The PlayStation Portable Store is a no-show this week, but there’s more than enough good stuff on the PS3 to make up for it. (Assuming you have a PS3, of course, otherwise you’ll just be left envious of those console-playing folks.)

PixelJunk Eden is the obvious highlight, making it the third PixelJunk game from Q-Games to be released on the PlayStation Network. Eden is a bit more abstract than the previous two games, which you could easily identify as a tower defense and racing game. $10 is the price for the full version of the game, or you can check out the demo that was released last week and read 1UP’s review.

LEGO Indiana Jones joins Madden 09 and FaceBreaker as the three new game demos this week. Madden’s demo is disappointingly short, letting you only play through the Madden IQ test and then a single trip down the field as you try to score a touchdown with the Giants in the closing moments of this year’s Super Bowl. It doesn’t really give you a great look at the game while the FaceBreaker demo does let you try out the create-a-player mode with your camera and play as many 90 second bouts as you wish.

Check out the full list of content after the break, including four new Rock Band tracks and some Soul Calibur music, which isn’t the slightest bit cheap.

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This morning EA has brought us two new demos on Xbox Live for both Facebreaker and Madden 09 to fulfill all your punching and tackling needs, respectively. In case you were unaware, Facebreaker is a quirky boxing title featuring humorous characters that was intended to capture the same feeling of the old Punch Out games (spoiler alert: they failed). Madden 09 is basically the next Madden game; and if you don’t care about the series by now, you probably never will. Both demos are available for download right now through Xbox Live.

This year’s Madden is just a couple weeks away, and you can bet that the folks at EA Sports are sweating bullets as they watch the Brett Favre saga unfold. Imagine the game shipping in two weeks and Favre already having been sent to New York, Tampa Bay or any of the other teams being discussed, and him being in a Packers uniform on Madden’s cover.

Regardless, that won’t have any impact on the game itself. We’ve got some new screenshots for you to check out today — and they sure do look pretty. It’s interesting to think how this is the culmination of 20 years of Madden titles. At the same time, it blows my mind how long this series has been around and how strong it sells to this day.

You can view all of the new screenshots over on FileFront.

Madden NFL 09 ships on every system ever on August 12 in North America.

Sure, you could just use custom soundtracks with the exact music you want while playing a game, but if you for some reason don’t want to or don’t have the ability to do so, Electronic Arts is looking out for you. EA chief music executive Steve Schnur told MTV Multiplayer this week that downloadable soundtracks for your EA games are coming in 2009.

The feature has been promised for years with the Madden series, but it’s been either the game’s included soundtrack or bust up until this point. I can think of a number of EA games in the past that I would have loved a different soundtrack for, as the selections that EA Trax make at times cause my head to hurt. Hopefully that will be a problem no longer.

When I interviewed Schnur yesterday about the soundtrack for Madden NFL 09 he finally named a timeframe. “You’re going to see it in 2009,” he said. He said that by Madden ‘10 gamers can expect some of the “broader-based” EA games (not just any music titles) to be able to “continually recommend” new music that can be downloaded to enhance a soundtrack.

But will that music be free, one has to wonder. I guess we’ll see next year.

EA Sports head Peter Moore is quite confident in his company’s products. In a blog post he made this week, Moore talked about how hard EA Sports is working to insure that 2008 is an even better year than 2007, which he reminded us of with the use of some strategically-placed bullet points. Allow me to demonstrate:

• Four EA Sports titles get Sports Game of the Year nods by various outlets, including FIFA, NCAA Football, Madden and NHL.  Of course NHL was consensus best in class, as I mentioned a few days ago.  Named sports game of the year by seven publications.  No one comes close to that.
• Three EA Sports titles in the overall industry top 20.  It was a great year for videogames, and Madden was No. 1 in sports and No. 4 overall.
• Seven platinum titles (more than one million units sold).

Moore was generally vague, but said he wasn’t surprised by the positive response to this year’s NASCAR, Madden, and NCAA Football titles. According to him, NBA Live sports “the most ground-breaking feature from our lineup this year” which will be unveiled at E3 next month. FIFA and NHL? “I’ll say with supreme confidence that the future couldn’t be brighter for two of our most critically acclaimed products from a year ago,” Moore added.

But what else do you expect from the face of a company. Of course he’s going to talk up his own products. But that’s where Moore makes things interesting.

“We’re hitting this season in terms of quality and innovation stronger than we ever have at EA Sports. If I’m wrong, you’ll see me sporting a new tattoo – maybe a competitor’s logo?”

Aside from it being impossible to argue that he’s wrong, I’d love to see Moore get the box of NFL 2K5 stamped on his arm. (Yes, I am seriously still that bitter about it.)

