50 years after the original 8 teams in the American Football League (AFL) were conceived, EA Sports is going to do the people who remember and love the history of them a favor, and releasing a AFL Legacy Pack, EA said in a press release today.

The Pack, to be on XBL Marketplace (for 500 points) and PSN Store (for $5.99) starting Sept. 24th, will feature vintage logos, uniform styles of referees and teams, and a new camera effect of “classic film grain broadcast camera.” This will also feature new trophies and Achievements for those that love to build up their Levels or Gamerscore.

In case you do not know of their history, the AFL was the “alternative” to the NFL from 1960 until 1969. In 69, they merged with the NFL, bringing their teams with them:

- Buffalo Bills
- Denver Broncos
- Kansas City Chiefs (as the Dallas Texans)
- New England Patriots (as the Boston Patriots)
- New York Jets (as the Titans of New York)
- Oakland Raiders
- San Diego Chargers
- Tennessee Titans (as the Houston Oilers)

As far as we know, this is the first major form of DLC for any Madden game, and this is good for EA to finally bring something to the table in this way in their football games. Hopefully they don’t stop offering good DLC like this. Keep your eyes opened on your system profiles for the new Achievements and Trophies soon.

[SOURCE] [MORE INFORMATION ON THE AFL]

A recent update by Super_Secret about the Playstation 3 feature issue has mentioned the following:

“Some of you people could really do with learning to read. I specifically said it was NOT Activision. I thought I gave enough hints as to who it was without directly stating it, but I guess not, so lets try this again, except we’ll make it interesting. Here lies the answers, lets see who is clever enough to figure it out?

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SFBhdE9vZlAu

As for those curious as to why I would call the whistle on this, tell me good sir, what would you do? You have a vested interest in the company you work for and you see this other company constantly getting in the way. Oh sure, on the outside everyone’s all buddy-buddy, but that’s just good business. And that’s what it boils down to – business. Why fix something that doesn’t need to be fixed when you can just **** over everyone else and get away with it? You know Sony isn’t going to make a huge fuss, they can’t afford to alienate publishers and developers (especially HUGE ones), not when Microsoft and Nintendo are happy to welcome them with open arms. Still, all our hard work and it just gets pissed down the drain because one company can’t be bothered doing some support? I ask you again – what would you do?

Oh and I appreciate all of you guys trying to spread this around, I hope that they’ll back track and enable that feature for as many titles as they can eventually, but don’t be surprised if Sony themselves denies this, after all their priority is to maintain good ties with publishers and developers.

Now, you probably wondering what all that coded BS is within that thing. Sounds like gobbily gook, right?

Enter PS3Center.net, who has apparently figured out that the gibberish is actually Base 32 code, and when translated, says something VERY interesting (and where EA comes into this story):

“It’s not Activision. It’s not Ubisoft. It’s not Capcom. It’s not Insomniac. It’s not Konami. It’s not Take 2. It’s not Midway. It’s not Squaresoft. are wE All getting the picture yet? One point I want to reiterate – there’s a difference between the games that didn’t work with in-game XMB and the games that DID work with in-game XMB but DIDN’T work well with custom soundtracks, so stop picking out the ones that simply didn’t do in-game XMB. Also, it wasn’t just ONE game that caused this, either. Although one title does come to mind and it wasn’t even what you or I would call a “Big” game. I’ll give you a hint: HPatOofP.”

What’s “HPatOofP”. Apparently PS3Center had that figured out, too: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. The game is published by EA.

This is why EA is in the center of the controversy, and why you see both our denouncement of what’s going on over on the EA Forums, and why suspicions are rampant. Coupled with the fact that Super_Secret is not just some random N4G poster looking for a laugh. He’s gotten everything about the PS3 Slim and FW 3.0 correct, so he seems to know what is going on over there at Sony.

I have tried e-mailing EA to get an answer (and this time, I think we, or SOMEONE else who’s been all over this story, will, since this one seems to be catching some fire right now). Let’s just hope this is an exaggeration or something that was a misunderstanding or whatever, because if it’s a correct assessment, then all hell will, and SHOULD, break loose (though keep in mind our denouncement about certain tactics).

[SOURCE]

As a long standing proponent of making your voice be heard (just look at this site), I do like that people are up in arms about the issues with the recent story we posted concerning why the Playstation 3 does not have cross-game chat right now. Some people have deciphered the code that Super_Secret, the inside man that broke this and other rumors, posted later in in the same thread that sparked our story (we will publish our own update shortly).

Some have even gone onto the EA Forums (EA are the ones accused of being the publishers that are blocking these features) and posted some rather passionate posts.

