EA doesn’t like you, probably. They certainly don’t care much for me…and we all know how they treat their own employees. Thankfully, EA works to make sure that you or I never forget that. If anyone has seen the reviews for the new Tiger Woods game, keenly titled Tiger Woods 08, you will see that they really aren’t trying anymore, or look at CronosBlade’s posting. But this isn’t the only example of how much they loathe us like Agent Smith..no! There are many more…

Don’t get me wrong, I like, nay LOVE, many of the games put out by EA over the years…the FIFA series, Skate or Die!, Need for Speed, a few SimCity incarnations, a couple of the Command & Conquer games, but this is a what have you done for me lately kinda industry, so I ask, what have they done for us lately..


1. Madden – I can’t ignore it, and neither can you. Madden is one of the largest and strongest franchises of video games to come out every year…so much so that they show pretaped tournaments between Maddenites on ESPN! Many have complained about the fact that the game is little more than a yearly roster update for 60 bucks and as much as I have to contend with such arguments…it’s hard to disagree.

2. FIFA – The other football…which like Madden is a high selling video game worldwide. Yet, I try to find out the release date, the demo release date, anything more than marketing speak regarding the features and I am SOL. You go into the forums for this game and you see people deciphering posts from Spanish and German EA forums just to get some information about this game. They have separate sites for UK and US and both have different information about the game! The developers of the game have to host their production blogs on other sites! This is ludacris ( I know its misspelled, but he will appreciate the name drop).

3. The Sims – What a cool game!...the first 80 hours we all played it..But wouldn’t it be cool if they had pets…yeah! Awesome!....and they could like go to College or to a club or something…Yeah, totally! Why didn’t they just put it into the core Sims 2 game? Did you know they have released 5 different versions of Sims 2? Not even counting the expansion packs…of which there are 13! Now, I can hear you saying, but at least they are giving content to people who still love the game…but they are pilfering 20 to 30 bucks PER expansion…which is a lot more money than a Sims 3 would cost.

4. Next Gen – See 1 & 2…not only does EA make you spend 60 bucks for basically roster updates (which to be honest, is why I think they don’t release much info about their games pre-launch), but they screw over Next Gen gamers by improving the graphics and sacrificing the content and gameplay. They ask for gamers to submit their ideas for the next iteration of a game, but I have yet to really see any of it implemented. Instead, they just put the next logical step in, or the best ideas from a competitor (I am looking at you Pro Evolution Soccer).

So accept that EA probably does hate you. But its not the worst thing that could happen. I am excited for Skate!