Last year, 2K Sports did a shrewd thing, bootstrapping its flagging MLB 2K series to its best-in-class NBA 2K in a combo package announced a month before the baseball game was due for release. The publisher is doing the same thing again this year, but listing the bundle for $10 more.

The combo pack is $79.99 and will be available on March 5, when MLB 2K13 hits shelves. Yes, technically, both games retail for $59.99 each, but four months after release, NBA 2K13 may be found new-in-the-box for $29.99 to $39.99 for consoles.

Expectations are low for MLB 2K13, which was a last-minute announcement and appears to be rolling out under a one-year deal only. 2K Sports was, by all appearances, ready to walk away once its license with Major League Baseball expired at the end of 2012. That would have meant no new baseball game on the Xbox 360, North America's dominant console, in this season. Evidently baseball wasn't willing to take that, and struck a new pact with 2K, having no other options.

The Combo Pack may make little consumer sense for those who are interested primarily in baseball, or in basketball only. It makes good sense for 2K, as it widens a sales potential on the PlayStation 3, where Sony's in-house MLB The Show series is utterly dominant, and there is no basketball option other than NBA 2K13, one of 2012's best sports video games and a widely acclaimed series for many years.

Correction: The previous headline mistakenly quoted the combo pack's price. It has been corrected.

Earlier this week, Metacritic bemoaned 2012 as a year of poorer review scores for video games than the one preceding it. Fewer titles surpassed the all-important 90—which practically guarantees job security to those who developed or greenlit the project—than in 2011. Interestingly, the three console platforms' average review scores all improved slightly.

This isn't proof of overall game quality any more than MVP voting is proof of overall player quality. If anything, it's proof of how observers reacted to the product put on the field. But it made me curious enough to go digging into how sports video games were scored. And even then, the numbers were, on the surface, surprising.

On average, 78 sports games (this includes different platform versions of the same title) rated 74.19 this year, according to Metacritic. That's up 6.4 points from 2011's average of 68.10.

That's remarkable. Taken at face value, that's an astonishing jump in overall quality—for an entire segment—especially one whose most visible releases are most vulnerable to criticism that they're insufficient updates of the previous year's version.

In 2010, sports video games averaged 67.10, so the seven point jump to 2012 looks even larger. (To clarify my methodology, I took anything that was classified sports by Metacritic, excluding iOS titles. To that I added any of THQ's UFC and WWE licensed titles, and the F1 and NASCAR licensed racing games.)

To make sure I wasn't crazy, I went to GameRankings. Measuring the same titles, it showed a smaller, but still significant increase of 5.83, from an average score of 69.23 in 2011 to 75.06 in 2012.

I know Madden was shades better in 2012 than the year before, but NCAA Football dropped about as much as its pro football sibling improved. Of the Big Four—the year-in, year-out Great Sports Games—FIFA and NBA 2K performed roughly the same in review scores while MLB The Show and NHL dipped by similar amounts.

It's true that 2012 saw great games like UFC Undisputed 3 and SSX which didn't appear in 2011. And series like Pro Evolution Soccer and WWE made modest but noteworthy gains. But 2011 had Top Spin 4, to 2012's mediocre Grand Slam Tennis 2. And we also saw a slew of licensed Olympics video games that weren't worth anyone's time.

Did I miss something? Didn't we just not award a Sports Video Game of the Year? Isn't this the year in which no one is taking any risks?

Yes, actually. And that lack of risk taking in part accounts for the overall rise.

I've written about this before: Sports video game publishing is in a war of attrition. Licensing costs are not going down; development costs only rise, and now must straddle the next console generation, expected to be announced at E3, if not on shelves by November. The high licensing costs, and the modern phenomenon of exclusive deals, keep fewer publishers out of the real moneymaking end of a shrinking business. The high development costs and the repeated failure of alternatives without a league logo mean no one is really willing to go into sports publishing without them. Remember Backbreaker? Tecmo Bowl Throwback? All-Pro Football 2K8 or Blitz: The League II? All of these were PS3 and Xbox 360 games, but it feels like they came out a generation ago.

