mechanic of the fights, the free-running, the climbing. But we did put some stuff aside.”

Patrice wasn’t shy when it came to changing major aspects of the first, such as the entire structure. The first game was all about numbers, he tells me. There were three cities divided into three districts where you had to do six investigations and eventually carry out nine assassinations. It was all very regimented and predictable, exposing the bare framework of the game and pulling you out of the experience.

“The structure of the first game is gone,” confirms Patrice. “We went for a more organic, more narratively driven game structure.”

In large part, this is because the new assassin, Ezio, is a very different person to Altair, the original game’s protagonist. Where Altair remained apart from society, Ezio is very much a part of his. As such, his story weaves through the cities he travels to and people he meets along the way.

“In the first one it was this monk warrior who had no life at all except killing people and the creed was really important to him,” says Patrice, explaining the difference between the two characters. “Now, Ezio, he’s got a life. He knows people, he is part of society.

“The first one was very serious, maybe too much. But here we’re making jokes, there is some comic relief. For example, in the relationship between Ezio and Leonardo Da Vinci, they’re friends, they act like friends. It’s not like [adopts serious voice] ‘Oh, you’re Ezio the assassin and you’re Leonardo, the most intelligent person on earth.’ No. One time Ezio is pissed off at Leo and he’ll say ‘Oh, look, he’s trying to invent some piece of shit!’ You know, they’re real people… except he doesn’t say ‘piece of shit’ because all the swearing is in Italian!”

“When you see it,” he continues, “you’ll feel that maybe we went in a different direction. But I think it’s because we’re not talking about the same guy. So, for sure, that different guy in that different period of time has given us different ideas. It has nothing to do with a reaction to the first one; it’s just that Ezio is not Altair, and Altair is not Ezio.

“But it’s still an Assassin’s Creed game. You’ll still do viewpoints… there’s a bunch of stuff like that that repeats, that are good. You’ll still do the ‘leap of faith’ because it’s fun. Ezio is not Altair, but he’s got it in his blood.”

It appears that Patrice and his team have really taken on board criticism of the weaknesses of the first game, while at the same time amplifying its strengths. The outward appearance may seem different, but underneath that Assassin’s Creed blood still flows. Isn’t that what we really want from a sequel?

But at least one other military video game has their sights set on the popular first-person shooter, getting a bit of added traction thanks to some controversial design decisions made in the Activision blockbuster.

For the uninitiated, Electronic Arts’ upcoming first-person shooter Battlefield: Bad Company 2 may sound an awful lot like Modern Warfare 2.

Both military games are set in modern times and pride themselves on realistic settings, weapons and combat. But where Modern Warfare 2’s single player story is a narrative that leads players through the action along a scripted plot, Bad Company 2’s developers say their game is a more open-ended experience.

“Battlefield: Bad Company 2 delivers an all-out war experience unlike any other FPS with its wide, open sand box environments, tactical destruction and of course the full range of player controlled vehicles,” said Karl Magnus-Troedsson, the executive producer of the Battlefield Franchise at Digital Illusions CE. “The game stands on more legs than this but these are the key areas which elevate Battlefield: Bad Company 2 above the rest of the pack.”

While Magnus-Troedsson calls Modern Warfare 2 and Bad Company 2 direct competitors, he knew better than to launch EA’s up-and-coming shooter at the same time as titan Modern Warfare 2. Instead, Bad Company 2 will be hitting the PC, Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 about four months later, in early March.

“These games are direct competitors while still being different games with different experiences,” Magnus-Troedsson said. “The gamers who like one will probably like the other, at least if they could get into the groove of the different second-to-second experiences.

“Obviously I wouldn’t want to launch at the same time (as Modern Warfare 2). However, we’ve seen a huge uptake in interest for Battlefield: Bad Company 2 even during the height of their marketing campaign. And we’re just getting started.”

Much of that increased interest in Bad Company 2 has been driven by gamers unhappy with some of the decisions made in the development of Modern Warfare 2. Most contentious among gamers was developer Infinity Ward’s decision to limit the control PC gamers have over how they play Modern Warfare 2 online.

