A couple years ago, Cullen Loeffler was sore at EA Sports because they had deliberately left the Minnesota Vikings' long snapper out of Madden NFL, for years, because of roster space restrictions. It was an amusing kerfuffle, mostly because who the hell is really looking to play as a long snapper on special teams, anyway.

Well, that's one player. The University of South Alabama has about 85, and 15,000 students enrolled, and a bunch more alumni, and is a full member of the Sun Belt Conference, and they're none too pleased they won't be appearing in NCAA Football 13 when the game releases in July. This season will be USA's debut year in Division I-A Football Bowl Subdivision play, and while they're ineligible for postseason bowls, three other schools making their Division I-A FBS debut—Massachusetts, Texas-San Antonio and Texas State—will be included.

An EA Sports spokesperson told a South Alabama blog that "We did not receive confirmation that they were changing to a full FBS schedule this year until it was too late for inclusion in NCAA Football 13. South Alabama will be included in NCAA Football 14."

But the same blog points out that South Alabama declared its intentions, back in 2009, to move to Division I-A FBS play—earlier than any of the other three teams joining Division I-A FBS play this year. Further, South Alabama is playing a full schedule in the Sun Belt Conference, which is a full Division I-A FBS conference featured in the game.

Yesterday evening, I pinged an EA Sports producer for an answer and was referred over to the same spokeswoman, who didn't immediately reply. While I thought this might be explainable by the fact USA is not bowl-eligible in its provisional year—and would require a fix to the game's extremely complicated scheduling logic that may not be worth it for a single season, that doesn't make much sense if the other three provisional schools are included. Further, Western Kentucky was added into the game's Division I-A FBS lineup with no problems back in 2008.

It may not mean a lot to me—I went to a Division I-A FBS BCS-member school, so I'm one of the Haves in college football even if N.C. State and the ACC only technically belong to that club . South Alabama is not a school I'm particularly interested in playing as or playing against, either, but that speaks only for me. I do know it's a tremendous affirmation when your school—and South Alabama was chartered as a university in 1963— is included in mass-market media, whether that's a national ESPN broadcast or a simulation of one in a video game. Whatever the reason for South Alabama's exclusion, it's regrettable and an unfortunate slight.

EA Sports Drops the Ball [Jags Jungle]

A couple years ago, Cullen Loeffler was sore at EA Sports because they had deliberately left the Minnesota Vikings' long snapper out of Madden NFL, for years, because of roster space restrictions. It was an amusing kerfuffle, mostly because who the hell is really looking to play as a long snapper on special teams, anyway.

Well, that's one player. The University of South Alabama has about 85, and 15,000 students enrolled, and a bunch more alumni, and is a full member of the Sun Belt Conference, and they're none too pleased they won't be appearing in NCAA Football 13 when the game releases in July. This season will be USA's debut year in Division I-A Football Bowl Subdivision play, and while they're ineligible for postseason bowls, three other schools making their Division I-A FBS debut—Massachusetts, Texas-San Antonio and Texas State—will be included.

An EA Sports spokesperson told a South Alabama blog that "We did not receive confirmation that they were changing to a full FBS schedule this year until it was too late for inclusion in NCAA Football 13. South Alabama will be included in NCAA Football 14."

But the same blog points out that South Alabama declared its intentions, back in 2009, to move to Division I-A FBS play—earlier than any of the other three teams joining Division I-A FBS play this year. Further, South Alabama is playing a full schedule in the Sun Belt Conference, which is a full Division I-A FBS conference featured in the game.

Yesterday evening, I pinged an EA Sports producer for an answer and was referred over to the same spokeswoman, who didn't immediately reply. While I thought this might be explainable by the fact USA is not bowl-eligible in its provisional year—and would require a fix to the game's extremely complicated scheduling logic that may not be worth it for a single season, that doesn't make much sense if the other three provisional schools are included. Further, Western Kentucky was added into the game's Division I-A FBS lineup with no problems back in 2008.

It may not mean a lot to me—I went to a Division I-A FBS BCS-member school, so I'm one of the Haves in college football even if N.C. State and the ACC only technically belong to that club . South Alabama is not a school I'm particularly interested in playing as or playing against, either, but that speaks only for me. I do know it's a tremendous affirmation when your school—and South Alabama was chartered as a university in 1963— is included in mass-market media, whether that's a national ESPN broadcast or a simulation of one in a video game.