While we believe that the gamers voices should be heard, and we do encourage those that are truly seeking answers to continue doing so, I have also seen some of the sickest sort of spam (in the way of scat pictures and those that could make someone want to vomit, and utter nonsense) being posted along with personal attacks. I know I sometimes let my mouth get ahead of me, as well, but this sort of thing is not necessary and will NOT be supported by this site, and I hope this site won’t be the only one that denounces this kind of posting.

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“Super_Secret”, the man that broke the story about 3.0, the Slim, and more, has posted another thread on N4G about why cross game chat is not here yet for the PS3, and all blame is on a certain unnamed publisher being the douchebag about it.

Here is his post ad verbatim:

“I promised you all an update on Cross-Game chat, so here it is.

And you’re not going to like it.

As I told you before, Cross-game voice chat has been in the works for a while now. I mentioned last time that it was on target for 3.0 providing that we didn’t hit any snags. Well guess what, we hit a snag! An all too familiar snag.

Time for a history lesson.

How many of you remember what it was like before FW 2.4? That’s right – no in-game XMB. No custom soundtracks. In-game XMB was the most heavily requested feature at the time and we worked tirelessly in order to get it in (By “we”, I mean Sony Japan – as I said before, FW isn’t my department). It very nearly didn’t happen, you have no idea how difficult it is to backport a feature like that onto a system (the game) that doesn’t even know its there, but somehow we managed it. Well, for most titles. There are still the odd few titles out there that don’t support in-game XMB (”black” titles).
Custom soundtracks was another one we had working in nearly every title. Obviously it was never going to work in black titles, but about 95% of the titles that worked well with the in-game XMB, had custom sountracks working as well.

So what happened? Why is it that titles HAVE to be developed specifically with custom soundtrack support when it was working more or less just fine?

Is it because Microsoft owns the patent on custom soundtracks in games?

This is something that makes me laugh every time I see one of the less educated ones spouting it off. That’s an absolute fabrication. Patents don’t matter, Sony as a while infringes upon thousands of patents through the whole company, both hardware and software. If you infringe a patent, you pay royalties to the owner or find a different way of doing the same thing that doesn’t infringe. That’s it. Microsoft infringes upon all kinds of patents we own but that’s up to legal to sort out.

No, the reason we had to drop Custom soundtrack support like that has nothing to do with Microsoft. It does, however, involve a different company. A rather large company.
You see, one of their games happened to fall into the 5% that didn’t support in-game custom soundtracks. And they did not like this.
When they found out that a new firmware update was going to suddenly make one of their games look inferior to just about every other game released, they protested. A lot.
They threatened everything, from legal action to dropping support for the PS3 all together.

What could we do? There was almost no way of getting it to work correctly due to the way their game was made (i.e. Poorly) and we certainly couldn’t leave a broken implementation in there. That’s when the hard decision was made to remove all support for older titles and instead adopt the “opt-in” approach that, to this day, most developers simply ignore. I have to hand this to Microsoft – they did their system right from the beginning and by completely separating it from the developers, they have universal support. Its very unlikely that you’ll ever see mandatory support for custom soundtracks in games on our system, I’m afraid.
So yeah, lets nail this on the head: The next time someone starts blaming Microsoft for something the PS3 doesn’t have, tell them they’re an idiot, they don’t know what they’re talking about. Are we clear on this? This is a pet peeve of mine because while everyone’s happy to go around blaming Microsoft, the real culprits are getting off scott-free. Of course, I can’t actually name them directly or, should I get caught, I might even get done for slander (you can never be too careful), but you can figure it out – it’s not Activision and they have a poor history with the PS3.

So what has this got to do with Cross-game voice chat?

Guess.

I warned you that we might hit a snag and we did. We’ve found a couple of titles that just don’t like it. Similar to the custom soundtrack fiasco, it can cause lag, crashes, desyncronisation (very very bad when this happens), you name it. It can’t be used in these games and it just so happens that some of these games are owned by the same company I’ve been talking about above.
So we’re in a predicament: Cross-game chat is useless if only certain games support it. It’s not too bad if its just the odd one that doesn’t like it, but at this rate we’d have to drop support for the ENTIRE back catalogue, which would (As I said) make the whole thing useless.
Furthermore, we can’t rely on developers to implement direct support for it. It didn’t work with Custom Soundtracks, so why would it work here?
So right now, we’re trying every little trick in the book to find a solution that works for everyone, but don’t hold your breath on this one, so far it looks like the best you’re going to get is a gimped implementation of it that only works with a handful of new games.

Now as I said, FW isn’t actually my department and even I’m not supposed to know some of this stuff, but this is actually where we are right now. It sucks majorly, but there you have it. Depending on the end result, it could come in FW 3.1 or it could come in FW 4.0, hell it might not even come at all but rest assured they are working very hard on it. And if it doesn’t come, you know who to blame.”

The names of EA, Capcom, and Ubisoft has been thrown around as to who it was.