Shortly after news broke that Modern Warfare 2 wouldn’t support the ability for gamers to run their own online games on dedicated servers, Digital Interactive CE announced that Bad Company 2 would have dedicated servers.

It may sound like a small issue, but the Infinity Ward’s decision spurred an online petition that currently has more than 210,000 signatures. It also created a movement among some gamers to shift their game purchase from Modern Warfare 2 to Bad Company 2.

One gamer mailed a cheque to Digital Illusions CE, telling them to use the money he had earmarked for Modern Warfare 2 to improve Bad Company 2.

Magnus-Troedsson wouldn’t say how big a factor dedicated servers will be for gamers come March.

“I can’t answer since it’s up to the audience,” he said. “What I can say is that we’ve always considered this a key factor to deliver the best online experience available and anyone caring equally much about this will probably get more out of the multiplayer experience in Battlefield: Bad Company 2.”

And he notes that while there are plenty of vocal gamers currently pledging support for Bad Company 2 at the cost of Modern Warfare 2, it’s still a small percentage of the entire audience.

“So far we’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback based upon what we’ve announced regarding Battlefield: Bad Company 2,” he said. “Some of it has come in the form of proper fan dedication from new as well as old diehard fans. We greatly appreciate this. These are the people that are at the core of our audience, the players we often listen to and who can help shape our games into something even better.

“However, comparing to the vast number of people that will buy the game it’s still a small percentage of people that actually get in direct contact with us. As for the fan mail, what we’ve gotten recently I can only hope is a sign that we’re doing something right.”

And there’s always a chance that a fan base so fickle, so easily swayed by design decisions, could decide that something about Bad Company 2 isn’t a good fit either.

Magnus-Troedsson realises the risk of winning over such die hard fans, gamers who could be intolerant of change.

“We can’t fulfil everyone’s wishes but we always build games that we truly believe our players will love to play,” he said.

With Bad Company 2 that means new game modes, new weapons and a much higher level of polish. Improvements that Magnus-Troedsson believes makes Bad Company 2 the better of the two games.

“Well, obviously I believe Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is better, especially looking at how our game incorporates an all-out war experience with vehicles, destruction, etc,” he said. “But not without a large amount of respect for our competitor, they have a great product with a huge fan base. Don’t expect us to be intimidated by sheer volume of sales though.”

In the first 24 hours alone, Modern Warfare 2 pulled in an estimated $US310 million in North America and the United Kingdom alone, selling 4.7 million copies.

“No matter what market or what products I’m a strong believer that there’s always space for competition,” Magnus Troedsson said. “It helps keep people on their toes and it helps drive development.”

That would be ESPN NFL 2K5, the last and best of an uncommonly good crop of football games in the first half of the decade and, perhaps not coincidentally, the last one before EA Sports inked its exclusive licence with the National Football League. Certainly, the stupefyingly good value 2K5 delivered on an unheard of $US19.99 price tag moved the needle on its high regard. But reviews of the game still said things like “the best-looking football game ever made” and “the most entertaining show in video game football”.

This coming week will see the last glut of AAA releases in this season’s sales cycle, and then it will be on to the question of Game of the Year. Sports titles are like the offensive lineman in modern Heisman voting. Just being mentioned would be honour enough, because the prize is completely inaccessible to your class of performer.

Maybe 2K5 did the best of any sports game, judged among others, in its year. It’s impossible to say definitively. I dialled up Brandon Justice, a producer on the 2K5 team to ask him where that game fit in the larger context of 2004’s top titles. Five years later, you can still hear the pride when he quotes the game’s feature set, as if he was back on the team going head-to-head with the Madden franchise.

“People are out there today talking about whether Madden 10 is overall a better product (than 2K5),” said Justice, who later worked on Madden and now is the director of design for Quick Hit Football (profiled September 19). “Five years later. They’re just now doing features that 2K5 did first — and not doing them as well. They now have online franchises; we had that mode. We had SportsCenter presentation with a highlight reel; they’re just now doing that kind of thing.”