You could still create South Alabama through the game's TeamBuilder feature, or import any of the several user-created versions of USA available on the TeamBuilder site. But whatever the reason for South Alabama's exclusion, it's regrettable and an unfortunate slight.

EA Sports Drops the Ball [Jags Jungle]

Robert Griffin III may be the cover athlete for NCAA Football 13 but the former Baylor quarterback is not an optimal superstar headlining the game's demo, which released last week. He's skilled enough, but the new "Reaction Time"—the signal feature of NCAA 13's Heisman and Road to Glory modes—is really showcased when you're running the ball, not throwing it.

To recap, "Reaction Time" is a bullet-time modifier, activated with the left trigger, and it will be introduced only in the single-player career modes for NCAA 13—that means the traditional Road to Glory created-player career, and the new Heisman mode, in which you may take a real-life college great and play him for a single season at any school.

In a spread offense, a player like Griffin should be deadly, but the brake on his speed and versatility—magnified by Reaction Time—is the lack of a tuck-and-run command when the quarterback is behind the line of scrimmage. Quarterbacks become full-strength ball carriers when they're past the line of scrimmage, or—theoretically—if all of the receivers are covered, your quarterback will start to scramble, but I didn't get into enough instances to confirm if this actually was happening. It also removes the threat of calling a deep pass from a shotgun formation and just deciding to bust it open from the snap, which could have game-breaking balance issues when bullet time comes into play.

So while NCAA 13 gives us an unusual look at two different game modes in a free demo, allowing you to play on or as one of six teams (the file is just shy of 2 GB on the Xbox 360) it doesn't really showcase the most visceral gameplay feature of the new Heisman mode. New sack-dodging commands, mapped to the right stick, make a moot point of slowing down time when your quarterback is set up in the pocket. I suppose you can see the field and the defense more clearly in Reaction Time (the camera does zoom in over your player's shoulder, though) but I still threw five interceptions with Griffin—on Oregon—against USC. The verdict, even after several games in the demo, is pretty clear—Reaction Time is primarily a running back's tool.

That's the situation in which I used Reaction Time when I first saw it back in April at EA Sports, using Eddie George (playing for N.C. State, of course). There, commands for jukes and tight cuts and throwing stiffarms become more deliberate and functional. Reaction Time caps out at 15 seconds and is tied to a player's awareness—in Heisman mode, you can expect to have a 15 second reservoir from the start. It will be depleted as you use it, and refilled based on the success of the play.

I got the feeling I could have used Reaction Time on every play with Griffin, though its net effect would be to slow down plays more than it would give me spectacular execution within them.

The real selling point of the demo comes when you play one of three matchups in a simulated Dynasty week. Here you can play an early east coast start, a late afternoon game, or a prime-time nightcap, and catch the studio update audio that ESPN's Rece Davis will provide, up to 10 times in a game. This delivered as advertised. Changes of possession brought in results from around the nation in games that had finished before my LSU-Alabama tilt. There was no halftime studio update, but I was told that was removed from the demo because of file-size restrictions. You'll get one in NCAA 13.

As the game wore on and late scores rolled in, Davis' audio became briefer, especially if the matchup didn't involve recognizable conference rivals. I should say that all of the scores you encounter in the demo will be the same: State beats Virginia 48-28 every time; likewise, Texas beats Texas Tech 34-32 and Stanford beats Colorado 28-21. It won't be that way in the full game—they had to strip out the simulation logic for, again, file size restrictions. Davis' situational audio was reasonably strong, but there was some disconnect—such as in the Stanford-Colorado result. Davis one time told me the Cardinal left the Buffaloes "no breathing room whatsoever," a curious description for a game decided by a touchdown at the end.

The gameplay played mostly true to what I was shown down in Florida. Though I didn't see a lot of the CPU-controlled dropbacks, I was running a spread offense most of the time, which doesn't have a lot of 5- or 7-step drops. Still, screen passes didn't seem to have the kind of quarterback drift that really sucks in the pass rush before dumping it off. So be prepared to get rid of it fast.

