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 We get sent weird and hilarious emails all the time, but there is a subtle brilliance to what one Australian reader, Chris, is proposing. I’ll just offer it here, verbatim.
When something happens in real life sports, my first instinct is to see if I can replicate it in a video game. It’s partly why they exist, after all. But the New Orleans Saints’ infamous “bounty” system, which paid premiums to players who delivered devastating hits, would seem to be beyond the means of a game like Madden NFL 12.
When you have done so much right for so long, to the point that very little needs to be changed, the paradox of your success is that what you offer risks becoming stale. For years, MLB The Show has been one of the most universally acclaimed video games, regardless of genre, and its improvements — while observable — sometimes feel like a world-class sprinter shaving hundredths of a second off his winning time.
Looking over the field of candidates for the Madden NFL 13 cover, I’m thinking of what William Munny said before he shot Little Bill in Unforgiven: Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.
• The world’s largest Tecmo Super Bowl tournament is tomorrow in Madison, Wis., featuring a field of 178 players. TecmoBowl.org also tells Kotaku that NFL Films will be present, apparently for a feature sometime later about video gaming and gridiron. The event will be live-streamed and live-blogged from TecmoBowl.org’s official tournament page. The action begins at 11am EST (US).
The Gaming Tailgate, which last year chipped in to help NCAA Football 12 coordinate its end zone artillery, has noticed that this month seven Heisman Trophy winners have all been mentioned on Twitter in connection with NCAA Football 13. Most of the mentions come from Sandy Sandoval, EA Sports’ top man for athlete relations.
Yankees pitcher CC Sabathia — who we already know takes his video games seriously — has a very special, one-of-a-kind PlayStation 3. And it’s one that speaks directly to my tastes.