So the improvement of sports video games—well, in their critical scores anyway—is more in cutting dead weight than actual improvement among its annual titles. We don't score reviews here at Kotaku (and, really, I thank Brian Crecente for that every time I write one), but we know readers feel there's grade inflation going on, where a 7.5 is a disappointment, and an 8 is average. Others who must score reviews do, too. NBA 2K is one of the do-no-wrong series in sports gaming. But it was given a 70 by the guy who organizes the sports video gaming panel show I appear on biweekly. Another colleague's publication gave it the same mark.

What does this mean for 2013? Well, it starts off on even better footing, considering MLB 2K had seven editions and the best of them last year couldn't bust 70. Considering the upheaval at THQ, you can probably drop any WWE titles from the discussion, too. But you also won't see anything from Fight Night, one of the most consistent and well regarded sports series over the past decade. EA Sports is busy with putting out an MMA title, a sport with which it fared only so-so back in 2010.

There'll be no SSX or Top Spin, a boutique title but one that always did well. Spinoffs like NFL Blitz won't be available. FIFA can't put out a World Cup edition for another year, either. In dropping from 111 sports titles reviewed in 2010, to 96 in 2011 and 78 in 2012, it seems the surest path to addition is by subtraction.

For as long as I have sought to illustrate posts with screengrabs from the NBA 2K series, I have despised its replay camera. Dedicated guys like MessenjahMatt can still produce virtuoso recreations of famous Air Jordan commercials using the game's PC version, but for the rest of us shlubs on a console, getting a Sports Illustrated cover-quality shot of Blake Griffin water-poloing a dunk over Pau Gasol remains a distant dream.

Well, it gets a little more tolerable thanks to the latest patch. Because even if the camera controls, rotation and centering still drive me crazy, at least that @$&%#@ red circle under the highlighted player's feet can finally be removed. Operation Sports pointed out the feature, noting that it is new to the series and arrived with the latest title update. Just press L1 and L2 simultaneously on your PS3 (LB and RB on your 360) and voila, no more red ring.

If it seems like this feature has been secretly in the game all along, it hasn't been. I just tried this out with NBA 2K12 and an unpatched NBA 2K13 on the Xbox 360 and it wasn't there. After pushing through the patch on 2K13 it became available.

How to Remove the Red Player Indicator Circle in NBA 2K13 Instant Replay [Operation Sports]

Rarely considered for overall video-game-of-the-year honors, the uncommon diversity of sports video games, and the unique demands placed on them to recreate both a real-world sport and the real-life experiences associated with it, support their own class of awards more than any other genre. These are Kotaku's Stick Jockey Sports Video Games of the Year. This year we'll recognize achievements in six categories.

While a game's technical aspects and ability to execute were considered, more subjective qualities such as innovation, impact, and the size of the gaming population it served also came into play in judging a game's worthiness.

These awards are conferred by me, in consultation with Luke Plunkett. Here is the best in sports video gaming for 2012.

Best Presentation

NBA 2K13

(Visual Concepts and 2K Sports)

Visual Concepts' audio team is the best in this sector, by a wide margin, and opened up an even greater lead with stellar work in NBA 2K13 and even a slapped-around MLB 2K12, whose commentary was still miles ahead of its direct competitor. Lacking the kind of money EA Sports has, 2K Sports can't simply cut deals with real-life networks to bring their graphics packages and booth personalities into the game.

Instead, NBA 2K13 has created a damn good virtual network of its own, using Kevin Harlan, Clark Kellogg, Doris Burke and Steve Kerr to deliver a dynamic call that sounds like all three are actually watching your game. Damon Bruce anchors an around-the-league intermission recap that other titles have simply given up on. Let's not forget Jay-Z, brought on as a celebrity executive producer, whose influence was most felt in pregame openings during the Association mode. NBA 2K has many strengths, but its presentation, sometimes quietly, is the one that improves the most year after year after year.