Based on the demo, NCAA 13 plays a lot like its predecessor, while teasing you with the chance to play as a named college great, with a funky new gridiron superpower. The presentational support, if you look for it, is the true distinction. In simulating several games, I paused to the menu and watched the score crawl around the regions, the same way I do when a live game is on. I noted Florida going up 14-7 on Missouri in those two school's first-ever conference matchup. This will provide much needed atmosphere and context to the story of the season you create in your new Dynasty mode.

But if you want to go balling out of control in Heisman Mode, with Reaction Time, my suggestion is to skip Andre Ware, Doug Flutie or Charlie Ward, and go straight for Barry Sanders, Eddie George or Archie Griffin.

It's dark, it's light, it's green, it's red. It's full of aliens that want to eat you (or marines that need to be eaten). And there's a bar where you can go to wash away your woes of losses in liquid happiness. Meet the reveal of the new Docking map. You can play it as of sometime tonight (potentially tomorrow) when it's made available.

If you didn't know about Natural Selection 2, where strategy meets first-person shooter, it's definitely a game to keep your eye on.

Some of us play games without worying about how much they cost. Others, like commenter Sol, want to make sure they're getting a fair amount of entertaiment for their money. How do you measure the value of a video game?

Is there any way you guys quantify whether you get your money's worth on a purchase? Or is it a gut feeling? I've heard people talk about the "dollar per hour" way of telling whether it's worth buying a game or not, but sometimes that just doesn't apply. At what point do you generally feel satisfied with your money? Were there any games you bought that made you feel cheated?

I tend to go with the dollar-per-hour for online games, but it's more of a gut feeling for single-player. If a game can't hold my interest online for very long I'll feel cheated, but if a five hour campaign just blew me away I won't regret spending my money. I felt cheated most when I bought games that I simply didn't like. Prototype was the only game I pre-ordered but didn't finish, and I wish I could get that $60 back. Otherwise I only buy if I'm pretty confident I'll play the game.

Hodor hodor hodor hodor this game.

Hodor would hodor hodor. Hodor! Hodor hodor hodor.

Hodor? Hodor hodor hodor. Hodor.

Hodor Jason Tedeschi.

Not many games look and feel like Papo & Yo. If you need to categorize it, you can call the upcoming PS3 exclusive a magical realism puzzle platformer. It's a game where you put cardboard boxes on your head to get hints and move houses to get across gaps. But, from what I played over the last few months, genre categorization really don't capture how Papo & Yo comes across as a sweetly poignant metaphor for an impoverished, abuse-filled childhood.

I've written about Papo & Yo before. It draws on the boyhood experiences of Vander Caballero, putting players in the role of a young boy who's chasing his sister through a shantytown wonderland. A key part of the game comes from teaming up with Monster, the giant pink creature goes on destructive rampages when he eats the frogs found throughout the game. Caballero says openly that Monster is an analogue for his alcoholic father and that making the game helps purge and repurpose the bad parts of his early life.

It stuck in my head when a commenter said that "[I] don't know if I feel like paying for someone else's psychotherapy" in response to a recent look at Papo & Yo. When I asked Caballero about that statement last week at E3, he laughed. To him, that sentiment shows how much maturing the video game medium needs to do.

"If we were at the Cannes Film Festival right now and I told you, ‘I'm making a short film about my personal backstory,' nobody would even care," Caballero offers. "Because it's a game and because it's so early [in the lifespan of the medium]—and only a few people are actually putting their stories in the forefront—when you do it, people go, "Oh no, it's not for me." But, every piece of entertainment comes from a backstory. In reality, that's what we love. We love the backstories because we're no different from the storytellers and audiences throughout history. If this were another medium, no one would even mention it."

Caballero doesn't feel particularly vulnerable baring aspects his childhood either. "There was a really great Facebook post that I read the other day that said "a creative person is a child who survived," he says. "What saved me when I was a kid and going through the alcoholism and abuse was my imagination. I'm still a kid at heart, and that has everything to do with my imagination."

"So it really comes easy for me, for example, when we were doing the puzzles that let you pick up cardboard boxes and have big houses moving [across the screen in response.] People say, "How did you come up with that one?" It came to me all at once. You just have to let go and and remember what it was like to enjoy being a kid."

