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.

Pasta Padre has the full list of all 32 teams. Everyone gets 10 players, five on offence and five on defence. On offence, each team gets a quarterback, running back, wide receiver, offensive lineman and then either a tight end or a second wideout. On defence, they get a defensive lineman, linebacker, safety and two corners. There was also some reference made to “entourages”, which are additional linemen, but it wasn’t clear if they’re a power-up, an unlockable, or a separate game mode altogether.

Unfortunately, many players on the launch roster are out of date, and there will be no updates. So that means the Oakland Raiders are stuck with:

• P Shane Lechler
• OL a traffic cone
• QB JaMarcus Russell
• WR drunk rodeo clown
• RB Four-year-old in a Power Wheels

But hey, with the game’s trick passing feature, Russell now has the ability to overthrow and underthrow his receivers on the same play!

Madden Arcade Rosters [Pasta Padre]

IGN reports that Electronic Arts announced its five-on-five Madden NFL Arcade will release Thanksgiving week, a time of the year in the US that already blends pigskin with parking one’s self on the couch for extraordinarily long stretches in front of the tube.

Madden NFL Arcade will release Nov. 24 (Tuesday) on the PlayStation Network and Nov. 25 on Xbox Live. It will cost $US14.99/1200 Microsoft Points.

The above trailer shows some of the reality-defying gameplay you can expect, such as throwing three passes at once, freezing defenders in place and the Washington Redskins scoring two touchdowns on offence. For a closer look at what this game’s all about, Totilo wrote up his impressions a couple of weeks ago.

Madden NFL Arcade Drops The Week of Thanksgiving [IGN via Pasta Padre, video via Padre]

A piece running on Yahoo! News Japan (translated by AltJapan) summed up the difference between Western and Japanese games: “There is a big difference in the way emotion is handled in Japan and abroad. Abroad, hero characters tend to be portrayed as powerful males, but in Japan squashed and cute little boys are the norm. The Japanese preference for see small-statured pretty-boys wielding big swords seems to be greeted abroad with a resounding ‘no way.’”

This paradigm does not hold true to sports game, the article notes. So when Japanese developers depict real teams and real players, the only option is to depict them realistically — and the vast majority of professional athletes are not small pretty boys!

Thus, Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer franchise is a big hit in the West, and ditto for EA Sports title FIFA 10. Neither title carries the cultural baggage pervasive in other genre games.

Fantasy and Football [AltJapan]

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.

Japan “is the cradle of our industry,” Moore writes, but “one of the frustrations of being an American company attempting to do business in Japan is the insularity of the industry that defends locally-made content and looks down on games from abroad.”

Moore mentions his experience with Japan while at Microsoft and acknowledges that factors such as genre, gameplay and art design have been factors in making a breakthrough. But, “with simulation sports games, these issues would seem much less relevant – it’s typically about the gameplay. So you can imagine my disappointment every year as we struggle to break through in Japan with our outstanding FIFA franchise.”

He goes on:

It is clear we still have work to do in Japan to more fully understand what drives that gamers attraction to sports titles. Let me be clear on this. I recognise that there are many factors that contribute to a gamer’s decision to purchase (or not) a particular game, I’d just hate for the gamers in Japan to not get as much enjoyment as the rest of the world out of the best sports game of this console generation.

Honestly, Moore could also be saying the same thing about FIFA’s acceptance in the United States. Granted, it sells much better here, but the U.S. is also very hidebound to its domestic traditions, especially the big four of major team sports. Soccer, football, kick-ball, however you call it, is a relatively new sport to Japan no matter its popularity. The J. League (1992), Japan’s top tier association, has been around about as long as the MLS (1993). Maybe an MVP Baseball for Japan’s Central and Pacific Leagues? Hell, I loved MVP in the States, I’d play that.

It might be a little nearsighted to chalk this up to insularity. It could be other things, such as sports preference and the tradition sports games have in Japan with which I will confess, I don’t have much familiarity. Whatever the case, it’s clear EA Sports is not exempt from his company’s efforts in that market.

FIFA in Japan [Peter Moore's Official Blog]

Functionally, it’ll operate in much the same way as FIFA’s system. Players will start the game mode with a random pack of cards. The players on those cards are the players on your team. They’ll mostly be the dregs of the NFL to begin with; as you play more and earn points, you can buy better packs of cards that will feature a higher calibre of player (they’ll still be random cards, just the more expensive packs will have better players in them).

Point being it spices up online gaming a little, creating random teams (to break up the monotony of people sticking with big/good teams), with the added compulsiveness of Pokemon-esque card collecting.

I’ve played the FIFA version and it was pretty neat, though the downside was that the FIFA version cost money. The Madden edition, however, will be free so the least you can do is check it out when it’s released in January.

