Over the weekend, UFC 100 happened. I can only assume that means it's the 100th UFC pay-per-view event. UFC president Dana White took the opportunity at a weigh-in and in some other locations to sort of crap all over EA's upcoming entry into the mixed-martial arts arena with hot quotes like...
Sweet. MMA Junkie has some choice quotes from the UFC boss about how he apparently tried to do a deal with EA over a year ago, but that EA wasn't interested. Now he's a bit hurt over the whole thing and, while he was at it, he confirmed the other rumors about UFC blacklisting fighters that do business with EA. Here's another look at the same story with quotes from the weigh-in."EA Sports never gave a [EXPLETIVE] about this sport. Now they do? Yeah, right."
Let's stick with EA for a bit here...
GamePolitics has one story with some economist from the University of Michigan, who claims that the deal that EA made NFL to exclusively publish licensed football games has cost Madden buyers "as much as $926 million." Seriously. Like a billion dollars? Just because Madden is the only NFL game in town? That on its own sounds sort of crazy. This theory was put forth as part of a class-action lawsuit stating that EA used its exclusive arrangement to eliminate 2K's competitive products. EA went in and found a respectful way to essentially say "that's completely crazy." Wedbush Morgan's Michael Pachter tended to agree in this follow-up story. Here's a quote from what he had to add:
I rarely read anything that gets me so incensed... They may have some odd estimates I'm not aware of, but based on what you printed, they should be embarrassed. You can quote me.
And in our final quick story for today, Bill Gates said stuff! Man, that guy used to say stuff all the time. Or, at least, he used to say stuff that is relevant to my interests all the time. So perhaps he's in rare form today, as he's talking about Project Natal's non-gaming applications. Specifically, he's telling CNET that he sees plenty of office applications for the crazy camera motion thing that's primarily being developed for the Xbox 360. So... will we be able to move and resize windows by waving our hands in front of our PCs? Sure, why not?
And finally, Destructoid is reporting that the announced-and-forgotten South Park game for Xbox Live Arcade will be shown at the San Diego Comic-Con, which is happening later this month. There hasn't been any real facts out there about the game, but I seem to remember hearing something about it being some sort of real-time strategy game. But that was a while ago, so there's plenty of room for me to be completely wrong about that.