But the feature-packed game wasn’t put out there to take home a statue, Justice said. It’s not to say that is the sole motivation of any past game of the year, but such artistic recognition is at least in the mix for your typical AAA adventure. Not so with sports titles, which seek a more product-oriented recognition, Justice said.

“Ironically enough, trophies matter little to the sports crowd,” he said. It’s very much focused on sales and beating direct competition where it exists. “Our main mission in 2K was to beat Madden’s score. Whether it wins sports game of the year or not, Madden’s still going to sell millions of units every year. More than anything else we just wanted to make a good sports game. And having worked on the Madden team as well, those guys have the same spirit. You want to crush the competition, and make the best product out there.”

In 2004, NFL 2K5 couldn’t afford to think about taking on Half-Life 2, Halo 2 or Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. That year’s Madden also went out to wide acclaim; just beating it would take best-in-class effort.

But it’s also a little pointless, Justice said, for a sports game to shoot for anything outside best-in-class accolades. A former games writer himself, Justice said the criticism operations of major opinion leaders just aren’t set up to give sports titles the same exposure as shooters, RPGs and other traditional genres.

“Every magazine I’ve worked for, they have a sports guy,” he said. And, working for IGN, he remembers plenty of sports copy being handed off to freelancers. “Everybody plays Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Fallout, Gears of War, but you really have to find someone who’s into baseball games, and then he always reviews it.” Inevitably, when that outfit polls its staff for game of the year, few voices speak up for a sports game because few have played them.

“You’ve got one or two voices voting for a sports game,” Justice said. “A lot of time it’s a question of volume.”

Could a sports title ever win Game of the Year? My gut feeling says the opportunity has passed. Criticism of video games is increasingly considerate of a game’s narrative, and a sports simulation fundamentally has none. And sports deal with creative limitations specific to existing rules of a game, plus the veto authority of a licensor who may not buy into daring creativity.

David Littman, a producer on EA Sports’ NHL title — taking 19 different sports game of the year awards in 2007 and 2008 — points out another basic limitation of sports games. “These big action games have huge worlds to explore, while sports games take place mainly inside a confined stadium,” he told me.

Plus, he said wryly, “Sports games don’t have guns. People seem to like guns.”

True. Shooters also don’t have to outdo themselves every year, lest they be branded as just a prettied-up roster update. The innovations in a sports game, year-to-year, may seem small, but comparing versions three years apart, the way one would Halo 3 to Halo 2, or Grand Theft Auto IV to San Andreas, and maybe a sports title’s advancement would look more profound.

“NHL 10 and FIFA 10 are two of the highest-rated sports games ever on this console generation, but FIFA 09 and NHL 09 were also among the highest scores,” he said.

Littman’s right. This year FIFA 10 and MLB 09 The Show became the first sports titles in the current console generation to post a Metacritic score of 90 or better. (NHL 09 and 10 both got 88.) From 2000 to 2004, every single Madden and 2K football title on every console got at least a 90.

But it’s not to say that we’ll never see a truly revolutionary sports game again, or that when it does come, its excellence will go unrecognised. There’s no way NFL 2K5 could have won Game of the Year five years ago. But it still enjoys a fame that’s outlived those that did.

“Do you really think, five years from now, you’re gonna hear ‘Is Grand Theft Auto on PlayStation 4 as good as Grand Theft Auto on PlayStation 3? Will Halo 6 people really say, ‘Is this as good as Halo 1?’” Justice muses. “I don’t think so.”

Stick Jockey is Kotaku’s column on sports video games. It appears on Saturdays.

We’re not going to catalogue every suit he’s ever worn; that would be boooooorrrring. Instead, we’ll just touch on the highlights before moving onto our own wishlist for the Mario games of the future.

THE PAST

FROG SUIT – Let you swim, and jump a little higher, but was so rarely used it’s almost irrelevant. But look at him! He was a frog! With googly eyes! Adorable.

GOOMBA’S SHOE – Stick Mario in a bouncing boot. Right. Another rare one, but memorable for its sheer absurdity.