Madden Ultimate Team First Look [GameSpot]

This package delivers Lousiville at Pitt’s Petersen Events centre (Big East); Michigan State at Illinois’ Assembly Hall, one of 47 such-named arenas in the Big 10; Texas at Kansas’s Allen Fieldhouse representing the Big XII; Florida vs. Kentucky in Rupp Arena (SEC); Cal at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion, because only in the Pac-10 do they play in pavilions; and of course, Wake Forest whistled for a charge against Duke at Cameron Indoor Stadium, because for no other ACC team is such a call ever made. Larry Rose must be an unlockable classic ref in this game.

The meal comes in four configurations, offers four “collector’s cups” featuring NFLers rendered, interestingly, in their cartoony Madden-for-the-Wii forms. McWhertor, still nauseous from last year’s unboxing of the Guitar Hero meal, assigned this to me on the pretense that as the sports writer, it was my responsibility.

I selected the five hot wings version over the two-piece grilled chicken (white or dark meat), the three chicken strips or the Twister (a wrap with lettuce). I went with the hot wings because I figured five pieces would allow me to burn 66 percent more calories reaching into the box than I would with three crispy strips, and that would be healthier than whatever I got from the Twister’s vegetable matter.

The KFC Madden Box also comes in a standard $US5 version and a $US7 special edition that, while it doesn’t include night vision goggles, is packed with enough pupil-dilating sodium you’ll see in the dark on your own. I went with the $US7 configuration, which is supposed to deliver an extra side item and a dessert.

But as you can see in the above unboxing, this product shipped in such an incomplete state I’m not sure any patch or update can fix it. Opening the box reveals just the five wings and the mashed potatoes and gravy – which I had declared as my extra side item. No crumbly biscuit doused in butter pheromones. No chitinous coleslaw in mayonnaise the colour and consistency of watery ejaculate. In fact, since the hockey-puck brownie bites come in plastic and I poured the Diet Pepsi (oh hell yeah, I went with the diet), there are a grand total of two items here actually prepared by KFC employees, even though the loading time for this was an unacceptably slow seven minutes.

KFC #D705027, Springfield, Ore., you fail. Well, maybe you were thinking of my health by subtracting 360 needless calories. Either way, my review of this meal’s components follows:

Hated (Secretly Loved):
Hot wings: These babies start slow, not really hitting you with the spice until midway through the third piece. Then it was like Cayenne Frankenstein farted in my face. Even after the meal my mouth had this residue on it that reminded me of the time I drunkenly kissed this chick who had that bee-sting toxin lip gloss to give her the Angelina Jolie pouty look. Both encounters were degrading, but this one diminished my self-esteem. Also, these are not boneless wings; I thought “wings” was an allegorical reference in lieu of “nuggets,” a competitor’s term, because these things were fried up to the point they no longer resembled the limbs of any known terrestrial animal. So I took a big mouthful of bone on the first attempt, and believe me, that’s not a sentence I ever wanted to write. I didn’t expect the amount of meat in this item to be nourishing; I did expect it to at least be filling. Rating: Anorexy.

Mashed Potatoes and Gravy: The pudding-like body of potato flour and pureed notebook was at least free of lumps or standing water. It was thoroughly mixed with the viscous tailings of cooked chicken, whose bouquet hit artful notes of obesity, unemployment, and parole. If the chicken didn’t fill me, this sure did, as not soon after polishing off the MP&G it felt like my large intestine was mixing up Redi-Crete, certain to turn my commode into a birdbath. Rating: Lunchlady.

Brownie Bites: These pucklike treats came packaged in a cellophane sleeve upside down on a piece of waxed cardboard, evocative of the conveyor belt that shat them out. In March. But ultimately, they were chocolatey and thus the highlight, comparatively speaking, of this dining experience. Rating: Hockey.

Despite the grandiose packaging and $US7 pricetag, even if this order had been completely filled it would still be engineered for a 15 minute experience, tops. I expected that this calorie bomb would have left me doing the old Dad thing of unbuttoning my pants and laying on the couch to watch Jeopardy and blame my farts on the dog. But all it took was one tuberculose belch-cough and I was back to full strength.

If there was $US1.95 worth of actual food in this meal I’d be astonished. That, coupled with the EA Sports sponsorship, must make this cross promotion an insanely profitable no-brainer for Yum! Brands, and all but guarantees a sequel in the coming year.

KFC Madden NFL Box was developed in a conference room by marketing geniuses and produced by KFC, a subsidiary of Yum! Brands, Inc. Retails for $US5, $US7 if you want the extra side-item and brownie bites, assuming they remember to pack all the base items. Eaten until regretted.

Furthermore, the game’s suggested retail price in the US drops another $US10, to $US39.99, just in time for the holiday retail season.

The DLC pack will release “early December,” nothing more specific, and will be $US9.99 on PlayStation Network, 800 points over Xbox Live.

Kotaku AU Note: No word on a similar price drop locally.

New Fight Night Round 4 DLC and Price Cut Announced [IGN via VG247]