It might not be a golden PSP, but blue isn’t half bad.

Over on PlayStation.Blog, Sony has announced the Madden NFL 09 PSP Entertainment Pack, which will include a limited edition metallic blue PSP. The bundle will of course contain a copy of Madden 09, as well as a “NFL: In Just One Play” UMD, a voucher to download Beats (which is awesome) from the PlayStation Store, and a 1GB memory stick, all for $200. Not too shabby, provided you like football.

I really dig this blue color, although I imagine playing with it would make it look like a little kid’s toy. (I don’t know if that’s good or bad compared with the too-beautiful-to-play, red God of War PSP.) What I’d like to know, though, is why all of these various bundles have to begin popping up immediately after I decide to upgrade to a PSP Lite. Having two PSPs would be bad enough, but three, I simply can’t stomach.

We’ve had some major news about EA Sports with the announcement of its casual sub-brand, Freestyle. They’re clearly making a push towards the mainstream audience of people who don’t traditionally play many games and are picking up a Wii. EA Sports prez Peter Moore was in attendance for seemingly his first public event since he came to the company at EA Canada recently, and GI.biz had a chance to speak with him.

If you ask anyone who regularly bashes EA Sports what the brand’s main problem is, they’ll likely say that they simply release the same games year after year. So if Moore really felt like the games under him weren’t innovating from year to year, would he be willing to sacrifice a year to give the developers extra time?

“Well, if we really felt we were in trouble, that we just couldn’t innovate at the level we needed to, yes,” he said. “I don’t think that with any of our franchises, even as difficult as it got with NBA Live a couple of years ago, there was a focus on ‘let’s take a year off’. That wasn’t the case. The team has done phenomenally well; you’ve probably seen it here. We’re making huge steps. We gained 15 Metacritic points this past year, from an admittedly low base.

“But I don’t think there’s any temptation to take a year off and try and catch up. I think our teams now are really starting to get in the flow of not just PS3 and Xbox 360, but as you’ve seen, really get a feel for what the Wii should be all about.”

The problem with that, of course, is where do you draw the line between innovating enough to justify releasing a $60 product a year after the last game? It’s a difficult question to answer, but it seems unlikely that Moore would resort to that.

I didn’t think that there was much of a difference between Madden 08 and 09 from the screenshots that PSU had compiled, and after seeing the trailer above, I’m still not convinced. While it’s not in HD running at 60 frames, you can still see the way the players animate and I don’t really feel like this is much of a leap forward in the technology department from Madden.

So what do you think? Perennial Madden hater or not, do you see much of an improvement over last year’s Madden?

A lot of cynics would argue that one of the few things EA Sports bothers updating Madden with every year is the graphics. Madden NFL 09 is just a few months away from its big 20th anniversary release, so PSU thought it appropriate to take some screenshots from last year’s game and the upcoming Madden and see if there’s really that much of a difference.

The arms look a bit more realistic, but I’m not sure that I see that significant of a difference between the two games. But what’s important about Madden is how it looks in motion, so we’ll have a trailer for you shortly so that you can be the judge.

When I hear John Madden talk, it is like someone is taking a baseball bat to my head. I do not know why, and I cannot really explain it to you properly, but for some reason whenever I hear him speak, I come close to actual rage. If perchance I see his face plastered somewhere, not only do I get stick at my stomach, once again I get enraged. Even when Frank Caliendo would imitate him on Mad TV, I would feel a weird desire to punch someone in the neck creep over me.

Psychologists would have a field-day over this I am sure, but despite him being my nemesis, I understand that gamers love to play the NFL games he has lent his moniker to. Therefore it is with great psychological pain that I present the new Madden NFL 09 cover art to you, featuring the hunky Brett Favre.

I think I need to go lay down for a while.

Peter Moore vowed that NFL Head Coach would see a major revamp that would address the many criticisms the first game faced. From the look of this new trailer and developer interview videos, it looks like EA Sports is doings its best to make good on those claims. In addition to the trailer above, you can head over to FileFront and see the Overview, Play Creator and Live Events videos.

I think the coolest aspect of the game is the ability to easily create plays in the play creator and then export those plays so that you can use them in Madden. Hopefully they don’t restrict what you can do in terms of trick plays, as that’s been a lacking component of the Madden playbook for years now, and I’d really like to be able to design some crazy option plays.

Also, if you’re interested in seeing the game up close, there are a few dozen screenshots that you can check out here.

I’m not completely sure yet, but I might be willing to give this year’s Head Coach a try if the price is right.

A curious omission was made last week by EA Sports when they announced the release date for this year’s Madden NFL 09 and revealed some of the details on NFL Head Coach 09 and the 20th anniversary collector’s edition of Madden – there was no word on a PC version. Peter Moore confirmed the news in a post on his EA blog.

We knew that our decision to not develop this year’s Madden for the PC would be an unpopular decision in some circles.  But I’ll reiterate what I said a couple of weeks ago in this space…the PC presents some very serious business challenges to us in the sports category, particularly because so many of you all are playing your favorite sports games on the PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii.  We are committed to shipping a limited number of our games on the PC this year, but we’ve also had to cut a few of our games from the platform.  We do have ideas for how to revitalize the PC for sports games and the types of games that are best suited to the platform, and we’ll continue to explore those.

Yes, he’s extremely vague in what he said so as to say nothing at all. He doesn’t say Madden is never coming back to PC, but he also doesn’t rule out the possibility. Anyone who’s ever tried to pick up your average sports game on PC and tried to play without a controller knows what a mess it is; for everything keyboard and mouse is good for, sports games simply don’t make sense with that interface.

