Damned If You Demo, Damned If You Don't 
NBA Jam Confirmed For 360, PS3 (But There's A Nasty Catch) 
Rugby League Comes To PS3, Xbox 360 This September 
UFC Online's One-Use Code A Lesson In How Not To Do It 
There Is No Such Thing As The "Madden Curse" 
Plenty Of Contractions, And A Lower Birth Rate In Sports Gaming When I run my mouth about international soccer, I sound like a complete and total imbecile. When a Brit does the same thing about basketball, it is 100 per cent comedy gold.
To throw a perfect game, a single pitcher must retire every batter and at least 27 of them, in a victory. That we know. 2K Sports, in its “$US1 Million Perfect Game Challenge, on Major League Baseball 2K12, applies a formula to those games, rating their degree of “perfection” so to speak, according to factors like pitch count and strikeouts. Here’s what I didn’t know until now: You are also judged on the physical perfection of your pitched game.
Though I wish I could say I was smart enough to think up this ruse in advance, I really did forget my backpack somewhere inside EA Sports’ Tiburon studio during a recent visit. This became an opportunity to roam all of its upper four floors of development, though not unescorted.
Internet superstar Tom Scott (who we were only talking about a few weeks back) wanted to play some mini-golf for his birthday. So he had a course built. One incorporating elements of Minecraft, Portal and…Wheel of Fortune?
Sports video games must licence everything. League symbols, player likenesses, individual events, even certain stadiums. Then they must provide a soundtrack every year and, yep, those songs must be licensed, too. It is a neverending headache unique to the sports genre.
Yesterday’s Champions League quarterfinal pitting AC Milan against Barcelona resulted in some light-hearted support from the Milan fans in the San Siro stadium.
EA Sports MMA was conceived as a two-year series, alternating publication years with its Fight Night cousin. No one thought it would be getting a sequel after its major licence, Strikeforce, was acquired by the UFC. But pulling the plug on MMA‘s servers shows the first edition’s lifespan fell far short of EA Sports’ expectations.
This week, the Portland Trail Blazers released Greg Oden after a five-year, injury-tainted marriage that was star-crossed before he could show up for his first training camp. Oden is one of the most ill-fated athletes ever to appear on the cover of a video game, starring on the cover of College Hoops 2K8. It got me to thinking about other cover choices that either were ill-fated, or ended up that way — for athlete, or publisher, or both.