Honorable Mentions
MLB 2K12, in its swan song, also put together a network-ready team of Gary Thorne, Steve Phillips and John Kruk. NCAA Football 13 still has the dean of sports video game commentary, Brad Nessler, and added ESPN's Rece Davis to an in-game score update that portends good things for the future of that series. However you feel about them, Jim Nantz and Phil Simms are true-to-life in Madden NFL 13. Those two, plus a new original score and a slew of stadium audio enhancements, righted that ship after a listless 2011.

Best Career Mode

NBA 2K13

(Visual Concepts and 2K Sports)

We've called this "best singleplayer" in the past; here the title is revised to include the best persistent career mode, team or single player. Madden NFL 13's groundbreaking "Connected Careers" was unquestionably a technical achievement, in the way it permits multiplayer leagues where one user controls only a star running back against another commanding an entire team. The virtual Twitter feed, particularly its stories of fictitious draft prospects, added a lot of zest. But the omission of a fantasy draft and some basic player customization options—later introduced by server-side update—needlessly limited the experience for about a month after its launch.

"My Player" in NBA 2K13, however, cements that title as a lifestyle product, through off-the-court interactions that have no analogue or imitator in other titles. In what other game are you choosing what your player will say in his Hall of Fame induction? What other game allows you to say what's on your mind, or say the right thing, during a pre-draft interview, postgame news conference, or a sit-down with the general manager? While other career modes also have experience points, and character attribute development, NBA 2K is doing the heavy lifting as the sports genre reckons with its true potential as a role-playing game.

Honorable Mentions
Despite its ponderous menu structure, the unique demands of player recruiting still make NCAA Football 13 the most compelling personnel management game available on a console. Its "Road to Glory" mode continues to make strides and tap the potential offered by a compact, four-season career. Madden is worthy of praise, as mentioned above. WWE '13's almost absurd level of stage management options cater to a "sports entertainment" spectacle uniquely enriched by multiple ongoing storylines.

Best Multiplayer

Madden NFL 13

(EA Tiburon and EA Sports)

Multiplayer was really the only thing last year's edition of Madden NFL did comprehensively well, and the game's post-release support has long put everything else to shame. This year's introduction of Connected Careers strengthened Madden's multiplayer dominance, created new relevance for its neglected Superstar career mode, and new enticements for longtime Franchise hermits to take their acts online, inviting friends to their world or joining someone else's. Sports video games are still realizing their potential as role-playing games; Connected Careers is an early vision of sports as a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, and it is bound to have imitators in years to come.

Honorable Mentions
NHL 13 introduced GM Connected, a more robust housing for online team play that allows players of lesser skill to still contribute as coaches or personnel managers. FIFA 13's strengthened it s package of offerings in Football Club (and Ultimate Team) with the introduction of "Match Day," in which real world outcomes, injuries, and current lineups were reflected in online matches.

Comeback Game of the Year

Pro Evolution Soccer 13

(Konami)

Heading into 2013, there is only one sport with direct competition among licensed video games, and that is in football. Had Konami put a lesser effort into Pro Evolution Soccer, we might be talking about a 2013 in which each sport is represented by a single console game only. PES 13 righted its ship, and the game's player AI, singleplayer career, and visuals make it a legitimately preferred option for some longtime football fans. PES had been hanging on largely through its incumbency in Japan, a basically saturated audience. Pushed to the brink of irrelevance, it has come back—and coming back against the FIFA juggernaut is a challenge no other series has to face.

Honorable Mentions
SSX hit the slopes after a seven-year layoff, blending modern console capabilities with fan service for a smoothly enjoyable experience. WWE '13's Attitude Era tribute helped wash away the disappointments of last year's title and was, quietly, the best showcase mode in sports video gaming this year. Madden NFL 13 introduced real-time physics a year ahead of its studio's internal schedule, but for many fans, such an improvement was long overdue.

Best Individual Sports Game

UFC Undisputed 3

(Yuke's Future Media Creators and THQ San Diego)

A winter release date, its publisher's long-running financial difficulties, and the surprise sale of the UFC license to EA Sports at E3 combined to obscure what a legitimately good sports video game UFC Undisputed 3 is, particularly for its career mode. A retooled submission system also placed the unique excitement of a choke-out victory into the hands of more players. Flash knockouts were rarer but more meritoriously applied. A flurry of hammer fists on a prone opponent inevitably brought on one of the year's most satisfying experiences, Mike Goldberg breathlessly shrieking that the fight was all over. It may be too late, and it may be bittersweet for those at THQ's San Diego studio, closed after the sell-off of the UFC license, to hear this now, but they should know they went out as a winner, gloved hand high in the air.