But why bring a game with all that child-like whimsy to sit alongside the big, noisy, bloody-spectacle games that tend to dominate the attention spans of E3 attendees? It's because he himself worked on games like those, says Caballero. "I was doing those games at Electronic Arts when I was the design director for Army of Two," he elaborates. "You get out of school and you get into the industry. And you love it. You go, "Oh wow, this is great." And you're doing what you always dreamed of. And then you think that the industry will evolve."

But, as far as Caballero can see, that evolution didn't come. "Right now, I'm essentially playing the same games I played 10 years ago. The shooters, the violence… Yeah, there's minor improvements. But the innovation has plateaued. And that really pisses me off, because I want to grow old playing games. I don't want to stop. To think that you are bored is terrible for the industry. I decided we have to be responsible and actually bring these backstories into the games that we make. Maybe it's not going to be for everyone, but it might speak to a few people who feel the same way. And I think that independents have to fill that hole." To that end, Vander and other refugees from AAA development formed Minority Media, a game development studio based in Montreal.

"I think what happened actually is there is a lot of people who are afraid of leaving the industry because it's a culture of fear inside the corporations. You hear things like ‘If you leave, you will never be able to last.' ‘You won't find another job.' There's no money out there. If you step out of a corporation, you'll die. It's not true at all. There are so many opportunities out there. And then the other stuff is just golden handcuffs. That they give you the golden handcuff. Why would you like to leave? You get good money. You get recognition. You get to travel. They give you development power. Why would you leave? And the reason you would like to leave is because, in my case, I felt responsible to the industry for doing something more meaningful."

Caballero wants to stir emotions with Papo & Yo but not all of them will be positive ones. "Yeah, people are going to feel sad. Because it is a sad story. But they are going to grow out of this sadness into joy. We've been testing the game with people. People actually get to feel that sadness, and it's a beautiful feeling. I think in order to be happy we have to be sad. You need a contrast."

If you want to experience a game that offers its own contrast to the brutality common to so many AAA games, Papo & Yo should be out sometime this year on the PlayStation Network. It may not be for you, as Caballero says, but if it is, you'll probably wind up playing through something singularly unique.

A couple of weeks ago, Chris made some gifs of the best ultraviolence from Game of Thrones' "Blackwater" episode.

Yesterday, he put together these fantastic gifs of Mad Men reimagined as a video game.

On something of a dare from one of our lovely Kotaku commenters, Chris has now combined the two ideas, rendering Tyrion Lannister's greatest moment from Blackwater into a Heavy Rain-style video game.

---

Yup, I'd play this:

The last thing I did at E3 last week, before going to LAX and heading home, was to meet with some gentlemen from Riot Games. They greeted me warmly and offered me a seat on the sofa and some coffee, then asked: "So, what do you know about League of Legends?"

"Honestly?" I blurted the first thing that came into my head: "It makes a bunch of my Twitter friends use the word 'jungle' as a verb. And that's about it."

They laughed. "Well, now we know how your friends like to play."

Of course, I did know slightly more than that. It's hard to miss talk of League of Legends these days. It coined the term MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena), though not the genre itself. LoL—which is, incidentally, the best game acronym—launched in October 2009, and three years later, in October 2012, will be offering a $5 million prize pool for its biggest competition. As of November 2011, they had 11.5 million players, of whom 1.4 million were concurrently playing at any one time. (Newer numbers have not yet been made public. I asked; they're "higher" now, but that's all anyone would say.)

League of Legends is kind of a big deal.

The basic idea is this: a player logs in and selects a Champion to play, for a 5 vs 5 match that will last roughly half an hour. During the match, the two teams each start at their own base, and must advance to capture the other team's Nexus. The field of play divides into three "lanes," filled with obstacles and turrets and minions and all manner of other things designed to kill you thoroughly.

Games last roughly half an hour, which is meant to feel kind of like a "RPG microcosm." Every round, all players start at level 1 and can advance to level 18, gaining equipment and skills nearly by the minute. Start powerless, end powerful—and hopefully, want to jump in and do it all over again. As of right now, there are 99 champions from which players can choose, and Riot tries to keep each one unique and distinct from the others. Some are free (and the selection rotates); some cost real-world money. Players can buy appearance skins and so on for their favorite champions as well.