BEE SUIT – Aaawwww. A suit granting limited powers of flight, it’s the highlight of 2007’s Super Mario Galaxy, and still perhaps the cutest suit the plumber has ever been spotted in. Aside from…

TANOOKI SUIT – Turned Mario into a furry centrefold. Gut-wrenchingly cute, but for accuracy’s sake, it probably needed more Tanooki balls.

PENGUIN SUIT – A new addition for the upcoming New Super Mario Bros. Wii. It lets you slide on ice and swim a little better, but more importantly, it lets you shoot ice at the bad guys.

PROPELLER SUIT – Another 2009 addition. Pick up a Propeller Mushroom in NSMB Wii and you get the Propeller Suit, which not only grants you the power of slow, easy flight via a little twirly helmet, but also gives you one hell of a red jumpsuit.

THE FUTURE

PANTHER SUIT – Smooth. Svelte. Silent. Sexy. Nintendo, you need to quit the cute/mythical animals and dress Mario up as a skulking great panther. Not only does he have the power of speed, but also emits a pungent odour that Princess Peach finds irresistible.

BIRTHDAY SUIT – He’s fat, hairy, eats mushrooms and lives with his brother. It’s not too great a stretch to conceive that Mario also likes to hit the bottle from time to time. So future games need a boozy mushroom, which instead of granting Mario a second outfit, strips him of his first. Doesn’t really grant him any powers – indeed, it just makes him more difficult to control – but it does have him asking whether KFC is still open. A lot.

LESS MARIO SUIT – Between games on the Wii, WiiWare, Virtual Console, DS and DSiWare, Mario’s a little over-exposed these days. Future Mario games, therefore, would do well to feature this suit, which removes Mario from the game and replaces him with a Nintendo character due a little more face time. Like Captain Falcon.

On walls around me hung a Wii bowling ball controller attachment, a Wii pool cue, Wii pom poms and more.

Who makes this stuff? Two amiable Orthodox Jewish brothers — black pants, white shirts, beards and an offer to their guest of some kosher pastries — sat across from me, cheerful about what they’ve built and the amazing gizmos surrounding us.

I was at the second floor offices of CTA Digital, a block from where Brooklyn, New York touches the East River, in a short, aged office building. I was in the spotless show room where Leo and Sol Markowitz’s line of sometimes-ridiculous, sometimes-useful — and apparently hot-selling — attachments for the Wii and other electronics line the walls. (See their offerings online, then imagine a lot of that hanging on the walls of one room that’s also big enough for a couple of couches and a big-screen TV.)

The brothers Markowitz are some of the guys who saw in the Wii not just a gamer revolution but a chance to make money selling people things to attach to their Wii remote.

They’ve sold 200,000 units of their Wii bowling ball controller worldwide. They say they were pleased to be surrounded by the plastic products of that opportunity.

“We smelled it right away,” Leo told me, recalling his first sensations of the Wii’s imminent success.

The Wii peripheral market is big and, despite other industry slumps, growing. Of the 58.4 million gaming peripherals sold so far this year in the United States, the NPD group reports that 18.4 million of those are for the Wii. That’s up a million from the same date last year.

So even though Sol, an avowed Kotaku reader, playfully cut his brother off early in our meeting about Wii add-ons to remind him that “real gamers don’t like the Wii”, enough people do like these attachments. They like the tennis rackets and the baseball bats, the imitation light sabres and shotguns. Maybe not the pom-poms — a weak seller — but people like buying Wii peripherals and business is no joke at all. It’s good.

CTA has more than 30 employees, a warehouse in upstate New York and design and development teams in Asia. Maybe most importantly, Leo noted, “We have five people who think of things to make 24-7.”

They think of things like… the bowling ball. “Why wouldn’t you buy it?” Leo said to me, when I ask him what the point is. I argued that people had been Wii-bowling with no ball-shaped shell around their controller just fine.

It makes the game fun for plenty of people, Sol said. “It makes it more exciting.” He knows that “real gamers” won’t care as much.

