The Tiger Woods franchise has always been a good one, and it’s one of few sports franchises for which the Wii outperforms its competition. PGA Tour 11 takes the good from previous versions of the game and improves upon pretty much the entire experience.

One of the best parts of the new game is the True Aim system, which IGN details below:

The first and biggest addition is known as True-Aim. I, for one, have wanted to get closer to the real thing without having to adventure into the super-difficult Tour Pro setting. True-Aim, coupled with the focus mechanic that I’ll talk about in the next paragraph, helps to up the difficulty without making it frustrating. True-Aim removes the accuracy circle when zooming into your shot and forces you to aim your ball entirely from an over-the-shoulder camera. You have the same viewpoint as you would in real golf. That means there’s no more camera tracking as your ball flies through the air. Instead, you’re left to judge from the crowd and commentators’ reactions how well you fared. It’s much more realistic.

If there was one thing Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11 did right, it’s making the realistic aspects of the game more accessible, without requiring you to enter the crushingly difficult modes of the game.

For a while there it looked like the Madden franchise might be dying. Each new version of the game felt stagnant with few new features to make anyone but the dearly devoted come back for more. In the past two years, though, EA has managed to revive the series, giving new life through better features and more in depth gameplay. Madden NFL 11 is set to follow that trend and will likely become the deepest sports experience in a game to date.

Though the game won’t launch until August, you can keep up on the latest developments at IGN. Here’s what they’re saying about the game.

Madden NFL 11 redefines the way you experience the game of football. It’s simpler: From 350 plays down to 1, the all-new GameFlow system puts you in the helmet of an NFL quarterback to execute an authentic, situational game plan, one play at a time. It’s quicker: 60 minute game times reduced to as little as 30 minutes; spend more time on the field and less in the playbook. full games, half the time. It’s deeper: Madden NFL 11 is feature-rich including all-new 3-on-3 Online Team Play, improved animations, more intuitive controls, and Madden NFL Ultimate Team … all to the play-by-play of the most exciting voice in sports, Gus Johnson.

Yeah, I’d say it’s gonna be pretty damn good.

We’ve seen exclusive titles for classic bands like The Beatles, Aerosmith, and Metallica, and they all made sense. These are bands with huge and fanatic followings, bands that have all been a major part of rock and roll history.

And then there’s Green Day. Don’t get me wrong, I love Green Day. I grew up on Green Day. The first album I truly loved (and still listen to today) was 1,039 Smoothed Out Slappy Hours. But is Green Day the kind of band that warrants an exclusive Rock Band title?

Jason at Bullz-Eye Main had a chance to play the game over the weekend and found that while the band’s history lends a solid background for the game, ultimately it will probably only be the hardcore fans that are begging for more from the rock trio’s list of tracks. Check out the full Green Day: Rock Band review at Bullz-Eye.com.

The world’s had a little time to digest Sony’s Playstation Move and the speculation is in full swing. Some are saying that this will do again for gaming what the Wii did. Others think it’s just another Wii and because of that no one will buy it. I fall heavily in that second camp. Really, from everything I’ve seen this is Wii HD. The only reason it might succeed is that developers will actually make some content that can be marketed at hardcore players.

There’s a problem with that success model, though; it doesn’t grow. There’s no plan for bringing more people to gaming than ever before. That’s been done. Nintendo did it. If you think the grandmas and the grandpas and the sorority girls and the little kids Nintendo shows in its commercials want a Move and a Wii I think you’re crazy.

A lot of the demos have harped on the accuracy of the Move, but we haven’t really seen that pinpoint accuracy is a big deal to motion gaming’s primary market. It’s more about the fun of the game and whether it basically feels like you’re swinging a golf club or not. The whole appeal of the Wii is that the learning curve is minimal because it’s simple. It gives everyone a chance to play, even if they aren’t gamers. The Move’s level of accuracy might appeal to the hardcore fans, but serious titles scare away the Wii Tennis addicts.

The biggest problem I have with Move is that I have yet to see a truly ingenious “killer app.” As soon as someone can tell me what makes the Move more than a Wii with good graphics I’ll consider taking a sip of the kool-aid. Until then, color me skeptical.

If you haven’t played Dante’s Inferno yet, you should. The atmosphere of the game alone is enough to merit the 8-12 hour excursion into the epic poem. Find a rainy weekend and rent the game at the very least. If buying is your thing, though, you can get EA’s latest slasher for just $39.99 at Target next week. That’s a damn fine price for a fresh title – a full $20 off retail.