Honorable Mentions
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 13 had a tough act to follow after introducing Augusta National and The Masters in 2011. A misunderstood Course Mastery system didn't help, but it's still one of the most endlessly replayable online sports games around. WWE '13 showed strong improvement, especially in utilizing the gameplay improvements introduced last year. Codemasters' F1 2012 may be more of a racer but it is a motorsports simulation, with a full featured career mode and gran prix circuit.

Best Team Sports Game

FIFA 13

(EA Canada and EA Sports)

The margin between the Big Four—FIFA, NBA 2K, NHL and MLB The Show—has never been thinner than it was this year, mostly for the fact each series largely retained its overall excellence without making truly transformative changes to the way it was was played. In the end, though heavily reliant on incumbency, FIFA 13 gets the nod for best team sports game. Its most recognizable improvements were largely refinements of its already strong gameplay. First touch physics sacrificed the unrealistic magnetism of past years in opening a subtle new dimension for planning passes and positioning. AI-controlled teammates broke into more useful runs, and defenders started thinking further ahead in the play, rather than fixating solely on the man with the ball. In a year with no true breakout hits, FIFA, a nod to the class of sports video gaming for the past four years is appropriate.

Sports Video Game of the Year

No Award

Incumbent excellence is fine for crowning a winner in a subcategory like Best Team Sports Game. Improvement deserves to be recognized, and that's why there's Comeback Game of the Year. But a game must do both to be considered the Sports Video Game of the Year, the standout best offering of the genre in the past calendar year. And none was this year.

FIFA 13, as said above, improved largely through subtle refinements. So did NHL 13 with a new skating engine, whose benefit was perceptible more to longtime players of the series than to a broader audience. Had NBA 2K13 developed even a modest showpiece mode for the inclusion of the 1992 U.S. Olympic Team, or returned the "NBA's Greatest" retrospective from NBA 2K12, it would have been hands down the Sports Video Game of the Year. A welcome control refinement made player movement more intuitive, but there are still a dizzying number of moves for the average person to memorize, much less master.

While these three plus MLB The Show did not regress, and leave this year as they began it—all highly regarded games—they did not take any appreciable risks either. Madden NFL 13 did, and no title this year strove harder to transform itself, and executed more in doing so, than it did. But overall laurels for it, in this year, would send a message that following a terrible year with overdue changes is all it takes to be the class of sports video gaming.

Nor should we arrive at this type of honor by such a process of elimination. It should be affirmatively awarded, for readily identifiable reasons. And sports video gaming's annual demand for $60, for what can be an incremental update even in its best series, arouses intense opinions and resentments within the community that further necessitate a clear-cut and defensible overall winner.

The most defensible choice, for 2012, is that there is no Sports Video Game of the Year. With the attrition in the licensed publishing catalogue, which speaks for the largest constituency in sports gaming, and with PC gaming a total nonentity except in management simulations, this hasn't been the worst year for sports video gaming. But it is the furthest from its best in this hardware generation.

Perhaps that's to be expected at this point in the lifespan. We're looking forward to the disruptions caused by the next console generation, the risks they will force all of these series to take, and the new contenders that may emerge.

Around halftime of a game on an NFL Sunday is a good time to take the temperature of the Madden NFL crowd. It's like the water department analysis that shows everyone flushing the john when the Super Bowl goes to the break. In this case, online gamers, many of whom have their consoles running and connected to the servers throughout, often jump in for a quick match during the network highlights and recaps.

Here was the picture on the Xbox 360 at midafternoon: 31,080 Madden players connected to the EA Sports servers; 2,978 were in a game. On the Wii U: 42 were online. One was in a game.

It may be an off-peak time, and it may be a version releasing three months after the game's main launch. The numbers still aren't good. That's forty-two people in North America playing Madden NFL 13 on a Sunday on the Wii U.

