Madden 09 tackling blog and video

A new Madden 09 producer blog and corresponding video have been posted, this one going over the new tackling engine and animations. You can read the full blog posting here.

With this brand new system (created in a collaborative effort between NCAA Football and Madden NFL), you will see unprecedented fluidity in multi-character interaction, which generates much better results across the board: improved blocking, improved chucks, better handoffs, interactive celebrations with teammates, and even friendly player avoidance and help-ups in post-play.  In NCAA you will see pursuit physics specific to wide open gameplay and interactive celebrating with mascots.  In Madden you will be manually breaking tackles, adding far better response and control as well as more depth to tackling, which is quite fun. None of this could be possible without this new engine.

Click here to watch the video on the official Madden website.

Prizefighter gets hands-on and new videos

IGN has released six new video clips to go along with their updated hands-on of Don King Presents: Prizefighter. The full write-up can be found here.

The six videos cover different aspects of the game such as gameplay, arenas, training, and story mode. After its poor initial showing last week do these videos change your current opinion of the game? Continue on to view all six of them and leave your thoughts in the comments.

Prizefighter takes a slightly different approach to its mechanics by abandoning the tried and true right stick approach to punching, replacing it with a more traditional face button style. X defaults as your jab, Y is your straight punch, A is your left hook, B is your right hook with a combination of two buttons required to pull off an uppercut. In our few hours with Prizefighter the punching system was responsive and relatively fast-moving. Animations follow along accordingly and look as you’d expect, though things weren’t quite as responsive in our early build as we’d like to see.

Read more

EA-Take Two news coming Monday

Coming out of the EA financial call yesterday Lazard Capital’s Colin Sebastian has stated that an update to the buyout proposal of Take Two will be coming on Monday. The deadline that EA had set previously ends this Friday.

The current offer stands at $25.74 a share which amounts to just about 2 billion dollars. That is the same amount as was originally offered (though the price per share was lowered when Take Two increased the number of shares available). The TTWO stock sits just over $1 above that right now however that is being artificially held up due to the expectation of the EA buyout.

So what could this news be? Among the possibilities are Take Two accepting the current deal or a revised deal, EA raising their public offer, or EA withdrawing their offer (though it could simply be yet another extension to the deadline). Regardless it’ll be good to get some movement on this instead of the uncertainty continuing to just loom over everything.