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]

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]

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.

Cris Collinsworth took over as the colour analyst for the Madden franchise last year. John Madden retired from broadcasting this year. As this video suggests, it’s only a matter of time before the ex-Bengals receiver takes over the title

Collinsworth (as voiced by NYC comedian Rob Lathan) has to start out somewhere, so here he begins by calling the action for Intellivision’s Rural New Mexico Six-on-Six Football NFL Football (and the later All-Pro Football, with the forward pass perfected by the Mattel LED handhelds years before).

Remember, “You’ve never lived until one of those clowns flips you upside down.” It’s a sound bite you hear 48 zillion times in the most mundane Madden NFL 10 game. It’d also take up 20 times the memory of one of these ROMs.

Collinsworth NFL 10 – Rated E for Effort [YouTube, thanks Ian V.]

Huang, co-founder of Red Octane and parent of the Guitar Hero franchise, went so far as to predict that this generation would be the last to own physical media. In five or 10 years, he said, everything would be digital download-based.

Moore — current head of EA Sports and former overseer of all things Xbox — agreed for the most part. He said that the console model of video games (where you get one complete game on a disc for $US60) was a “burning platform.” As in, do you stand on a burning platform and face certain death or jump into the waters of digital distribution and face probably death?

Clearly, you want the digital distribution. Right?

Despite Moore and Huang’s faith in the future of digital distribution, however, both developers are releasing three to four disc-based games on console a year. Complete with plastic peripherals which cost even more money to manufacture than video game software, mind you.

Huang explained Red Octane’s Activision’s motivation behind ubiquitous releases as accessibility. “We need to give [our users] channels to access additional content,” he said. Not everybody is ready for the DLC revolution, apparently, so they have to keep putting out physical media for the next five to 10 years. Or however long it takes for my physical-media-dependent generation to die out and accept digital everything.

Young had a slightly different take on the digital future. He would, because he develops games almost exclusively for the iPhone like Rolando and Eliminate. Young said episodic content doesn’t work because you can’t chop a complete game into tiny pieces. Rather, said Young, game makers should be looking at ways to monetize usage. To him, this means making a game that’s free to play and then finding ways to trick you into microtransactions. Like shelling out for extremely nerdy clothing for your virtual avatar in a free-to-play role-playing game.

It all comes down to the fact that the video games industry is risk-averse. If console makers believe that the next generation of gamer won’t shell out for $US60 for a disc that gets scratched up eventually anyway, then we can expect the next iteration of console to not have a disc tray. And when that happens, maybe we can all stop shelling out for plastic guitars and a new copy of what’s essentially the same football game every year.

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]

Two weeks ago The Plain Dealer of Cleveland reported that Thompson’s lawyers had canceled a procedural conference because the case is in the process of being dismissed. Thompson, a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s “Hall of Fans,” who wears a bug-eyed dog mask, hard hat and waves a bone, had sued EA for a similar character appearing in Madden NFL 2005.

The Plain Dealer’s Oct. 5 report said the suit was expected to be resolved in three weeks. His suit sought at least $US25,000 and a promise from EA to no longer use his image.

Browns Superfan John ‘Big Dawg’ Thompson’s Case Against Game Maker Likely to be Resolved [Cleveland.com via Gamasutra]

All three have filed suits over the unauthorised use of likenesses in EA Sports titles. Byron Bishop ended his injury-filled career with the Tar Heels last year, but has sued the NCAA, which licensed EA Sports NCAA 10 game, because a player with the same number, state of birth, appearance and position also appeared on the roster in that series. Like the former, and more noteworthy, player Sam Keller, Bishop seeks a class-action status in his suit.

The sports management group Fighters Inc. claims EA put boxers it represents into Fight Night Round 4, flouting exclusive licensing agreements the group says it had with the fighters. Further, Fighters Inc says EA Sports continued to pursue boxers under its brand, signing them for downlowdable content packs. Fighters Inc. isn’t messing around, they want $US25 million in actual damages, plus punitive on top of that.

But the best is John Big Dawg Thompson, one of the inaugural members of the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s “Hall of Fans” class. Thompson, who changed his middle-name to Big Dawg, is the bug-eyed, hard-hatted, dawg-mask wearing denizen of Cleveland’s notorious east end zone stands. He contends that a “Big Dawg” fan character in Madden NFL 09, similar except for jersey uniform number (92 instead of Thompson’s 98), is an unauthorised use of his image. He wants 25 grand.

The good news is, by no longer making a baseball game, EA Sports can’t be sued by every douche who sits behind home plate talking on his cell phone and waving at the camera.

EA Tackled by More Sports licence Suits [GameSpot]