But my personal bet is on Valve. Gabe has not been very shy about how much he hates the PS3 and has been a lazy fuck about trying to learn anything about it. Not to mention that the Orange Box was a shit port that was outsourced by EA with little to no support from either company for it, and would be one of those “black titles” SS is talking about since it was released in 07.

What do you think? Could it be Gabe trying to sabotage (intentionally or unintentionally) the PS3 in this way, or is there someone else you’re thinking about?

Be advised, however, that this is a “rumor” until further notice.

As you are aware by now, Sony announced the Playstation 3 Slim at Gamescon 2009 along with the price cut that has been well needed for a long time. And, as many predicted, a lot of people have been pouncing on it, if you take Amazon’s top sellers list to heart.

However, a big question mark was whether or not we would see the return of backwards compatibility to the PS3. Apparently not, as it wasn’t announced at Gamescon at all (not even brought up), but Sony venomously denied it and said that it wasn’t coming back. However, with the recent spread of something involving the first two God Of War games, there is some speculation as to whether or not Sony is bluffing and trying to stop the rumor from spreading like a wildfire like the Slim did. One site said yes, another said no.

However, we got a tip from the same anonymous source (which the reason it is such will be obvious in a moment) that gave PSInsider their tips. The source gave it to him, and then PSI’s owner decided to tell us this to give another site the limelight on N4G or wherever else it ended up. The tip is this: expect BC soon, as the real reason it’s not here yet is because it’s still being play tested.

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As you may be aware, we just started a little thing called “Media Outlets” on the top of the page. This is going to be step one in the metamorphoses of this site.

We are going to change our focus of the site from reporting gaming news into reporting about those that DO the reporting. In other words, the news ABOUT the news. Since the Media Watch has been a hit one way or another with a lot of visitors, I considered expanding it to the basis of the site, and instead do here what TV Newser does with cable news outlets like MSNBC: talk about the personalities that write for them, and analyze the reporting of various stories. Opinions will still be here, including my DP Thoughts, Special Comments, and Worst Persons, but this, to me, would be a much better way to serve the gaming community at a time where such a site is needed.

Stay tuned for more developments on this change of focus.

Gauntlet has been thrown down. Or at least, it sounds like it.

As you are probably well aware, Valve angered about 30,000 plus (and at this rate, it’ll grow to a hundred times that before the game launches) when they announced Left 4 Dead 2 at E3. They all formed a Steam Community Group saying that they were boycotting the game: http://steamcommunity.com/groups/L4D2boycott.

Now, apparently, someone has decided to counter. According to Blend Games (which the author of its story seems ready to agree with the latter, even refusing to link you to the boycott page, calling THEM “whiners” and that they “don’t deserve anymore hits”, along with them hoping that other outlets pick this story up. Too bad they didn’t say how other outlets would react), about 500 members have joined a “L4D2 Enthusiast Group”. This is basically a “PRO-cott” group to counter the boycott one. Democracy is here, right: http://steamcommunity.com/groups/L4D2Enthusiasts

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We now definitely know that there is a MGS game in the works. First the Famitsu leaks confirm it, and now the picture of Big Boss on the countdown we all know and love. However, through all the hoopla over the “R” and the pic, no one really caught that there was one more clue added, or one that no one had caught before. At some points on the completely random rotation of the clue, a “P” appears (you can see it faintly in the pic if you look hard enough).

What does THIS mean? Well, since they are random, and we also have officially a Snake (since Big Boss was also named “Naked Snake” in MGS3, thereby killing anything about a snake symbol from the “3″), we now have an E, S, and 3. The E and 3 could mean the upcoming E3, but it could also go with the P that we saw. Which could mean one thing:

This might not be coming to the 360, since the P could mean that we should take the other clues as MGS, E3,…and PS3.

Of course, in 4 days, we could be in for more as the rain clears…or an official confrimation from the man himself.

And why NO one caught THIS yet is a very strange enigma indeed.

Oh, boy, here we go again.

Apparently, Microsoft knows they don’t have too much in the way of games in 2009. Why? Because they’ve gone and shown us why Sony is probably not wasting their money on marketing: MS does a lot of Sony advertising themselves.

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This is why I emulate this guy on this site and in other places. He knows what he’s talking about.

On Countdown with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC last night, “KO” laid the smack down on FOX News’ Glenny (or, as he called him, Harold Hill)  concerning Beck’s assertion about a Pittsburgh, PA shooting. Keith does a better job than I can with explaining it, since I don’t know all the details about the crime.

But Beck is “Worst”, and just listen to what Keith brings up in order to slam Beck.

NOTE: The video may play an ad first before going to the actual video, and this is the entire Worst Person’s segment from last night.

Bliss, isn’t it.

UPDATE: For those interested, here’s the story (from Pittsburgh’s CBS affiliate KDKA 2’s website) that led to the Beck quote.