Well, alright, maybe it’s a heartwarming story anyway. The jamfest was put together by Pro vs. G.I. Joe, which arranges morale-booster multiplayer competitions between sports stars and service members overseas. Via Xbox Live and a satellite connection, Roethlisberger (git-tar, second from right), and his offensive line – Ramon Foster (guitar, left), Willie Colon (vocals) and Trai Essex (drums, looking like he’s playing on easy) took their Guitar Hero 5 skills up against the Army’s 336th Military Police Company.

Afterwards, Big Ben orated:

To be able to interact with these guys and enjoy it – and I could see the joy on their face – and get to beat them a little bit in some Rock Band. It’s a lot of fun.

Facepalm.

Madden NFL 10 cover boy Troy Polamalu didn’t play, but he did show up in grass-covered sniper camouflage (yes, really.) I bet Hines Ward’s eyes got real big when he saw that, thinking that getup would be perfect for his next out-of-nowhere blindside hit on Keith Rivers.

NFL Super Bowl Champion Steelers Connect with Soldiers in Iraq for Guitar Hero Competition [Ripten]

Marty Schottenheimer, Jerry Glanville, Marv Levy and Herm “You Play to Win the Game” Edwards join the opposing cast in Quick Hit, which focuses on game preparation, playcalling, and player and franchise advancement as opposed to arcade running and passing action.

The coaches will head teams whose personnel and tactics conform to the types of teams they led in the NFL. Levy and Glanville, for example, would probably direct fast-paced offenses, the run and shoot for Glanville and a no-huddle pro set for Levy. Herm Edwards just plays to win the game. Hello?

OK, kidding. Quick Hit has had to put together more than 100 individual deals, the vast majority of them past players. (It’s limited to using five current players by the NFLPA). These four coaches will add depth to the season simulation, said Jeffrey Anderson, the Quick Hit founder and former CEO of Turbine.

“Our users tell us they love testing their football skills against the true style of real coaches. We’re all about coaching and strategy, and these four new coaches will bring even more authenticity to the single player experience,” said Jeffrey Anderson, CEO at Quick Hit.

The game is free and open for signup to the general public.

Of the more than 20 races in the Blood Bowl board game, Cyanide Studio only included eight in the initial PC release, and there were some grievous oversights. Where are the Dark Elves? That’s a question that will be answered next month, as the pointy-eared bastards arrive as part of a free update to the game. Not only will the team, which combines the trademark elven agility with sheer brutality, be available as a free download, some stores will be getting a special Blood Bowl Dark Elves Edition that comes with their evil packed right in. From the official description:

“Dark Elves combine Elven agility with a cruel brutality. They are perfectly at ease playing the ball or crushing skulls with their callous fists. Furthermore, their Witch Elves excel in that field, as long as they don’t get caught up in the euphoria of battle! Dark Elves are masters of deception and can also call upon deadly Assassins to instill fear (and the cold blade of a dagger!) in their adversaries’ heart.”

I don’t know how the game survived without the Dark Elves in the first place. Not sure how the other teams will survive once they’re included.

Visit the official Blood Bowl website for more pics and info on the Dark Elf team.

No word on when this patch goes live, but when it arrives, the development team has promised defensive tweaks that improve the chances you record a sack (rather than the CPU quarterback throwing the ball away), improving defenders’ pursuit angles, and improving the coverage of the flats. Better simmed stats in franchise mode also are coming, as well as other unspecificed uniform and presentation changes. The official blog post on the patch reminds that the list of fixes and updates is not final.

Madden NFL 10 – 2nd title Update Preliminary Details [Inside EA Sports Blog via Pasta Padre]

I’m one of those Madden players who picks up the game every year, beats the pants off of the AI in easy mode a few times, gets his arse kicked online once or twice, and then trades the game back in. I enjoy the game, but when it comes right down to it the whole thing is a bit too deep for me. Perhaps Madden NFL Arcade for Xbox Live Arcade and the PlayStation Network is the answer.

There are no penalties and no field goals in Madden NFL Arcade. Just four downs to make it 60 yards to your goal, with the first team to score 30 points winning. Games can be tailored to your liking, tweaking skill level and points-to-win, and during play you can use any of 13 “Game Changers” to break the field wide open. It almost sounds like NFL Street, doesn’t it?

“When you look around the office and see your whole team playing and having tons of fun with it, you know the game hit the right mark,” said marketing director Nathan Stewart. “We have diehard Madden fans who have worked on the franchise for a decade, and more casual gamers who are all playing together and enjoying it. If our productivity the past few weeks is any indication, we’ve created a game that everyone will love.”

Madden NFL Arcade will be available on the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade in December for $US14.99 and 1200 Microsoft points respectively.

The report of this greater-than-gaming feat appeared in Saturday’s Syracuse Post-Standard. The newspaper reported that Ismail Brooks, a tailback in the Section III high school Auburn, has scored 25 touchdowns in his first six games.

The paper noted that such a performance seems to be out of a video game, but quotes Brooks’ cousin and teammate, Julaun Richardson as saying: “Sometimes, you never see people score seven touchdowns with one player in the easiest level of video games… It’s ridiculous what Ismail is doing. I knew he was that good, but I never knew he was this good.”

Congratulations to the football player for his great stats. And congratulations to the Post-Standard for introducing a novel concept: The action in real life that is so amazing that it couldn’t have even happened in a video game.

