For the past week, EA has been making a big splash over their “Madden Next-Gen” product, set to debut on Xbox 360 this christmas. That culminated in an ad they showed during the NFL draft this past Saturday.

The only problem is the ad doesn’t show any in-game footage. It only shows a pre-rendered “artistic sample” of what the next-gen Madden might look like. According to this preview by GameSpot, the final game will look better than this preview.

I find that exceedingly hard to believe, considering the source. EA is going to have to work a lot harder to regain gamers’s trust after a long string of sub-par games. This video isn’t going to do much to help EA’s cause.

But it will make sure Madden sells millions come December. And I guess that’s all that matters.

Electronic Arts cuts forcast, shares fall [News.com]

The company’s shares fell nearly 13 percent and weighed heavily on the sector in after-hours trade following the news, the first time in EA’s history as a publicly traded company that it issued a profit warning during a quarter.

Electronic Arts’ U.S. market share on a dollar basis for the year to date is roughly twice that of its closest competitor, Japan’s Nintendo.
[...]
“I think this is a carry-over of not only the hardware shortage but also them not having a ‘Halo 2’ or ‘GTA,’” he said, referring to the two hottest games of last holiday season, neither of which EA published.

New releases were unable to offset a “significant falloff” in sales of older, catalogue games, the company said. It also blamed strong competition from new games, in particular the breakout hit of Vivendi Universal’s online game “World of Warcraft.”

I think EA just got a wee bit too complacent, and they are beginning to feel the effects of their complacency.

A person named Amit Singh has figured out a way to use the Apple Motion Sensor (AMS), found in the latest generation of PowerBooks, as a human interface device. The AMS detects the movements of the PowerBook and can park the Hard Drive heads in the event of a sudden acceleration (such as during a fall). But now it has a new use; it can replace your mouse.

There are a number of concept videos showing a racing game and a game called NeverBall, both being controlled by tilting the PowerBook in different directions. It can also be used to scroll documents in various applications.

A free download of the software, AMS2HID, is available by clicking the first link below.

CafÈ Macs reports Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) will bring drastic improvements in 3D game performance.

As we already know, the performance of DOOM 3 for Mac in comparison to its Windows counterpart is a little depressing - but those tests were on a Mac running Panther. The test machine was able to crank out an acceptable, yet somewhat lackluster performance by running the game at somewhere between 20-30 FPS at 800x600 on High quality.

On the same test machine, now running Tiger, saw an incredible performance boost. A clean install of both the latest Tiger beta (8A414) and DOOM 3 saw a steady 35-40 FPS at 1024x768 on High quality, with 2x Anti-aliasing enabled. Quite an improvement.

Tiger is due sometime during the first half of this year. Recent reports indicate Tiger will be released sometime in April.

The Mac version of id Software’s seminal shooter Doom 3 has finally gone gold and will be on store shelves by the end of the week. All is not well, however, as Macworld magazine got an early look at the game, and put it through a series of benchmarking tests, with somewhat disappointing results.

First, a little bit on our gaming rig: It’s a Power Mac G5 2.5GHz dual processor model, equipped with 2.5GB of RAM and ATI’s new Radeon X800 XT Mac Edition graphics card—the fastest ATI card you can get on the Mac, equipped with 256MB VRAM.
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The system was running Mac OS X10.3.8—the minimum operating system requirement for Doom 3, since that particular release features some improvements to Apple’s OpenGL drivers that help improve performance for games like Doom 3. All tests were performed in full-screen mode, with no other applications running in the background.

All tests were made using Doom 3’s timedemo demo1 command, accessible through its built-in console. The tests were performed at resolutions from 640 x 480 to 1600 x 1200, running with and without Full-Scene Anti Aliasing (FSAA).

The fastest they were able to get the game to run was 47.1 FPS…
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