This bowling ball was a dream project, a year in the making and spurred by research that showed them that Wii Sports bowling is the most popular activity on Nintendo’s console.

“We all knew that whoever comes out with bowling, it’s going to be huge,” Leo recalled.

Those CTA engineers got to work, trying to craft a bowling ball something-or-other that could fit around a Wii Remote. They didn’t want people to chuck a bowling ball controller through their TV, so they tried to design a bowling ball shell that wouldn’t function if you didn’t wear the shell’s wrist strap. Couldn’t get it to work right, Sol said. They settled on a design that has two wrist straps and is sealed with a sticker that must be broken in order to first encase a Wii remote in it. You rip that, you assume the risks.

The bowling ball’s good, though it’s holes are positioned only for right-handed bowlers. An ambidextrous design hadn’t worked. But have no fear, fellow southpaws. “We probably will get into the left-handed business,” Leo told me.

I met with the Markowitz men and a helpful colleague for over an hour. Leo repeatedly bounded from his seat on a couch across from me to grab secret prototype after secret prototype of CTA gaming add-ons that will make the bowling ball seem pedestrian. They’re secret still, but they’re wild.

CTA’s been in this business for 16 years, Sol explained. They started with mobile phone add-ons, then moved on to iPod attachments. Now they do gaming add-ons too, like PlayStation 3 chat pads, Xbox 360 cooling devices and iPhone steering wheels. The Wii’s been the big one for them lately, and gaming’s up to a quarter of their business, though they won’t say how much money CTA makes. They sell their attachments worldwide to electronics stores that once ignored them or shunned gaming.

They say that even Bed Bath & Beyond is on board now. The brothers recalled that the retailer — not exactly a gaming powerhouse — consented last Christmas season to trying to sell 30,000 of CTA’s Wii add-ons, simple things like controller charge stations, and sold almost all of them. The retailer asked for more — asked for the top sellers, even. So, the brothers told Kotaku, CTA has sold Beth Bath & Beyond Wii Sports kits to sell and even a Wii controller shotgun. No word if it’s sold next to shower curtains.

Leo showed me a smart one: A belt and holster designed to hold a Wii Remote for users of Wii Fit. He rightly pointed out that the game requires players to use the Remote to start their exercising but then forces them to either put it down or needlessly hold it as they work out on the Wii Balance Board. The holster holds the Remote, freeing the user’s hands. And it swivels, letting someone point the Remote to navigate menus without having to un-holster it. That seemed to address a Wii Fit user-interface issue.

I asked the brothers if they saw themselves as being in the problem-solving business, the fun business or — gesturing to the Wii Music Kit that lets you embed the Wii remote into shells shaped like a violin, a trumpet, a dog paw — the novelty business.

“We see what the problem is [with a game] and figure out what we can make for it,” Leo began.

“We are in the fun business,” Sol cut in.

Leo laughed. “We’re in the business to sell and make money.”

CTA’s bowling ball controller may make the company stand out, but they are not the only creators of imaginative Wii add-ons. Mad Catz makes controller shells shaped like Ubisoft’s Rabbids characters. Nyko director of marketing Chris Arbogast told Kotaku that one of his company’s most creative Wii add-ons was going to be their Party Station: “a combination charging station/beverage container/chip bowl”. It’s not coming out. “Although it generated a lot of buzz and consumer response, it was not cost effective to produce and was tabled.”

Arbogast noted that some of the more imaginative controllers, while fun or aesthetically pleasing, don’t fit his company’s strategy. “We decided on particular accessories that allowed us to incorporate new technology or offer features that were not previously available, like button relocation on our Action Pak pistol grip or rumble in our Kama.” Their next big product is their new Charge Base IC.

CTA is well aware that some of this wilder stuff doesn’t work. The Wii Music kit has been a slow seller, not helped by relatively slow sales of Wii Music.

The brothers seem undeterred. They say that their new Wii Sports Resort kit, which includes a bow-and-arrow add-on, a Jet-Ski-style handlebar and even a Frisbee shell, is selling great.