I nodded along. The basics were easy enough to understand, on paper. But something about League's meteoric rise still wasn't clicking with me.

The team showed me a recording of a Korean championship match, one that close to 4 million viewers had watched live. I had no idea what the announcer was saying, but he certainly was enthusiastic, and the crowd watching live in an arena was going absolutely wild. Spells were flying everywhere on screen. As best I could tell, I was watching e-sports chaos.

The guys from Riot all grinned, nodding along. Clearly, this was a favorite. And other than "a PvP video game," I had no idea what I was watching.

"The best way to understand it is to play it," I was cheerfully told, and I found myself being ushered to the desktop computer in the corner and creating an account.

Ryan "Morello" Scott was going to be my teacher. The PR manager, Chris, introduced him as "a very loud man." There is some truth to that. But he was also a very friendly and patient man. While I was fiddling with the details of registration, Morello asked me, tentatively: "So what do you usually play, in MMOs and games like that? Magic, or..."

I always have a ready answer for that. "Rogues. Always rogue types. Sneak and stab and snipe, that's me!"

"Assassin," the room universally agreed. Then they looked over what was actually available (not an Assassin), and set me up on Ashe, a frost archer.

The tutorials, for what it's worth, are delightfully ridiculous. You follow the instructions of a disembodied voice, a woman's rich contralto that booms, "GOOD JOB!" when you've done something particularly tricky like, say, moving. Or clicking a button. I felt embarrassed to be receiving such virtual adulation for performing utterly basic tasks.

But then I completed the first tutorial and advanced to the second, which takes the form of a standard match only populated entirely by bots. By then, I was wishing for more praise. Or really, wishing to deserve it. My hands, trained by many an RPG, FPS, and MMO, kept wandering back to WASD even though I needed QWER to cast. I was moving too slowly, not paying enough attention to everything around me. I learned to focus on offense, but forgot defense; then, got switched.

After a while, I thought maybe I was starting to get the hang of it. Just maybe. "You really are a rogue," Morello mused. I hadn't realized it, but he pointed out that I was automatically trying to flank every turret and shoot it from behind.

"I don't think we have a hit from behind bonus," a voice behind me pointed out. "We could," another responded.

It didn't occur to me to use the landscape to my advantage at first, until I was told I could go into the tall grass and bushes to hide, recover, and look for goodies. I regularly, thoughtlessly ran headlong for the nearest cover after that, until being reminded that the other guys could do so, too...

I played for about forty minutes total, all in tutorial modes. That's not nearly enough time to become an expert, or even to become competently fluent. And although I was making progress across the field in my bot fight, I had to let it go after taking out a half-dozen turrets. Our appointment time was over; I would not be able to get Ashe to the other team's Nexus. At least, not that day.

One thing became immediately clear: for all that League of Legends has an extremely competitive and often crass fan base, these guys really want everyone to be able at least to try their game. The bot-game tutorials weren't an original part of it, but added along the way, to let players (like me) work up to the challenge of playing with other people. It seems intimidating from the outside—a world with its own highly specialized language, where everyone's waiting to yell at you—but from the inside, Riot's working hard to make it approachable.

I get it, now. I can see why so many fans would keep coming back, and why they'd enjoy watching skilled teams work together on the field to take each other out. There's always something going on, and some new trick to learn.

And I finally learned what "jungling" is. It is a term who like to hide in things, grab all the good stuff, and choose their attacks carefully. Making one's way through all that grass without being seen? Sounds like the right challenge for me.

After another round or ten with the bots. Just for practice...

Having recently become a parent, I can say that the loss of my child is one of the most terrible things I can imagine. I don't know if I'd want to play that tapping into the emotions surrounding such an event. But, at E3 last week, our own Chris Person took a look at the game made by student from the Danish Academy of Digital Interactive Entertainment and got one of those developers to talk about the design ideas behind A Mother's Inferno. As harrowing as the journey seems, I do like the idea using a game as a experiential metaphor for moving past a terrible life experience. You can check out more info on A Mother's Inferno here.