While the Wii was probably the worst console of all time for sports video game development, I don't see much in the Wii U's current offerings—all of three simulation sports—that makes its high-definition successor any more of a full partner in the same landscape. And as we're soon embarking on another console generation, possibly next year, signs point to the Wii U being, like the Wii, left behind as soon as it arrives, with third-party titles mostly there because it's one of the few viable extra products their publisher can sell under license.

The three games in question aren't bad. But they aren't exceptional, either, despite the new capabilities the Wii U GamePad should offer. The lack, so far, of in-game microtransaction support means Madden NFL and FIFA's Ultimate Team modes are absent. These modes drive more than online participation, they're responsible—in EA's case, anyway—for huge growth in new revenue streams, the kind that get investors' attention when traditional sales are suffering across the industry.

Until that comes aboard, sports video game publishers won't have much interest beyond planting the flag on this platform, and the feature set in the current releases unfortunately show this. Though FIFA makes the greatest use of the GamePad by allowing you to send attackers on runs with it, and Madden's byzantine pre-snap commands are intuitively simplified, almost across the board the console's main distinguishing feature is under-used. NBA 2K13 makes the least use of the second screen of the three.

It especially disappoints me that Madden makes no application of the GamePad beyond in-game playcalling. Because EA Sports appeared with Nintendo on stage at E3 2011 to talk about Madden for the Wii U, we can reasonably assume this title had a two-year development window, whether or not EA Sports chose to use all of it. For a game given to menu sludge, almost unavoidably, much of the player management, scouting and draft tasks would seem well suited to the notepad-like quality of the GamePad, a second source to check before pulling the trigger. But Madden uses none of this potential.

If it took any steps in this direction, it could be a preferred play option—especially in singleplayer franchises—despite the lack of realtime physics and aggravating framerate drops with every snap. I still don't know if EA Sports will put the Infinity Engine into this game next year, because Nintendo has been so cagey with its machine's computing power. Hell, it removed the means to see all of the machine's specifications with the Wii U's first firmware update.

That last quality speaks to the real barrier for sports video games on the Wii U, as it raises the ages-old complaint that Nintendo offers an outstanding platform—for Nintendo. Which doesn't make sports video games. Not the licensed simulations that define so much of the genre, anyway. The games the Wii U has are plainly ports of existing games built on engines that are years old. Even though these are the launch offerings, they won't be remade anytime soon. Outside of adaptations like EA Sports' regrettable All-Play series for the Wii, I couldn't name for you the last licensed sports title built specifically for a Nintendo platform. And I can't foresee any future instance of one, either, not with two new consoles getting ready to eat up escalating development costs.

While it is, at last, a high definition experience under the Nintendo nameplate, I'm not optimistic that sports video gaming will be much better than a stepchild on the Wii U, as it was on the Wii. Not when there are a total of 86 players online, right now, in FIFA 13 on the Wii U. Not when Cabela's Dangerous Hunts has a larger Miiverse community than NBA 2K13. And not when you've got one person in all of North America in Madden searching for an opponent on an NFL Sunday. For all I know, that person may have been me.

[CORRECTION]: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said NBA 2K13 did not have the new MyTeam feature on Wii U. It does. The story has been revised to reflect this.

If the Video Game Awards are actually an awards show, and not just a keynote for promoting upcoming games, then the big news from last night was The Walking Dead: The Game. Eminently quotable analyst Michael Pachter said before the show that if this title, a downloadable self-published game, took home Game of the Year, he'd eat his hat. To his credit, Pachter later tweeted out a request for one, presumably to consume.

But the surprises don't just stop there. The Walking Dead won Game of the Year coming out of the Best Adapted Game category. Except for 2003, the first year of the VGAs, when things were very different from today, only two adapted games have even been nominated for GOTY: Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman: Arkham City, and neither won. This is a different time in games development, with publishers looking for games whose characters and stories they fully own.