Target is also having a sale on NBA 2K10, dropping it down to $29.99. There are also a few Pokemon deals going down if you want to have the most random collection of games this side of a Sega Saturn. I should probably also remind you that Bad Company 2 and MLB 10: The Show both drop on March 2nd, though those will be full price. Not an altogether bad week for gaming.

Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter has already had a busy week. So far he’s predicted that Project Natal will run $50 for Xbox 360 users and that it will sell 10 million units in about a year, which he thinks will be five times as many units as Sony’s Arc will sell.

“I think that the Sony motion controller will have some problems gaining traction, since it is not an ‘in the box’ solution,” he told PS3 Center. “That will probably limit adoption to 1 or 2 million at the outset.” He thinks the extra sales of Natal will help it gain a third-party advantage over the Arc.

The real shocker for me is that $50 price tag for Natal. For a company that charges more than a benjy for a low capacity hard drive, $50 for the latest gaming technology seems crazy. Of course, that’s exactly what Nintendo did with the Wii and I think we all know how that turned out.

The Playstation 3 just reported a hell of year. Sales are up almost 50% over last year, from 4.5 million units to 6.5 million. That’s a huge jump this late in the generation, though according to the Wall Street Journal, the important numbers are on the loss chart.

Sony’s baby is still losing six cents on every dollar of hardware it sells. That’s not as bad as it was at launch – not by a long shot – but it’s bad, again considering where we stand in the lifecycle. The company’s CFO, Nobuyuki Oneda, says he can deliver a 15 percent cost reduction, but not until March of 2011. At that point we could start to hear rumors of the next generation of consoles, not to mention the addition of expensive motion controlling hardware.

As much progress as Sony made this year, it’s a long way from being a profitable division of the corporation as a whole.

Source: Wall Street Journal

As you surely know, Dante’s Inferno launches next Tuesday on the PS3 and Xbox 360. The fiery slasher is highly anticipated and has already received very solid reviews. I got the chance to talk with EA’s Phil Marineau, the Senior Product Manager on Dante’s Inferno, to talk about development, the game’s place in the action/adventure genre, and the upcoming Super Bowl ad for the game.

Fearless Gamer: Obviously the game’s based on Dante’s Inferno so why that poem, why that source material?

Phil Marineau: Well, ever since our executive producer read the poem – and he’s somewhat of a literary buff – if you go online and you go on Google and you type in Dante’s Inferno and you search images everyone throughout history who’s read the poem has been inspired by it. The image you see the most is the cone, the cone image, where someone’s sort of drawing Hell. And it gave us the idea that, you know what, this sets up perfectly for a level-based video game. You start at the top, on the surface, you fight through nine levels of Hell, and at the end you have the ultimate boss battle with the ultimate bad guy, Lucifer.

As we were going around pitching it internally people were like, “Yeah, I totally get it.”

FG: So what makes Visceral and EA’s vision of hell different from what we’ve seen. There are a lot of games out there that take the hell concept, what makes this different?
Read the rest of this entry »

You may know George Hotz as Geohot, the guy who cracked the first iPhone for use on other carrier networks. He’s a boy genius, continuing to work wonders on every version of iPhone software and hardware that’s been released. From the sound of things, he may have also cracked the PS3.

He posted to a new blog this week, saying:

I have read/write access to the entire system memory, and HV level access to the processor. In other words, I have hacked the PS3. The rest is just software. And reversing. I have a lot of reversing ahead of me, as I now have dumps of LV0 and LV1. I’ve also dumped the NAND without removing it or a modchip.

It’s a big step toward complete PS3 modification, but he mentions that it can be difficult to do and made more difficult once Sony is aware of the exploit.

Finally, there’s a corporation in the world that’s willing to move on from Tiger’s sex life and continue to endorse him for what he does best (yes, better than cheating on his wife – he failed at keeping that quiet): playing golf. EA officially announced today that Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11 is in development.

The game will launch in June of this year for the Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, and the iPhone. I really wish there were more jokes to be had at Tiger’s expense, but really I’m just glad that this little saga is at the beginning of its end.

Sure, Tiger’s income looks a lot more like a trickle than the insane waterfall of years past, but it’s better than nothing, right?