I’m now convinced that EA Sports has my phone tapped. I literally had a conversation on the phone last night talking about how this year’s Madden was vastly improved in so many areas over last years iteration. But that said, there were still things I missed from the last gen version of the series — things like trading cards.

Well here they are … sort of. Cards will contain players, coaches, and jersey options, but special ability or perk cards offering up things like “rocket arm” or “scrambling legs”  don’t look like they made the next-gen transition. You will however be able to collect cards and do something new with them — build a custom team.

Cards will apparently come in different flavor decks (Bronze, Silver, and Gold) with each deck costing a different amount of “points” and each deck containing higher quality players than the previous. Points won’t cost you money (which is refreshing) but will instead be earned via on-field achievements.  It also looks like there will be periodic “weekly deals” offering up discounts on the rare cards.

Collecting players from the same professional or college team will grant special on the field rating boots and different instances of a single player will be able to exist on the same team. So, while you will need to build your team with lower level players at first, with a little dedication and hard work, it won’t be long before your squad resembles the John Madden Ultimate “Brett Favre” Team shown above. Boom!

The Madden 10 “Ultimate Team” feature will be available for free sometime in January via download on Xbox LIVE and PlayStation Network. Below are some screen images provided by EA Sports. What do you think of this latest addition to the game?

This is an awesome opportunity for a collector to own a piece of Nintendo’s gaming past. The Topps Vault is auctioning off four original pieces of Nintendo card art, with the last auction ending 6 days from now, and the earliest ending in just under 6 hours.

Each auction consists of a hand painted color layer and art overlay (as shown below). I used Photoshop to create the effect the two would have when placed over each other in the headline image above so that you could see what the finished cards looked like.

Check out the auction, and make your bid before it’s too late.

Source: Ebay (via GoNintendo)

With Warner Bros. announcing that they are exclusively supporting Blu-ray, one of their sister studios, New Line Cinema, was apparently not on the cards. However, it has been revealed that they will also follow.

When you think of New Line Cinema, certain films should come to mind; Lord of the Rings, Dumb and Dumber, Nightmare on Elm Street, Se7en, Austin Powers, and most recently The Golden Compass. Even though they are a part of Time Warner, this is not an insignificant studio.

Although Warner Bros. decided to move to Blu-ray, it was not known whether New Line Cinema would follow. Warner’s President, Kevin Tsujihara, stated that their announcement did not stretch to New Line, HBO, or the BBC (which Warner distributes in American). Tsujihara did, however, say that

They’ll be making whatever decision they’re going to make, I assume they’ll let people know very quickly.

Today Variety confirm that New Line Cinema are doing just that, and in reality this was the only rational move.

Warner sister company New Line confirmed it will shift allegiance to Blu-ray only as well.

HBO, another Time Warner company, has not yet revealed it’s direction, but we presume that they will fall in line.

Things aren’t looking great for Toshiba, Universal and Paramount. Expect this High Definition Format war to transpire towards a conclusion very soon.

An official Xbox Community Developer on Xbox Live Nation has released some very interesting new Gamercards using new Microsoft software.

The Gamercards are powered by Microsoft’s Silverlight; a flash like technology powered via API web services, where the dynamic data is generated by a php engine.

Overall these new gamercards look pretty sweet, and even check gamestatus/gamerscore in real time, furthering interactivity. This is just one example of how Silverlight can be used, since it will evolve in the coming years to create even more impressive Gamercards.

Here is the disjointed announcement by an Xbox Community Developer:

After some major programming hours I’m proud to announce that we now feature Silverlight based Gamercards.

Silverlight is a flash-like technology from Microsoft.

The xln cards are rendered using our own API web services and the dynamic data is generated by a php engine.

The overall architecture is quite complex but it works.

The cards can be seen in our forums.

This is in beta so please report any errors.

Via Stonyarc of XLN