PIC via Flickr

The Xbox Avatar Store now contains football jersey’s for each of the thirty-two current NFL teams, each coming in both male and female versions, courtesy of Madden NFL 10. From the amazing Philadelphia Eagles to the even more amazing Pittsburgh Steelers, your avatar can show his or her pride for football teams from Pennsylvania for the low price of 320 Microsoft points, or $US4 real-world money. I suppose you could buy jerseys representing other teams as well, but that simply doesn’t make any sense at all to me. It’s crazy talk.

Buy Your NFL Avatar Jersey Here [Xbox Live Marketplace via Major Nelson]

Interrupting a football game between the San Diego Chargers and Pittsburgh Steelers is enough reason to cause some sports fans to want to shoot someone, so slipping the new Modern Warfare 2 trailer in between plays is nothing short of marketing genius. Expensive marketing genius as that, as advertising during Sunday Night Football tends to run on the costlier side of the spectrum.

The new trailer, featuring in-game footage mixed with whatever that is in the image up there, should be dropping sometime after the show starts at 8pm Eastern. Don’t worry — if you miss it, we should have it up shortly thereafter.

New ‘Modern Warfare 2′ trailer to kick off on ‘NBC’s Sunday Night Football’ [USA Today]

Loved
Come-Back Story: Unlike NFL 2010, which kicked you back to the beginning of the current quarter, in iPhone Madden you may leave a game at any point—whether or not you select pause from its menu—and come back to it exactly at that point. This alone makes it the football sim to buy for your Apple mobile.

A Monster in Your Pants: For such a pocket-sized download (102.3 megabytes) this still delivers the core gameplay and presentation one uses and expects through 90 percent of a console Madden experience. Most notably, you get roster management—including trades—within your full season simulation. The real-life stadia are used; booth commentators Tom Hammond, Cris Collinsworth and (a bit obtrusively, however) John Madden himself supply analysis. The stadia you play in are the ones you see on Sunday, not generic clones. And most of all, the framerate and camera remained reasonably smooth and definitely well positioned. The game definitely exceeded what I expected to find in a Madden port to this platform.

Hated
The Clock Stops You:: Madden, like NFL 2010, employs a bullet-time mechanic to let you pull off running back jukes, punishing hits, and timely pass breakups. The good news is in Madden, you have a manual trigger, and don’t have to rely upon the game to slow down time for you, which sometimes never came. The bad news is it’s one more part of the screen to touch, and fat-fingered button-spamming spazzes (*raises fat-fingered hand*) will face an inscrutable learning curve as to when to key this feature, and even hitting it correctly. I want to be clear, my quibble is only with the trigger; bullet-time itself is the best solution to performing finesse moves on this platform, and once I figured it out, I was springing runs of 12 and 20 yards, and more. It’s the only shortcoming of what is, overall, a very solid control scheme given the platform. I loved drawing the custom receiver hot routes with a flick of my finger, and being able to touch any player on the screen and take over his control, rather than cycle through them with a pre-snap icon.

Now I can see why Gameloft hustled NFL 2010 out the door for the iPhone. They won the race to be first, but not to be best, and its offering shows glaring weaknesses against what Madden 10 on the iPhone brings to the table, even at double the price. You’re still playing a complex game with a virtual stick and buttons — but once you grow accustomed to that, it easily becomes a football experience that fulfils both the Madden brand and the promise of mobile gaming.

Madden NFL 10 was developed and published by Electronic Arts for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Released to the iTunes App Store on Sept. 3. Retails for $US9.99. Reviewed on an iPhone 3G. Played through play-now and season modes.

A Costa Rica casino is now taking proposition bets on when the Madden Curse strikes Larry Fitzgerald of the Arizona Cardinals, Troy Polamalu’s cover co-star. Polamalu was sidelined for three to six weeks after spraining ligaments in his knee in week one. This, of course, was attributed to the Madden cover jinx, which has dinged pretty much everyone except Marshall Faulk (2003) since they started putting athletes on the cover.

Playblackjack.com is giving 9:1 odds (bet $US100, win $US900) on each of Fitzgerald’s remaining 15 games. Basically, the terms are that Fitzgerald gets injured for at least one game — not the kind of season-ending, career death spiral the Curse is cracked up to be. He needs to be listed on the Cardinals’ official injury report for that game to win the bet, says the casino.

Larry Fitzgerald must be listed on the Arizona Cardinals official injury report for a bet to be graded as a winner. If he’s injured during practice or outside practice, the upcoming game is the wining game. If he stays healthy throughout the year, all bets are off and all money is returned.

You can see where this is headed. First, a player can be listed on an official injury report and still play the entire game. See Patriots, New England, whose coach has listed Tom Brady as “probable” since scouts watched Brady play for Michigan. Second, it suggests that Fitzgerald could get both legs broken in the first quarter of, say, week four, but the winning game is actually week five. Third, it leaves open the possibility that Fitzgerald gets a hangnail in weeks two through 17 and every game is a winner.

Betting on a specific player’s injury? What a fantastic idea! If only there were some way to affect the outcome. Like, if only the people who organized such an honest gambling business also had professional relationships with people whose job it was to injure others …

Will the Madden Curse strike again? Bet on it! [PlayBlackjack.com via Go Nintendo]