Some might look to a licensed or adapted work and consider that the game derives its significance, or at least the attention given to it, because it draws on some other franchise in popular entertainment. So it's strange that a licensed, adapted work reminds us that story, and characters, and choices, and the memorable experiences they create, matters most.

Here's another surprise nugget: The Walking Dead: The Game earned its makers five Video Game Awards. The next big winner? Journey, with three (including a nomination for Game of the Year.) Borderlands 2 also took home three awards, the best haul for a traditional boxed console game.

So if you're thinking this might have been a different Video Game Awards, in its 10th year, you're probably right. Had the show given more attention to that purpose—only a handful of these awards were actually presented in the broadcast—we might be pondering it as a landmark year. The VGAs are often accused of being an industry popularity contest, but maybe this year they acquired recognizable critical heft. We'll have to see what happens next year, and the year after.

So here are the 25 winners of the 2012 Video Game Awards, plus the Game of the Decade. Two fan-voted awards gave Character of the Year to Claptrap from Borderlands 2, and Most Anticipated Game to Grand Theft Auto V.

Game of the Year

The Walking Dead: The Game

Telltale Games

Also nominated: Assassin's Creed III, Dishonored, Journey, Mass Effect 3

Studio of the Year

Telltale Games

Also nominated: 343 Industries, Arkane Studios, Gearbox Software

Best Xbox 360 Game

Halo 4

Microsoft Studios/343 Industries

Also nominated: Assassin's Creed III, Borderlands 2, Dishonored

Best PS3 Game

Journey

Sony Computer Entertainment/thatgamecompany

Also nominated: Assassin's Creed III, Borderlands 2, Dishonored

Best Wii/Wii U Game

New Super Mario Bros. U

Nintendo

Also nominated: The Last Story, Xenoblade Chronicles, ZombiU

Best PC Game

XCOM: Enemy Unknown

2K Games/Firaxis Games

Also nominated: Diablo III, Guild Wars 2, Torchlight II

Best Shooter

Borderlands 2

2K Games/Gearbox Software

Also nominated: Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Halo 4, Max Payne 3

Best Action-Adventure Game

Dishonored

Bethesda Softworks/Arkane Studios

Also nominated: Assassin's Creed III, Darksiders II, Sleeping Dogs

Best Role-Playing Game

Mass Effect 3

Electronic Arts/BioWare

Also nominated: Diablo III, Torchlight II, Xenoblade Chronicles

Best Multiplayer Game

Borderlands 2

2K Games/Gearbox Software

Also nominated: Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Guild Wars 2, Halo 4

Best Individual Sports Game

SSX

Electronic Arts/EA Canada

Also nominated: Hot Shots Golf World Invitational, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 13, WWE '13

Best Team Sports Game

NBA 2K13

2K Sports/Visual Concepts

Also nominated: FIFA 13, Madden NFL 13, NHL 13

Best Driving Game

Need For Speed: Most Wanted

Electronic Arts/Criterion Games

Also nominated: Dirt: Showdown, F1 2012, Forza Horizon

Best Song in a Game

"Cities" (Beck) for Sound Shapes

Also nominated: "Castle of Glass" (Linkin Park for Medal of Honor: Warfighter); "I Was Born for This" (Austin Wintory for Journey); "Tears" (Health for Max Payne 3)

Best Original Score

Journey

Sony Computer Entertainment/thatgamecompany

Also nominated: Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Halo 4, Max Payne 3.

Best Graphics

Halo 4

Microsoft Studios/343 Industries

Also nominated: Assassin's Creed III, Dishonored, Journey

Best Independent Game

Journey

thatgamecompany

Also nominated: Dust: An Elysian Tail, Fez, Mark of the Ninja

Best Fighting Game

Persona 4 Arena

Atlus/Arc System Works/Atlus

Also nominated: Dead or Alive 5, Street Fighter X Tekken, Tekken Tag Tournament 2

Best Handheld/Mobile Game

Sound Shapes

Sony Computer Entertainment/Queasy Games

Also nominated: Gravity Rush, LittleBigPlanet (PS Vita), New Super Mario Bros 2

Best Performance by a Human Female

Melissa Hutchison for The Walking Dead: The Game

Also nominated: Emma Stone for Sleeping Dogs; Jen Taylor for Halo 4; Jennifer Hale for Mass Effect 3

