I don't much care for Electronic Arts and its EA Sports counterpart. In a previous blog entitled, "EA's Exclusivity License with the NFL Soon Expiring!," or something to that effect, I briefly yet fully explained my feelings toward EA Sports. The parent company Electronic Arts is a somewhat separate and much larger thorn in my gaming experience as a whole and is the sole reason that the used games industry should continue to exist.

As petty as it may be, I do boycott EA and EA Sports..regarding new releases. As mediocre a game as Def Jam Icon may be, its premise, graphics and experimental gameplay make it enjoyable to me. A couple of hours at a time. For the used game purchase price of $12. This is an EA game and it does a great job of being average. The fighting mechanics are why I can only play for a couple of hours at a time. They're ghastly elementary. But guess what? This mediocre game has an original idea. The turntable controls that are used to change the music to your track of choice as opposed to your opponent's during a fight, giving you a couple of slight edges over your foe. The first being that your attacks will increase in speed and the second is that you can utilize hazards using the turntable controls within each scene to send your opponent on a ridiculous, pulverizing flight across the screen. Timing your blows with the beat means your attack sequence is your flow as well, but this "Master the Beat" idea doesn't lend itself to much light in the game, it's barely noticeable. Too bad none of these features were really fleshed out. That's the problem with EA as a developer. It's original ideas are trapped in experimental games while all of their blockbusters are built from the ground up with a mod of another studio's ideas.

Dante's Inferno. Just in case I need to elaborate, all that EA's Visceral Games did here is look at the first two God of War games and how many copies they sold and said, "Let's do that, but change the character and the story, keep the style of massive scale but use different environments." 'What about the gameplay?' "Nah, Sony did a good job, why should we work as hard on a core element?" Being that I boycott EA games, how do I know this? Well, if every reviewer wants to recant their playing time with the game, they can. Their opinions being much the same as what I've written in this paragraph, in conjunction with the lengthy gameplay videos I've seen, I think my opinion is just as valid, albeit completely biased. EA deserves a bias against it for the story line as well. Save the chick. That one's never been done before. Dante is a vulnerable protagonist in EA's interactive rendition of Alighieri's literature. Kratos is an ambitious anti-hero in ways that most don't dare portray. I have played the first two God of War games, just to be clear.

Many of the games in the Electronic Arts library are at least good, some are above average and you can't say they don't have the resources to make a game work as most of their releases have sound control mechanics. But their business practices are why I absolutely will not contribute to their profits, with the exception of them being the publisher and not the developer. EA can judge the talent of other studios very well, i.e. Dice's Mirror's Edge. It may not have performed as well in sales as hoped, but it had an original gameplay premise and earned "Must Play" honors. This is a business and sales do count, but a studio should find a way to ensure that a "Must Play" title sells well. In my opinion, the storyline of Mirror's Edge was too short-lived and just not very deep. What EA simply cannot purport to do is hold itself to any moral standard in the way of current business practices, original ideas or a passion for the subject matter contained in the games they develop. They don't deserve to be associated with the word, "create." The EA Sports division of Electronic Arts, although a powerhouse of a developer, seems to operate like a children's school; Executives, the adults/teachers, reviewing what works in competitor's games and giving the lower level employees, the children, homework, checklists of what elements to steal from competitor's games.

Current example: EA Sports MMA. While being interviewed just before the release of UFC Undisputed 2009 and amidst talk of EA Sports MMA, Dana White, president of the UFC, lamented EA due to a previous encounter in which they told him that what he promotes and runs is, "not a real sport." Then, UFC Undisputed 2009 releases and captures a major audience. EA, realizing it was wrong, admitted so by making the exact same game, only with a different roster of fighters and my favorite referee (Big John McCarthy, you sons of bitches! Damn you EA, now I'm gonna wanna play this after someone returns it). EA doesn't "create" games, it codes cash cows and the fact that this is all that makes up the company's desire to release games is a shame. Sham. Both. Copycats cannot create substance and substance is something that EA, as a developer, has been lacking ever since the very first Medal of Honor for the original Playstation.