And don’t worry, those of you who might feel you’re too cool for these kinds of attachments. Leo and Sol are making some products for you in mind too. Just wait. Brooklyn’s keeping busy.

Nowhere is the realisation of flight grander or more satisfying than in video games. When done right, flying in a game can leave a lasting impression on both players and developers that impacts every game they play or make going forward.

Telltale Games designer Mike Stemmle pointed this out while demoing Tales of Monkey Island Episode 3 for me in September. I asked what gameplay inspirations helped him develop for Monkey Island and after a moment’s pause he said, “Kingdom Hearts.”

“Oh, because it has pirates?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “It’s the flying.” The way the game introduces flying the player — about halfway through its storyline after you’ve been running and jumping on the ground the whole time — was like a revelation in game design for him. “Because once you get [to fly in Never Land], it’s like you knew it was coming. It just felt right.”

There’s a fantasy fulfilment that comes with flying in video games. And even if flying in a game is just another way to get from point A to point B, it’s appealing to a part of your senses that you don’t use very much in everyday gameplay.

“We live in a very X, Y world,” Dark Void Senior Producer Morgan Gray said. A veteran of flight games like X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter and X-Wing Alliance, he knows his Z axis and isn’t afraid to build his games around it. “If you look at … shooters, when they first came out, everything was flat. [There was] a roof over your head and walls on all sides. It was only really when you got to games … where you had enemies [above or below you] where you had to start exploring the Z axis.”

Like Doom players that had to learn to use the mouse to enjoy Quake, your average gamer has to put in effort to master flight. Instead of thinking in only one or two directions, he or she has to think in a 360-degree bubble where enemies can come from any angle. They have to be aware of their character’s (or aircraft’s) physics so that they don’t get lost when trying to execute a turn. Some games make it easier for the player by limiting the range of flight to forward-only like Star Fox or Panzer Dragoon; other games like Dark Void layer on tutorial after tutorial to make absolutely sure you internalise the controls before cutting you loose in the wild blue yonder.

By that same token, developers without Gray’s flight-filled background have to work a lot harder to implement flying. Whereas Gray can look back over both his career and his childhood and see Chuck Yeager’s face mocking him after Gray had crashed and burned in Advanced Flight Training, some developers only have memories of Star Fox or Wing Commander as their flying inspiration. They don’t realise that there’s more to flight than getting off the ground.

“Don’t get me wrong,” says Gray. “[Wing Commander's] level design was great, the ship design was great, progression was great. The actual nuts and bolts of flight? All pretty arcade-y because [it didn't feel] like there was meat to the simulation.”

Developers with traditional level-making experience on shooters or adventure games that have the walls on all sides and the roof overhead have new challenges when making an enjoyable flying sequence or full game. They have to relearn how to organise a level around enemy spawn points in spaces with no walls or roofs.

“You really need to use enemies not only as a way of making a challenge for the player, but as defining space because [players] have to have that frame of reference for ‘where am I in the terrain?’” said Gray. “If you get [the timing right], it really gives the [flight] meaning and puts a plot to the [enemy] encounters. It’s different than ‘And now we walk you in this room and find the blue key,’ because you don’t get blue keys in the air.”

He compared a perfect flight level to a map called De Dust in Counter-Strike. To him, it was obvious that some developer had sat down with a stopwatch and timed how long it would take enemies to reach players when spawning from two different points on the map. That developer knew exactly where the player would be and what they would be doing when the enemy got to them, and they build the level outward around the player from that point.

Flying levels, Gray said, should be built the exact same way.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the upcoming Avatar for the Wii. A flight level with a giant lizard bird was the centrepiece of a demo given to me by creative director Daniel Bisson, and he wasn’t shy about telling me it was the hardest level to design. In early efforts, the enemies spawned too fast and the Wii Balance Board was over-responsive to even the slightest shift in weight, causing the lizard bird to pitch wildly and slam into spawning enemies. As the level developed, they added more environmental boundaries like tunnels and trees to define the flying space and confined 360-degree movements to quick time events.