Best Performance by a Human Male

Dameon Clark for Borderlands 2

Also nominated: Dave Fennoy for The Walking Dead: The Game; James McCaffrey for Max Payne 3; Nolan North for Spec Ops: The Line

Best Adapted Video Game

The Walking Dead: The Game

Telltale Games

Also nominated: Disney Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two, LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroes, Transformers: Fall of Cybertron

Best Downloadable Content

Dawnguard for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Bethesda Softworks/Bethesda Game Studios

Also nominated: Leviathan for Mass Effect 3; Mechromancer Pack for Borderlands 2; Perpetual Testing Initiative for Portal 2

Best Downloadable Game

The Walking Dead: The Game

Telltale Games

Also nominated: Fez, Journey, Sound Shapes

Best Social Game

You Don't Know Jack

Jellyvision Games

Also nominated: Draw Something, Marvel: Avengers Alliance, SimCity Social

Game of the Decade

Half Life 2

Valve Corporation

Also nominated: Batman: Arkham City, BioShock, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Mass Effect 2, Portal, Red Dead Redemption, Shadow of the Colossus, Wii Sports, World of Warcraft

On a long drive back yesterday evening I heard over the radio that President Obama, using the White House bully pulpit in deficit negotiations, had opened a social media campaign designed to pressure Congressional Republicans. If tax cuts set to expire on Jan. 1 do so, middle-class families would take a cash hit of around $2,000 in 2013. So the president's media folks created #my2K as a Twitter hashtag. Use it, he said, to tell everyone what #my2K means to you and your family.

"Well, #my2K means My Player in NBA 2K13," was my first thought. And I wasn't alone.

My2K is indeed the shorthand for the single sign-on account in NBA 2K from NBA 2K12 to NBA 2K13 this year. It hasn't trended like other NBA 2K hashtags have, but it has come up. Still, there's the 2K branding, and the fact that President Obama has appeared in NBA 2K since NBA 2K11, either in the game's championship cinematic or, amusingly, as a coach after 2016 in the game's career modes.

So, write your elected representatives. Tell them what #my2K really means to you.

The state of NBA 2K13's roster update has been uncommonly bad to date. In the most recent episode of the Press Row Podcast, Operation Sports' normally placid Steve Noah needed bleeping when discussing the slowness and inaccuracy of the update. "There's been three players added in the latest update," Steve said, in a podcast recorded on Sunday. "Thirty are missing."

These are players missing from their correct teams either as trades or free-agent signings. The update released on Tuesday has 25 players missing, adding only two new names. Moreover, Pastapadre notes that only one player has had his ratings adjusted since the season began—Landry Fields, whose one-point drop seems so arbitrary as to be pointless.

"This is crazy," Noah said, pointing out that the player population of the NBA is about 450, compared to 1,700 in the NFL, which gets a weekly update for Madden NFL 13. And hex-edited rosters—the kind that exposed the NBA's Christmas uniforms before the league had announced them, appear to be damaged by the 2K Share service, requiring additional workarounds just to be usable. So community efforts to provide workable, reliable rosters two weeks into the season are being thwarted, according to Noah.

The game still has the time to update new floor designs and put Mike D'Antoni on the Lakers' sideline in the wake of Mike Brown's firing (this wasn't too hard; D'Antoni's likeness was already in the game as an assistant on the 2012 U.S. National Team). Yes, many of the roster moves don't concern marquee performers that gamers look too. Still, this is what you sign up for when you promise simulation quality realism, and this isn't a title update. The content is sent out over the 2K Sports servers. The tardiness of a fully accurate roster, now two weeks into the season, requires some kind of an explanation by now.

NBA 2K13 Week Two Roster Update: Mike D'Antoni Added, Still Missing 25 Players [Pastapadre. Image via Operation Sports.]

Around sports video gaming's water cooler, much is being made of NBA 2K13 clocking in as October's No. 1 seller on the NPD charts, and it is indeed an affirmation for sports video gamers as a whole. Sports video games are, culturally, treated as an outlier in core video gaming, yet they routinely send two, three or even four titles to the NPD's top 10, a kind of Dow Jones Industrial Average for the gaming industry.

