The NHL 14 cover vote has advanced to the 2nd round of voting with 32 players advancing from the original field. This round is a little different then previous voting rounds. Instead of head to head matchups in the traditional tournament style form, you are free to choose any 16 out of the 32 available choices to advance to the next round.
The Sharks and the Maple Leafs are the only teams that still have 2 players in contention. Every other team only has 1 candidate left so vote wisely. Voting for this round ends on Sunday, May 5th. If you have a specific player in mind you’d like to see on the NHL 14 cover, you can vote via Twitter on Thursday to get double points.
The voting for round 2 is open today at NHL.com. If you are interested in pre ordering NHL 14 or if you just want to find out everything we know so far about the upcoming hockey video game, that information can be found at the PreOrder.org NHL 14 page.
After a week or so of good news coming out of EA Sports (outside of the company laying off over 10% of it’s workforce) we received word that the new college football playoff system will not be in NCAA Football 14.
Upon first glance, this makes perfect sense because we know the new playoff system won’t be implemented until 2014. However, despite EA Sports’ strongest efforts to turn us all into ultimate team addicts, the vast majority of people who buy the game play it for dynasty mode in some form either offline or online.
In dynasty mode, you take control of a team for 5, 10, 20, or more years. Given that we know there will be a playoff system in 2014 and beyond, a game that calls itself “sim” should in fact take that into account and implement it into the game. The proper way to have handled this would be to have a BCS title game for the first year followed by a playoff system, like the one announced a few days ago, for every year after.
An EA Sports representative had this defense when questioned on the move, “We don’t yet have all the info about how the playoff system will work, including who will make up the selection committee and what their criteria will be for picking the playoff teams.” Upon first read the quote seems reasonable but when you dive in further, it reads as a steaming pile of horse crap. In the current system, does anyone really believe that they run the exact BCS calculations each year of your individual dynasty to determine rankings? The answer is no. They may have some algorithm that is generally fairly accurate but it is not nearly the same as what the BCS uses. It can’t be unless they run each online dynasty by real life college coaches and media members. Obviously, that notion is ridiculous.
The current ranking system used in NCAA Football games isn’t 100% accurate but it is close enough to the BCS that no one complains. It would not be that hard to do something similar with the new college football playoff system.
This seems like nothing more than a poorly veiled gimmick to persuade people to buy this year’s NCAA Football 14 game and then be forced to buy next year’s NCAA Football 15 game if they want to use the new playoff system. You have disappointed us again EA Sports. If you don’t include the ability to export draft classes to Madden 25 this year you will absolutely see the lowest sales figures for the NCAA Franchise in more than a decade.
FIFA 14 will be released on September 24th, 2013 in the United States and it will make its way across most of the world within a week or so. The first FIFA 14 news came out last week to a bit of an underwhelming response, but nonetheless the game looks very promising.
Other noteworthy information that came out today includes the (not in any way shocking) pricing for FIFA 14 as well as the cover art featuring Lionel Messi. The game will cost $60 on the PlayStation 3 and XBOX 360, while it will cost $40 on handheld devices like the PS Vita.
The consoles that FIFA 14 has been confirmed on at this point are the PlayStation 3, XBOX 360, PlayStation 4, and the PS Vita. We expect it to also make its way onto the new XBOX which will be announced on May 21st.
After nearly 2 months of voting, starting with 64 players, the Madden 25 cover vote has finally come to an end. Over 40 million votes were cast in this year’s competition with the winner being announced on ESPN’s SportsNation show live. Old School fans will be happy to find out that former Lions running back Barry Sanders will be on the Madden NFL 25 cover.
In the past, fans would do everything they could do avoid their favorite player making the cover of Madden due to the “Madden Curse.” However, anyone who watched the NFL last year knows the curse has now been lifted after Calvin Johnson Jr. (the Madden 13 cover athlete) destroyed all sorts of records.
Barry Sanders was a 3 seed in the “Old School” side of the bracket, while Adrian Peterson was a 2 seed in the “New School” side of the bracket. Sanders knocked off Ron Rivera, Marcus Allen, Ray Lewis, Joe Montana, and Jerry Rice on his way to the finals. Peterson knocked off Carson Palmer, LeSean McCoy, Rob Gronkowski, Robert Griffin III, and Arian Foster to reach the finals.
Barry Sanders shared the NCAA Football 13 cover with RGIII last year. The only thing left for him to accomplish in the video game world was to grace the Madden cover.
EA Sports has been hyping a new feature called, “Run Free” so naturally the final vote would come down to 2 of the best running backs in history.
The first trailer for Madden 25 can be seen below. The schedule for when the rest of the information will be released can be found here.
For those of you who haven’t been keeping up with Madden news this year, the game was named Madden 25 (instead of Madden 14 which pretty much everyone expected) to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Madden video games.
Who would have ever expected the Detroit Lions of all teams to have back to back winners of the Madden cover vote?
Madden 25 is still set to be released on August 27th, 2013 on both the PlayStation 3 and XBOX 360. An official announcement should come in June on whether we can expect Madden 25 on the new XBOX and the PlayStation 4.
Even though the cover vote for NCAA Football 14 ended nearly 2 months ago, EA Sports has just now decided it would be a good time to reveal the cover for their popular college football video game. Former Michigan quarterback, Denard Robinson will be featured on the cover for the PlayStation 3 and the XBOX 360.
Robinson broke all sorts of Michigan records in college and beat out former Texas A&M receiver Ryan Swope in the finals to claim the cover. The voting process was compromised by fans of each player creating fake profiles in order to cast fake votes for the player of their choice. The voting totaled 5.7 million votes over the course of a competition setting a NCAA Football franchise record.
Denard Robinson is the 3rd Michigan Wolverine player to grace the cover following in the footsteps of Desmond Howard and Charles Woodson.
It is fitting that Robinson made the cover this year with the huge emphasis being put on making the running game and specifically the option more realistic this year.
NCAA Football 14 is scheduled for release on July 9th. The only consoles it will be available on are the XBOX 360 and the PlayStation 3.
Now that the 2 months of Madden 25 cover voting is coming to an end, EA Sports has launched their cover tournament for NHL 14. 60 players (2 from each team) made it into the bracket. Teammates will play each other in the first round so only 1 representative from each team will make it into the second round.
You can place your vote on the NHL.com website now through April 28th for the first round. You may vote up to 10 times per day. On Thursdays, your vote via twitter will be doubled so if you have a strong preference for a certain candidate to make the cover for NHL 14, it would be wise to vote as much as you can then.
The cover vote will conclude in early June. The game itself will be released on September 1oth in North America and September 13th in Europe.
You can check out the official cover vote trailer released by EA Sports earlier today below.
