Take-Two Inks Exclusive Baseball Deal

EA took the NFL license from Take-Two Interactive. Now, Take-Two has acquired a seven-year MLBPA exclusive deal to use the players' likenesses in all future baseball games beginning with the 2006 season. There is a catch, however. The console manufacturers (Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo) still have rights to produce their own official baseball games with the real players. So, Electronic Arts could just team with Microsoft, for example, to continue to release their EA Baseball games. Take-Two is currently working on securing other rights to baseball such as official stadiums, team names, logos, uniforms, etc.

In related news, Take-Two Interactive has purchased Visual Concepts (game developer) from Sega for $24 million, meaning Sega Sports no longer exists.

Sony has confirmed another design flaw in the PSP. Of the four main action buttons on Sony's Playstation Portable, the "square" button is not as responsive as the other three buttons. Sony states that this is actually the way the PSP was designed and game developers will just have to factor that "flaw" into the programming of their games. The button was so close to the screen that the button's switch underneath it was moved off to the right.

Finally, some rumors of Nintendo's next console, Revolution, have surfaced. Obviously, new Mario and Zelda games are in the works, but a new controller feature may be seen as well. The new controller could have motion and tilt sensitivity thanks to gyroscope technology. The other rumors consist of the following: broadband gaming out of the box, two processors will power the Revolution, and the game disc format will be HD DVD (not Sony's Blu-ray).