But the NPD figure is decreasingly relevant, as it specifically excludes digital sales, the one channel looked to for growth in a business still losing sales—of traditional, full-version video games—month to month. Further, a game releasing on multiple platforms has an advantage as every title sold, regardless of platform, counts toward its overall total. NBA 2K13 released on the 360, PlayStation 3 and PC—and PSP and Wii. Resident Evil 6, by all accounts a bad game, made No. 2 releasing on just two consoles, albeit with an assist from marketing and brand incumbency.

Still, the game's delayed Steam release—it came out Oct. 30—meant that for a full month, PC users who wanted NBA 2K13 had to buy a physical copy—the kind that counts toward the NPD charts. NBA 2K12 released on Steam on Oct. 4, 2011 and NBA 2K11 on Oct. 6, 2010, the same dates as their console launch.

Sports video games frequently show up in the NPD's top 10, and the global popularity of the leagues they emulate is only one reason. The other is that they have been, ever since EA Sports canned Madden on the PC, predominantly console-based products, with a strong majority of sales coming at retail locations. 2K Sports is, to its credit, one of the few sports publishers willing to deliver a PC version of everything it makes (although that will not include MLB 2K next year. FIFA and Tiger Woods PGA Tour likewise offer PC releases.)

Still, it appears to me that this launch month was all about selling through retail channels to make sure NBA 2K13 outperformed its predecessors—and it did, by 19 percent more in October 2012 than the phenomenal NBA 2K11 sold in Oct. 2010.

Across the office at 2K Games, however, XCOM: Enemy Unknown didn't even make the top 10. NPD said 114,000 units of it were sold though, again, that's physical media sales only. It's preposterous to think XCOM's cash register appeal stops there, when Steam showed 70,000 PC users playing it, concurrently, on the weekend after its launch.

You can't convince me that XCOM isn't one of October's 10 best sellers across all channels. You also can't convince me NBA 2K13 is really No. 1 for the month, either.

It's a year-round best seller and by all rights has never been better, but Ben Sin, writing for Kill Screen Daily, says NBA 2K13's competitive balance—online anyway—is completely thrown out of whack by the superteams that make the real league such a compelling story for basketball fans.

"Whereas the Chicago Bulls, despite having only one all star for most of the past 28 months, were able to become a top team with hard-nosed defense and grit, the digital Bulls are simply overmatched anytime they play against a team with a cache of stars, like, say the Knicks," Sin writes.

He has a point, even if the tendency to pick the league's best team in multiplayer is hardly peculiar to NBA 2K13. The NBA, with five players on the floor and a total of 12 on the bench, has the smallest personnel size of the major team sports, making superstars' acquisition a lot more impactful than in sports with 9 or 11 on a side, especially one with specialized positions.

But any football team with a talented quarterback, running back, and receiver or tight end will be favored in online multiplayer regardless of the quality of the offensive line or the defense. The difference is that those positions are largely confined to a few interactions. Tom Brady throws the ball, Adrian Peterson runs the ball and sometimes catches it, Calvin Johnson catches it and then runs with it. Furthermore, in video games, their success is much more dependent on teammates' execution than in basketball, especially considering how frequently isolation plays are run in online hoops.

There are more ways for a superstar to beat you in basketball, and a team with three of them has a huge advantage, especially in online multiplayer, which rarely looks like the sport it simulates. Even simulation quality games give a tremendous weight to offense, probably because that's where the most fun comes in playing a video game.

I'm not sure I go along with his final recommendation for fixing the imbalance, but Sin's correct in pointing out that NBA 2K13's multiplayer—almost through no fault of its own—is made very routine by the same thing that makes the real league so exciting. My recommendation: Start up a franchise in MyTeam, whose online multiplayer does a decent job of matching you to teams of similar strength. But give the essay a read, it makes a valid point that developers should consider more.

Lebron James didn't kill the NBA, but he did kill NBA videogames [Kill Screen Daily]