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Thanks to a link provided by VG247, we now have a list of developers confirmed for E3 2008 along with what titles they will be showing off at the event. While the list is still updated regularly, as of this post, this is what you can expect should you be attending.

Akella
Postal III (PC, X360)

Bethesda Softworks
Fallout 3 (PC, PS3, X360)

Capcom
Bionic Commando (PC, PS3, X360)
Bionic Commando Rearmed (PC, PS3, X360)
Capcom Project #1 [untitled] (other)
Capcom Project #2 [untitled] (other)
Dark Void (PC, PS3, X360)
MotoGP 08 (other)
Neopets Puzzle Adventure (PC, Wii)
Plunder (PC, PS3, X360)
Resident Evil 5 (PS3, X360)
Spyborgs (Wii)
Street Fighter IV (PC, PS3, X360)
Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix (PS3, X360)

For the full list, hit the jump.

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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

Since I sent off my PSP to a cousin in Iraq via his care package, I have been waiting on purchasing another one because I wanted to see what the cool looking God of War limited edition looked like. Over the past couple of months my initial excitement over the nifty handheld has waned a bit and I have decided just to go back to black (no Amy Winehouse reference intended), but if you were wanting to get your hands on one, you can now because they are hitting stores today.

The limited edition PSP also comes with the Chain of Olympus game, “Superbad” on UMD and a voucher to download Syphon Filter: Combat Ops from the PlayStation Store (free). The bundle will be priced at $199.99.

Over across the Pacific though, Japan is also getting two new colors for the PSP to choose from. The metallic blue (which we will be getting via the Madden 09 pack) and Cinnabar Red.

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.

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.

Some of you who have been around the internet for a long time will likely recognize the name Shawn Fanning as the man who founded Napster, thereby bolstering many a music libraries. More recently he’s been at work on a site called Rupture, which describes itself as “[a]n online destination connecting gamers around the world, allowing them to share gaming experiences, events, challenges and achievements.”

Social networking continues to be all the craze, and Electronic Arts will attempt to take advantage of that with its recent purchase of Rupture for a cool $30 million, according to TechCrunch. Given that it was in a closed beta, EA’s investing in the technology more than it is the userbase.

Currently the site suports five games: Halo 3, Team Fortress 2, Guitar Hero III, World of Warcraft, and Madden 08. EA Mythic’s Warhammer Online is set for a release in the latter half of 2008, so expect to see the site emerge as a destination for Warhammer Online users, among other games.

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.

An exciting announcement has been made by YouTube, stating that Sony has decided to integrate the YouTube API with the PlayStation 3, which means that both future games and past games have the ability to allow gamers to upload in-game video directly to YouTube. This functionality has been added to the Japanese game Mainichi Issho, and could quite possibly be added to anything from MotorStorm to LittleBigPlanet. (Nothing’s been announced on either of those fronts, or any other, but hypothetically…)

Imagine building a level in LBP, and then promoting it online via YouTube. Or being able to share an incredible save you made in a co-op session of Resistance 2. Or an incredible game-winning touchdown in a game of Madden. And all of this would be available to watch on YouTube, and not simply tied to the game like in, say, Halo 3. (Sorry, Bungie. You’ve got a wonderful system, but this has the potential to be something much cooler.)

Hopefully developers decide to embrace this, and it ends up being something we see introduced on the Xbox 360, as well. One question I have, though, is if this would be able to capture voice chat, or purely the game itself.

via Joystiq

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.

Okay, so if GameStop is any indication of how the rest of the retailers in the U.S. sold Grand Theft Auto IV, Microsoft saw its system cash in on 64% of sales for Rockstar’s game, while Sony only got 36% of the love in the game’s first week. But, as the numbers show, the PlayStation 3 actually had the better performance when you compare the number of systems that have been sold. (Thanks to Level Up for doing all the math so I didn’t have to.)

After reaching out to both Microsoft and Sony, Level Up got two very different takes, as you’d expect.

