Okay folks, it's time to hear from the peanut gallery.

We've all heard the news, that EA has bought the NFL exclusive license for 5 years, and would love to have the NBA and MLB licenses exclusively also. They already have the PGA and Nascar exclusives, and just the other week bought a 20% share of Ubi-Soft (more than the founding fathers of Ubi have, so I hear). Hell, they even bought Renderware, the software engine that the majority of engine purchasing development teams use, earlier in the year.

This, in a year that EA said they wouldn't be as aggressive as in years past.

I could go on for page after page about what I think is happening to the industry because of EA, but I want to hear it from you, the people who still come to read this stuff.

So I pose the following question:

Do you think EA is good or bad for the gaming industry as a whole, in the long term?

So the gaming corners of the internet have been all a-twitter with the news of EA signing deal with the NFL Players' Association granting EA exclusive rights to use the actual players and teams of the US National Football League for the next 5 years. I find it interesting that the same people who like to complain about how every videogame that comes out these days is either a license a sequel are up in arms over the idea that any developer other than Electronic Arts wanting to make a football game is now bestowed with a mandate to come up with something original. Not only that, but these other developers would have all the more reason to innovate in tech, art, and design, just to overcome the licensed product they were competing against.

Isn't this what we all want? More innovation? More originality?

Or do sports games fill a special category. The play is not the thing, rather sports videogamers are looking for fantasy simulators. Are sports games more about the branding than about the love of the naked game?

I don't play sports videogames, so I wouldn't know. Enlighten me.

UPDATE Midway Games throws their hat in the ring as only they can.

Evil Avatar refers a post on the WarpPipe forums where a poster has discovered that Nintendo's new DS is emitting a weak anomolous signal that can be picked up by TV antennas.

Whether the unintentional result of poor shielding, or an intentional hidden feature that Nintendo was going to introduce down the road through some sort of tuner peripheral, this effect makes my designer's brain spin with possibilities. Imagine a multiplayer game with one player's screen duplicated on the TV, while the other (up to 15 on a DS wireless LAN) work privately on their own screens. We've seen Nintendo try things like Legend of Zelda: Four Swords, and multi-player Pac-Man that might indicate future intent (whether using some sort of stand-alone tuner, or a future console add-on that uses the wireless network). I'm excited.

Then again, the DS might just be possessed by ancient evil.