2004 was a great year for sports games. NFL 2K5 and NBA 2K5 were some of the best sports game ever created (that remains true to this day) and they were sold for only $20. That put some pretty significant pressure on EA Sports, which responded in the football market by dropping the price of that year’s Madden from $50 to $30. NFL 2K5 managed to sell over 2.9 million copies in the US, according to the NPD Group, and ever since — once EA locked up exclusivity with the NFL, NCAA and Arena Football League, some would argue that EA has had little incentive to innovate or drop the price on its football titles.

That trend isn’t about to end, either. Last year, 2K Sports put out All-Pro Football 2K8 which sold poorly without the help of a significant football license. (The game wasn’t great either — it was basically NFL 2K5 sans the NFL license.)

Two gamers — one from Washington, DC and one from California — have had enough of this and filed a class-action lawsuit against EA over “blatantly anticompetitive conduct.”

“This vigorous competition benefited consumers,” reads the lawsuit. “Electronic Arts could have continued to compete by offering a lower price and/or a higher quality product. Instead, Electronic Arts quickly entered into a series of exclusive agreements with the only viable sports football associations in the United States: the National Football League, the Arena Football League, and NCAA Football.”

Even if EA didn’t have the licenses, though, their potential takeover of Take-Two would essentially eliminate any and all competition in the football market. In doing so, the lawsuit says that even if EA were to lose its exclusivity deals, it “would remove one of the few companies with the ability and expertise to compete in the market for interactive football software.”

The lawsuit is seeking restitution and damages for individuals who have purchased EA football games since August 2005 (ring me up for three of those), as well as disgorgement (that’s a fancy word for “give up”) of all profits made as a result of their anticompetitive actions, and that any infringing agreements be declared null and void.

The likelihood of those events ever occurring is incredibly low, but I do enjoy thinking of a world where the NFL 2K games are still alive.

via Evil Avatar

The newest trailer for Madden NFL 09 shows off “EA Sports Backtrack,” where you get to watch Cris Collinsworth analyze the previous play from every angle you can imagine. First you’ll get an overview of how the previous down played out from the offensive and defensive sides. Then you get to see the offensive play call, and then the defensive play call, and a success rate for that play with the personnel on the field. Definitely very cool, and I enjoyed watching it.

Then the second example comes up, and you can see how annoying this feature might get. A significant play happens, the announcer says it’s time for an EA Sports Backtrack, and off you go! I’m sure you can skip it, but just watching two examples of Backtrack show you how terribly repetitive it’s likely to be. It’s the exact same formula each time; stare at the offensive play call, the defensive call, etc., all while Collinsworth is droning on about the same thing.

Luckily, the game itself looks pretty good, and that’s what really counts. I’ve never come across a sports game where the commentary didn’t become repetitive and annoying at some point, but who knows — maybe Backtrack won’t suffer from it as much as I extrapolated from this trailer. You’ve gotta wonder, though, how much this is going to break up the flow of the game. Yes, football has as many as 40 seconds in between plays, but that includes time for calling a play, trying to draw the defense offsides and so on, meaning that this would likely freeze in-game time while it plays. I’m not entirely sure I want even more breaks from the action when I’m trying to play a videogame.

Anytime you’ve got John Madden standing there talking, you’re bound to have something unintentionally hilarious. Such is the case with the new Madden NFL 09 ‘Virtual Training’ video, which gives you a look at the tests you take in order to determine your Madden IQ. As you’d expect from a guy who talks about the most blatantly obvious things, the tests are the fundamentals of football, but good ole John is right there to explain it to you anyway.

I don’t really understand why EA Sports decided they needed to make this look like a virtual reality training video from an old movie. The NFL license is their big edge, so why not take advantage of it and let the person pick their favorite team and use those players for the test? It’s a minor gripe, but it seems silly to do it like this.

“What you wanna do here is is is try and get the ball in the endzone so you can get more points than the other guys.” -John Madden quote, or at least something that’s very very close to what he’s likely said in the past

All the talk out of EA Sports these days is about Freestyle and All-Play and their new casual movement that Peter Moore is spearheading. But the company behind Madden and NBA Live doesn’t want hardcore sports game fans to worry — EA has no intention of leaving them behind.

“Hardcore fans are our base and our biggest fans,” said Reg Hamlett, EA Sports’ senior director of brand marketing. “Their opinions and seal of approval are of extreme importance to us. That said, the All-Play brand is aimed at those consumers who seek to leverage the unique attributes of the Wii and play a sports game that utilizes these unique features.”

A company with the size of EA Sports — especially if they were to absorb 2K Sports if Take-Two is ultimately acquired by Electronic Arts — would certainly have enough resources to cover all of the bases, and then some.

via Wii Fanboy

Okay, so the screenshots (and that trailer) didn’t do much to convince me that this year’s Madden was going to really take things up a notch visually. The new “Comparison” trailer you see above doesn’t convince me either, but they’re not making it easy to judge by showing you one and then the other, rather than the two side-by-side.

It’s still far too early to really be making any judgment calls on the game, but this year’s game better have some significant improvements to the game, or this might be the first year I don’t buy a football game in over eight years.