So what began as a flying level instead turned into an arcade-style on-rails experience. Sure, you’re up in the sky on the back of a bird. But, there’s not much fantasy fulfilment and no raw freedom in having your hand held.

The trick is keeping reality from ruining fantasy. Yes, it’s a lot of work to pilot an X-Wing in the Star Wars: Battlefront games; but if you get to blow up a TIE Fighter as a reward for your patience, you don’t mind sinking effort into learning how to be a pilot. Likewise, War in the upcoming Darksiders would look silly with a pair of wings sprouting from his burly back; but hijacking a gryphon from an angel for a quick joyride through a ruined city appeals to the fantasy of the character and doesn’t last so long that the game needs to bog the player down with real physics.

Above: The lone flying level in Darksiders.

With Crimson Skies and flight sims on side of the spectrum and our Star Foxes and Panzer Dragoons on the other, there are so many ways gamers can fulfil the fantasy of flight. Each new game that introduces a flying segment or builds its entire experience around the thrill of strapping on a jetpack builds on the collective fantasy gamers and developers share of taking to the skies.

The ultimate dream of flight in games, says Gray, is this: “I don’t know where I’m at, but I’m having fun.”

Image Cred — Kingdom Hearts
Title Image: The Fall of Icarus, Peter Paul Rubens, 1636

Having gone undefeated through 10 games, the Broncos (not a user-controlled team in this dynasty) reached the BCS Top 4, striking distance of Florida, Oklahoma (with an uninjured Sam Bradford) and Alabama. The week 12 standings were strongly analogous to present day standings, absent TCU and Cincinnati, both undefeated in the real world.

And then Boise fell at home to Nevada, tumbling far out of both voting polls’ top 10, and to 12th in the BCS. The machine held the lesser-conference team to the same double-standard as the human voters, who have matched one-loss teams from the major conferences in the previous two title games. Further, Boise State quarterback Kellen Moore (sorry, “QB #11“) who had led the Heisman voting to that point, bottomed out to third in the final tally. Finally, a two-loss Oregon (to Boise and to Utah) leapfrogged the Broncos, as many expect the real-life one-loss Ducks will do once pollsters realise their votes will affect on a national title and major bowl bids.

The plausibility of all this is not just dumb luck. Games in November always bring into sharp focus just how American college football’s poll-driven, playoff-less season and postseason is the most meritless selection of a team champion in the entire world. And yet NCAA Football 10, unlike any other sports simulation, has the responsibility to simulate the same purely subjective conditions, which aren’t just the subplots of a season, they are the season itself.

“With sports there is always going to be controversy,” said Kendall Boyd, a senior product manager for NCAA Football 10. “We do our best to make sure we have a little drama, but also ensure the integrity of the current system.”

As college football, with seven unbeaten teams, lurches toward another inevitable matchmaking controversy, this week I tugged on EA Sports’ shirttail, asking how they build a game that, if it mirrors reality, should also screw some deserving team out of a title shot every year. Boyd didn’t answer that question head on, and I really can’t blame him – the hypercriticized Bowl Championship Series is one of the game’s biggest licensors, after all, and it’s not doing so to be held up to ridicule or split polls in virtual reality, too. But he did shed light on how NCAA Football incorporates reputation into its team and individual performances.

“The biggest factor of our ‘human element’ is leveraged against your conference’s prestige,” Boyd said. “If you play in a BCS conference, you’re going to move up the rankings a lot easier than a smaller conference school would.”

Conference prestige – this is different from the six-star rating each program has in NCAA 10 – comes most into play in the game’s simulated coaches’ poll, the human factor most driving the game’s BCS rating. The coaches’ poll routinely favours programs from the major conferences, as 33 of 59 voters in this year’s poll represent, and still others have previous experience with them.

Boyd said that once the season gets moving, “our media and coaches’ poll are very similar.” NCAA 10’s media poll is, of course, analagous to the AP Top 25, which asked out of the BCS formula five years ago but remains an influential measure for judging the biggest matchups week to week.

