Results tagged “ea” from Tech-Out

Images of a youthful Mike Tyson and Muhammad Ali tell you almost everything you need to know about Fight Night Round 4, the latest edition of EA's boxing franchise.

Those two fighters set the tone for the whole game, making it a feel like a playful romanticizing of the sweet science that focuses on boxing's past while relying on players' creativity to bolster the present -- because let's be honest, unless you're a huge fan of the lighter-weight divisions, the present isn't that great.

Evolving my race into space was a threshold moment in Spore for me until I discovered that instead of a galaxy of fun, there was little to do once I had actually gotten there. Arriving at the center of the galaxy proved to be a temporary injection of excitement because afterwards, I found myself back to running the same spice routes and while drawing from the same, tiny glass of mind numbing activities.

So it was with some anticipation that I loaded up the expansion pack, Galactic Adventures, hoping to see if it could help reinvent what could have been the best part of the game. The good news is that it adds a fun wrinkle to the daily grind of spice running and planet hopping while allowing you to run wild with your own ideas. The bad news is that it also has a few holes in its heat shield..

I'm always going to remember the mid-to-late '80s. It was a simple time for me, and a lot of people my age (I'm 30). School was easier, life issues were easier ... and if you wanted to know who the best person was at almost anything, there's a chance his first name was Mike, and there was a chance he had an unearthly talent.

You had young Michael Jordan building his mythos through the air. You also had the other MJ, dubbed the "King of Pop" and always a moonwalk away from another chart-dominating piece of work.

Then, there's this guy:

I can't remember anyone who seized my attention more when I was younger than Iron Mike Tyson. Jordan soared, Jackson dazzled, but there was something about Tyson's contained feral energy that captivated me and millions of other people. As a gamer, the only real taste we had was in Mike Tyson's Punch-Out, and he was a boss battle.

All this sentiment is why Fight Night Round 4 was especially important for me. I had a thought in my head that maybe I didn't need to invest myself into it as much, since my fighting jones would be sated with UFC: Undisputed. I was kidding myself: UFC's a fine game, but I don't remember watching those dudes when I was 10. I remembered Tyson, and I wanted to see if EA was watching the same guy.

I had a lot of Erin Andrews in my life over the weekend. Not because I wanted to simply ogle the ESPN sports reporter some have dubbed the "Sideline Princess," but because she's a central part of one of the game's more intriguing features -- the Road to Glory. It's a takeoff of last year's Road to the Heisman and the college football franchise's long-standing equivalent to Madden's career / superstar mode.

The premise is that EA (the woman, not the company) has picked you to be part of her special series, which aims to follow the path of a student-athlete and his accomplishments from his last days of high school to the time he leaves college. It has a kind of Hoop Dreams sentiment to it, but with more flashing lights and graphics. You obviously have to suspend reality a bit here, since we're talking about four to five years of work, and this is the kind of stuff that usually shows up in dramatic documentary form after the fact. Also, a lot can happen in that time: What if you stink up the joint and never start a game in your life? Hell, what happens if you're completely average? In the real world, you probably wouldn't be worth a story.

At some point, I want to see how Road to Glory handles a clearly unglorious prospect. Perhaps one day we'll see a concept of building a player in college who is "followed" by Andrews or any other sports reporters from the first time he steps on the field (NCAA Football) to the day he retires from the NFL (Madden), culminating in some sort of retrospective report. It adds a bit of role-playing, something I think can be undervalued in the world of sports games. Imagine having your path from college walk-on to NFL superstar chronicled in a larger scale sports fantasy series. Just a thought.

Anyway, the following are some random musings from a weekend with EA:

I shouldn't have been surprised at the treatment of the film after the first Godfather game from EA, but in playing through Godfather 2, I found myself impressed yet again with how they have continued to pillage the venerable film for ideas. If you're a fan of the films, I'd advise you to stay away, but if you're remotely curious about the game and are willing to stomach what it does to the franchise, then read on. This isn't going to be pretty.

It's the end of Day Three at E3 and I am exhausted. Completely and utterly wiped out. So many games, so little padding left on my feet meant that the end was actually a welcome event. Kudos to everyone at all of the booths that continued to repeat the same spiel again and again all day long over and beyond the three days of the conference. They're the real heroes.

With that said, I did a final sweep of the halls to see what there was to see and get in a little more play time with the titles that I could get to. So here we go...

James Cameron and Pele showed up to this thing, which gives you an idea of the kind of mojo Ubisoft was rolling with on the eve of E3. I don't have an exact time down, but this had to be the longest press conference of the day. The theme of their show was confluence, which in short, is attempting to merge the minds of Hollywood and gaming to create a universe of uber-creativity. We saw some of that, at least conceptually, with Peter Jackson's King Kong, an original launch title for the 360 that was tied to the movie.

There was a lot of stuff to digest here, most of which dealt with the confluence thinking. I'll spill my 2 cents about some of the other games. I've got my man-crush on Sam Fisher and Splinter Cell: Conviction (seen above) and Reggie will expound on his man-crush on James Cameron's Avatar. Enjoy, post-jump.

The next press conference was EA's at the Orpheum Theater in downtown Los Angeles where we didn't have to deal with waiting for our car as much as we did with the crazy line queue massing outside. And then there was the WW2 bunker in which we had to park our car.

So here I go with a brain dump of all of the things that EA had shown off for the crowd after the jump. I'll be the one starting things off this time.

If you haven't already heard, EA's next update to their Sims series, Sims 3, has reportedly appeared on torrent sites two weeks before its official release date. Just as Ars Technica won't verify whether or not the torrent is actually the real deal for obvious reasons, neither can I, only to say that cruising through the other news sites and forums that are out there, there are quite a few comments that it is actually the real thing. This isn't the first time that this has happened to a huge release like this as Spore had also been leaked before its official release date, although not as far in advance as this one was.

This is undoubtedly not making EA happy, especially after they had conceded that their DRM methodology has only served to aggravate users moreso than in making them feel like valued customers and had extended an olive branch of sorts to make up for it. Sims 3 was going back to the old, reliable CD code check instead as a result.

EA hasn't officially replied to these reports as of yet, but it will be interesting to see just how they will approach this. Ars had recently pointed out how the indie developer of Zeno Clash had approached the pirates by commenting on their own torrent stream in explaining their position as indie developers, urging would-be pirates to buy it and asking them to be patient as a demo is on its way, and nothing more without preaching the ills of why they shouldn't be doing this. It seems to have worked in their case, even if only a few had decided to put in the dollars for the game.

The art director for the new Madden '10 breaks down the depth-of-field concepts that people are going to see in the EA football titles. It's a pretty good breakdown, but there's a lot of it, so check it out when you have time.

There's even a nice shot of a revamped Ben Roethlisberger of the world champion Pittsburgh Steelers to display improved character models.