twitter.com/thesportsgamer

Because I’ve been working for the weekend (and will be on the weekend), I dug through my twitter feed to find the latest sports gaming nuggets for y’all.

• Operation Sports has a very cool interview with Tecmo Bowl Throwback Producer, Mike Fahrny. You can read it here. Definitely looking forward to this one, especially the multiplayer and editing options.
• What’s been hyped as the greatest soccer game of all time got some new gameplay videos. Yep, FIFA World Cup 2010 is spotlighted at gametrailers with a couple new and juicy vids. Another one I’m eagerly anticipating.
• Oh, in related news – FIFA World Cup 2010 won’t be coming out early in the UK despite a previously projected date of late March on Amazon.co.uk. That has since been changed to April 30.
• Colin McRae lives on! The Edge confirms Dirt 3.
• Operation Sports has some new screenshots of MotoGP 09/10, due out March 23 for PS3 and Xbox 360. Not a racing series I usually get up for, but the game sounds pretty cool. You can check out a demo on PSN/XBL now.
• NBA Jam teaser trailer, courtesy (again) of Gametrailers.
• Looks like the original Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater is coming to iPhone. There isn’t word yet on whether your phone doubles as a skateboard peripheral. [Games Radar]
• Great, just great. Another day with two big sports releases. [Kotaku]

And now some site updates…

• Have you seen our videos of Triple Crown Championship Snowboarding and Spongebob’s Boating Bash on the channel yet? No? Can you even say Triple Crown Championship Snowboarding without launching spittle all over the place? We’ll do some quickie Wiiviews on these two next week.
• Our coverage of Racquet Sports continues with a full review of this fine Wii Sports-style take on, well, racquet sports. Watch for it sometime this weekend (i.e. Saturday or Sunday).
• I haven’t forgot about the MLB games yet, we continue our coverage next week with some more current-gen features and a look at MLB 2K10 for the Wii.

Tiger Woods will don the cover of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11, but won’t be alone as Rory McIlroy, the Northern Ireland phenom will share the spotlight with Woods.

While the choice to go with two players isn’t new for EA – just look at Madden NFL 10 with Larry Fitzgerald and Troy Polamalu – one does wonder if going with the duo takes a bit of the heat off a Woods solo cover. Then again, EA is emphasizing its new Ryder Cup mode as well – so the cover does fit the billing there, flags and all.

The Ryder Cup mode sounds especially compelling, allowing for up to 24 players online to take each other on in teams of up to 12.

Support for Sony’s upcoming motion control Arc peripheral will be included as well, even though it hasn’t been released yet. This was true for the original Wii release as EA supported MotionPlus well before the release of that product as well.

Do you have any strong opinions on EA going forward with Tiger? With the bevy of big name sponsorships dropping rank, I’m really not surprised EA stuck around. It’s as much a Tiger brand as an EA brand, as “Tiger Woods” is almost as psynonymous as kleenex when it comes to golf gaming. The game’s sales may suffer a tad – but that may be more for economic reasons than anything else.

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11 hits stores on June 8 for the PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii. The official site can be found here.

Today we take a look at the pocket size versions of MLB 10: The Show and MLB 2K10, both which made their way onto Sony’s PSP this season.

First – and not really catching me by suprise – is that both titles have seemingly dropped infrastructure support for the long haul. This is a concerning trend among PSP titles these days and doesn’t seem to be letting up anytime soon. Only major releases with online multiplayer in mind (like SOCOM Fireteam Bravo 3) seem to be getting infrastructure support these days. Both games allow for ad-hoc play, and I’m not sure whether you can play through the PS3 on ad-hoc party for these ones – but if you wanted to play online for PS3 you probably are playing these games for PS3…

Also, I still don’t understand why SCEA eliminated the King of the Diamond mode from the stellar MLB 08. For a quick blast of fun on the go, that was easily a better choice than the quite stale Home Run Derby that is included here. As for 2K’s response, the Home Run Derby career is a cool little mode (that hasn’t changed since last year) that at least offers a little bit of the mini-game style diversions that are almost necessary for handheld games these days.

Read on after the jump…
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Before I get back into the current-gen versions of MLB 10: The Show and MLB 2K10, let’s not forget the other platforms both games have been released on. One of them is the almighty PS2, which simply refuses to die (though the prospects look poor for it living much further outside of August’s Madden NFL 11 release).

I gave both games a shot on the PS2 and while in my limited play time I can’t quite say which one is more deserving of your money, I was able to form some solid early impressions. Read on for those as well as a hearty offering of gameplay video…
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Somewhat surprising news out of the 2K camp is that the NHL 2K series will not be put on hiatus – it will only be put on Wii.

That’s right, NHL 2K11 will be a Wii exclusive, something that crossed my mind as a possibility for the franchise, if only because of the unpredicted success of the product on the console last year. Just as recently as last year, SCEA’s NBA 10 franchise was released only for the PSP in an effort to restructure (at least what was said at the time) for a possible current-gen reboot in 2010.

2K Sports President Ben Feder remarked that, “We’re taking the year off on our PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions. We’re doing that because we’re so committed to competing and winning, and we think those platforms need a breather so we can go back to redesign and rethink as opposed to continuing to iterate.” One would seem to think those remarks point to an eventual reboot of the current-gen iterations, or at the very least a wait-and-see approach.

Well, it’ll be a different year for hockey games to say the least. We’ll have two titles that won’t necessarily be competing against each other (at least not in single platform households). Will EA branch it’s series out to Wii? I doubt it. Will 2K come back to the PS3 and Xbox 360? Mmm, we’ll see. For now it’s at least nice to know something is spared in the sports gaming world. Can 2K now come out and say they’re bringing back College Hoops? Please…