Microft’s Aaron Greenberg (the same one that ripped the PS3 recently) had this to say:

I think many people have been surprised to see how well GTA IV is selling on Xbox 360 given the history of the franchise. These sales results add GTA IV to a long list of franchises that have switched over from Playstation to find a new home on Xbox 360 similar to what happened last year with titles like Madden and Guitar Hero. As you have covered on Level Up in the past, the majority of third party franchises are being developed first on our platform so they end up playing best on Xbox 360 and when you combine that with Xbox Live, we expect this trend to continue as more multiplatform releases hit the market. With that said, it is fantastic to hear that we beat PS3 two to one on Grand Theft Auto sales from a major retailer like GameStop.

Sony marketing VP Peter Dille offered this take:

GameStop probably does a little bit better with the early adopter crowd. There’s a larger installed base right now on Xbox 360 than on PS3. So it’s not surprising that there’s going to be more selling on Xbox 360 than PS3. Having said that, we’re really excited about the ratio. If I had an installed base advantage of 3-1, I wouldn’t be crowing too much about a 60-40 sales advantage. We think it’s not as high as what GameStop’s telling you, if you look at [the full picture on] the national level. They’re outselling us, but not by that same margin, and it’s because of their installed base lead. With an installed base lead that’s close to 3-1, if you’re bragging about a 60-40 software split, it’s clear evidence that the Playstation 3 consumer is overindexing on GTA IV, and the Playstation brand loyalty that we’ve been talking about is bearing itself out in the marketplace as we speak.

Dille’s right, as the numbers proved, but does anyone else find it funny that for once Sony is actually using its smaller install base as an argument in their favor?

via Level Up

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.

You may have heard of the Novint Falcon controller already. It’s the bizarre-looking gaming controller that users reported could mimic the actual feel of unique textures and objects. The strange device made quite an impression on almost anyone that tried it, but it still seemed like a gimmicky piece of technology that wouldn’t appeal to the gaming community at large. Well, Novint still isn’t giving up on the Falcon, as they’ve reported that they will be licensing several EA titles to make them work with the touch support controller. According to the agreement, Novint will license the games and then develop patches so they work with the controller. Those games will include Madden NFL 08, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08, Need For Speed ProStreet, Battlefield 2, Battlefield 2142, and possibly the next Need For Speed game. To recoup the cost of developing the patches, Novint will also be charging $9.99 for each of them.

To me, this doesn’t change much. The Novint Falcon still seems like a device that is really, really cool, but not something I’d actually buy; $10 fee for patches or not. It’s something I’d want to play around with for a short while, but I couldn’t actually see myself throwing down a lot of money for it. If arcade’s were still thriving, I’d say Novint should probably focus more on getting an arcade game out there with the Falcon built in; but since they’re not, I have no idea what they should do with their incredibly awesome-but-useless technology.

Via Level Up

In the hunt to discover why it’s so difficult to track down a new copy of Tetris DS, Patrick Klepek spoke with Capcom about the life cycle of games. Capcom VP Christian Svensson claimed, “The sales life cycle of a product is shrinking,” but in speaking with Electronic Arts’ head of North American publishing, Jeff Karp, we’ve learned that this is not necessarily the viewpoint of all companies. In fact, he believes that the life cycle of games is actually increasing.

Karp said that most high-profile games will be viable at retail for 18-24 months, and admitted that some EA games like The Sims and Spore are different. In fact, EA is planning on creating new content for Spore for at least ten years.

Downloadable content is key in extending the lifespan of a game, although properly handling it (i.e. fair prices and good content) is an important factor. While EA can rely on titles like Madden every year not everyone has that in their stables. “We have products that have been around for a while and people are used to [them],” said Karp. “Very few other publishers really have these types of franchises that have the longevity.”

He admits that he could very well be wrong, and is also fairly modest about what EA’s stance is when one of their games underperforms. For the full story, head over to MTV Multiplayer.

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.