“The previous week’s rating is evaluated,” Boyd said, “and then the following factors are brought in: score versus opponent that week; was it a game on the road? What was the ranking on our ‘Toughest Places to Play’ poll versus the opponent you played, if it was road game? And then finally, the separation between the two is simple percentages, so we have a disparity between them.”

The game’s BCS computation comes into play in Week 8, the same as it does in real life, but it is not a strict replication of the actual matrix. For one thing, the Harris Interactive Poll, which serves as the second human poll in the BCS formula, isn’t a factor all that distinct from the game’s media poll. And the six indices – with names like Colley, Sagarin, Wolfe and Massey – that form the ranking’s computer average are not used in NCAA 10, Boyd said, even though their formulae are public. “We do make it equally interesting,” Boyd said. “Without giving too much away, we combine the media and coaches’ poll and then add in other variables, such as strength of schedule.”

Such as? “Quality wins and losses are a big factor. Losing to a bad team will definitely have a severe impact on the rankings in our game.” Also, timing is a key factor, just like real life. “In our game, it’s better to lose early than lose late,” Boyd said. “If you were to lose in the first few weeks of the season to a strong opponent, you will naturally move up the rankings as long as you continue to win.”

The biggest question I had is whether NCAA 10 internally gooses the polling to help out a user-controlled team, in the name of a more fun video game for the person who bought it. Because in more than six years of playing console sports sims, few experiences have been more gratifying than taking over a two-star doormat, storming the Top 10, and getting that “Where’d They Come From?!” headline in the next week’s NCAA news.

Answer: No. “We want it to be an even playing field,” Boyd said. If you manage to take Temple to the Orange Bowl, you came by it honest. “I believe most of the ways we evaluate the teams would be affected if we skewed it toward the human-controlled teams,” he added.

Nor is the voting skewed toward user-controlled players in the game’s Heisman Trophy simulation. However, “We do have a special circumstance for potential upsets in the voting to keep it dynamic, for a twist,” Boyd said, “but we don’t want to disclose the formula, to help keep the intrigue. But this is equal among human controlled and CPU teams.”

NCAA 10’s Heisman voting likewise reflects the values of its real-world counterpart. It typically goes to quarterbacks, running backs and wide receivers, although I have seen offensive tackles and defensive backs get mentioned week-to-week, as they sometimes are in real life.

Significantly, Boyd said that the stats or results of a simulated game in a dynasty carry no additional weight, positive or negative, in the game’s Heisman voting. And while it’s easier to load up arcade numbers against creampuffs, he said a surer path is to take on tough teams on the road and log credible performances that contribute to a win there.

And no, Boyd said, there is no East Coast Media Bias helping players or teams from that region, in either the polls or the Heisman sims.

After our conversation, I went back into NCAA 10 to try to test out what Boyd had to say. I ran another simulation pitting Boise State versus a much tougher nonconference schedule this year. The Broncos went 8-3, losing to Oregon at home and Alabama and Texas in Tuscaloosa and Austin. Boise still ended the season at No. 11 – remarkably, the highest-rated three loss team in the nation, although all of the defeats came early. In fact, 11 is an uncommonly high rating for any three-loss team, let alone one from the WAC. Strength of schedule, with two Top-5 games on the road early in the season, clearly was in play here.

But it was impossible not to notice that a lesser team, North Carolina – whose football ranking I’ve long said is propped up by the school’s basketball reputation and the votes of people who wish they went there – had hit No. 2 by the end of the regular season on a schedule as weak as the last swallow in a 2-liter of Cheerwine. And that literally raised up the old State alum anger in me, seeing the despised Tar Heels exalted by a system that would never ever give the Wolfpack the same benefit of the doubt, which is pretty much how we think about things in real life, too.

But then in the conference title game, Carolina suffered the kind of crushing loss that is so common to arriviste college football programs – 28-13 to Clemson, the ACC’s original football power, booting UNC back to a lesser bowl, the Gator. And I threw a fist and roared with delight at, again, the true-to-life fidelity of NCAA 10.

Stick Jockey is Kotaku’s column on sports video games. It appears Saturdays at 10 a.m. U.S. Mountain time.