madden-nfl posts

Another week is about to end. What will the next week bring us? Lots of stuff about owls, we suspect ... or maybe not:

• The man who helped to create the first versions of Madden NFL for the Apple II, Commodore 64 and MS DOS now claims Electronic Arts owes him a lot of money.
• The newest edition of the official Bethesda Softworks podcast celebrates the 5th anniversary of The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion.
• Will the next Resident Evil movie actually be a prequel to the last four flicks?
• Check out a preview of the Rage comic book series.

EA Sports still hasn't been forgiven by many PC sports gamers for pretty much getting rid of their entire PC sports game lineup a couple of years ago. The publisher has been making a tiny effort to get back into PC gaming since then in the US with the browser-based Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online (now in beta) and the upcoming release of EA Sports FIFA Online.

Now Bloomberg reports that a version of Madden NFL Football might be heading to the PC . . .via Facebook. EA Sports Peter Moore is quoted as saying, "We have to make 'Madden' more accessible You'll see us on Facebook going forward." There's no word yet on when this might happen but we bet that the game will be designed around microtransactions like most successful Facebook games. Of course, we know PC sports gamers just want a port of the console Madden game but don't look for that to happen anytime soon, if ever.

Last year, Electronic Arts decided to cut most of its PC versions of their many EA Sports games, including the latest version of the popular Madden NFL franchise. Only the NHL and FIFA games had PC ports last year. Well PC football fans who were hoping EA might reverse itself with this year's Madden just got hit with some bad news. The just announced Madden NFL 10 (for 2010) did not have the PC among its many different platforms it will appear on this year. Big Download emailed EA Sports for comment and a PR rep confirmed the news saying, "We have no plans to release Madden NFL 10 on the PC this year. We continue to explore ideas to revitalize the PC for sports games and the types of games that are best suited to the platform, and this remains our goal for the Madden NFL franchise. "

Meanwhile there are rumors that EA Sports could be abandoning the PC port for their NHL game this year. According to a post on the message boards at the the Hockey Downloads web site the writer claims he has gotten world from EA's NHL producer that a PC port won't be made. We consider this to be a rumor since EA has not officially confirmed this news. EA Sports' PR rep told us tonight, "We have no other announcements regarding our other franchises at this time."

Developing PC games just by themselves can be challenging. You have to deal with not one but thousands of different hardware configurations along with updating graphics drivers, the unique keyboard-mouse interface and more. But what about when you develop a PC game that was originally made for a console like the PS3, the Xbox 360 or others?

Some PC ports of console games have been embraced by PC games like Gearbox's superior port of Bungie's first Halo game and more recently BioWare's PC version of Mass Effect. Yet so many other consoles games either don't translate well to the PC formula or fail to reach a wide audience even if they add content that is not in the original version. Today we take a look at the many console games that either failed as a PC game translation or failed to reach a high PC gamer audience.

Click on the image above to continue reading "The College Try: Failed PC Ports Of Console Games"