There remains a glimmer of hope, though. I doubt EA would completely abandon the PC sports market, but I really don’t know how they can handle making your standard sports game work on a keyboard and mouse without radically designing the game from the ground up.

Hate Electronic Arts and, in particular, EA Sports? Peter Moore is hoping you might give them a second chance as he plans on changing things to cater to more sports fans than EA Sports already has more access to and also making games easier to play without dumbing them down. That’s not a pledge to higher quality, but it does sound like EA Sports is going to at least be changing things rather than releasing nothing more than a roster update year after years, as the haters would claim.

“We’ve got to bring more people in. We’ve got to grow the sports business…you know, the interface on our games is just too complicated for those folks and we have to change that, and we’re doing a lot of work to do that without dumbing down the games,” he told Next Gen.

“There are a lot of people who know it very well and have never played a videogame. Our biggest challenge right now is getting those people – sports fans – to start wanting to experience an interactive sports experience.”

I think it’s actually an interesting concept. I’d love to play Madden against friends of mine who enjoy football but are intimidated by the concept of playing a game with a 360 or PS3 controller.

“What we’ve got to do to grow the market is bring in the football fans, that own high def TVs, that love football, and yet don’t enjoy our games because they see them as too hard. Now the strategy we have here is to maintain our core consumer, but we’ve also got to go out and captivate the masses.

“You do that by having easier menus, more intuitive gameplay. People are intimidated by the controller. They walk past the TV and if you say ‘hey, do you want to play’, they say ‘No, I just don’t want to make a fool of myself’.

“There are too many buttons and triggers and d-pads. We’ve got to break a lot of that down.”

I’ve got no clue how they accomplish that without simply focusing on the Wii, but I’m very interested.

Anyone have any ideas?

The leaderboard for the most played games via XBL for the week ending February 9th have surfaced, and the game taking the top spot was CoD4: Modern Warfare. This should come as no surprise to anyone who has played the game, but Halo fans will be a little saddened to know that their hallowed game has lost its crown for the time being. Guitar Hero III beat out Rock Band and surprisingly Assassin’s Creed is still getting a little download lovin’ from 360 users.

Below is the full list courtesy of Major Nelson, where each list is based on global unique users connected to Xbox Live or in the case of Arcade, full versions purchased that week:

LIVE Activity for week of 2/4

Xbox 360 Top Live Titles

1. Call of Duty 4
2. Halo 3
3. Guitar Hero III
4. Gears of War
5. Rock Band
6. Madden NFL 08
7. Devil May Cry 4 Demo
8. Assassin’s Creed
9. Forza Motorsport 2
10. FIFA 08

Top Arcade Titles (Full Versions)

1. Poker Smash
2. Rez HD
3. Chessmaster Live
4. Metal Slug 3
5. UNO
6. Bomberman LIVE
7. Sonic The Hedgehog 2
8. TMNT 1989 Arcade
9. 9 Worms
10. Marble Blast Ultra

The above arcade list is based on full versions purchased.

Original Xbox Top Live Titles (based on UU’s)

1. Halo 2
2. Battlefield 2: MC
3. Counter-Strike
4. Star Wars: Battelfront 2
5. Madden NFL 08
6. Call of Duty 3
7. Fable
8. Street Fighter Anniv.
9. Ghost Recon 2
10. Rainbow Six 3

In a move that is both unsurprising and disappointing, Electronic Arts announced today that it has extended its exclusive rights deal with the NFL through 2012. The current deal, signed in 2004, was to run through the 2009 season. The amount paid for either the original deal or this extension have never been publically disclosed, but estimates put it at somewhere between $250 and $300 million.

GameDaily Biz was able to speak with former Microsoft exec and current EA Sports head Peter Moore about the new deal. Moore talks about how EA wants to do more with the NFL than just Madden, and even more than Head Coach and NFL Tour. Periods of time like after the Super Bowl, around the draft and training camp are all lulls for EA in the football department and they want that to change.

Of particular interest were Moore’s comments made when asked what he would say to those who believe having a single choice is the best option for gamers. (Emphasis is ours)

This deal allows us to invest. The key is to make sure we’re in a position to invest aggressively in making the most innovative game. Madden this year has been our best game in three years. Our MetaCritic ratings are the best that we’ve had since the 2006 version. As we move forward, it doesn’t stop anyone from doing another football game as 2K proved this past season (with All Pro Football). At the same time, obviously, the ability for us to use the teams, the players, the stadiums and all of the official marks is important.

Let us not forget that this deal was at the NFL’s directive. They wanted to have an exclusive arrangement. This was not EA coming in and demanding exclusive rights. The NFL put their license out for tender and we bid, as well as many other companies did at the time…I wasn’t here at the time but I remember it very well. I think if the product we put out this year was slipping in quality and innovation, we might have a tougher platform to defend, but that’s not the case. I think the message to gamers is, “Look, we continue to enjoy an incredibly rich relationship with the NFL. We’ve invested hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D over this period of time, in not just Madden but with other things we’re trying to do.”

While I understand what he’s saying, I still feel like competition is what caused Madden 08 to be so much better than the previous years. Without competition, both the 06 and 07 versions of Madden on the 360 and PS3 felt like they had little effort behind them. But, as soon as All Pro 2K8 showed its face, EA really stepped it up. Perhaps it’s simply me being jaded as a longtime, diehard fan of the NFL 2K games, but I still don’t like companies having exclusive rights to a sport – that goes for baseball, as well, in addition to any and every other sport.