A federal judge denied the NFL's request for a stay on judge Susan Nelson's ruling to lift the lockout. This means that as of Friday, the 2011 NFL year will begin, and the league will go back to mostly business-as-usual while the NFL continues to attempt to appeal the decision.

With the NFL draft beginning later tonight, the Chicago Bears run for a victory in Super Bowl XLVI will begin!

Well, yesterday, Sony finally came out and admitted that the PlayStation Network (PSN) had been hacked. Apparently, it took them one or two whole days to find out themselves, and then another whole week before they told their customers. Well, I guess I can understand that they wouldn't want to tell anybody that the names, birth dates, email addresses, phone numbers, usernames, passwords, and possibly also credit card info, billing address, and the answers to security questions to all of their 77 million accounts were hacked.

I wouldn't want to admit to that either.

But as a customer, it sure would have been nice to have been notified earlier that I needed to start changing my passwords and security question answers to any other online services that I am a subscriber to. Or that I should start double checking my bank accounts and credit reports for possible fraud.

But these sorts of things happen. A data theft this bad has never happened before, but anytime you put any personal information in an online service, you are taking a risk. So I can't really be too mad that this happened.

What I can be mad about, however, is that Sony pretty much begged for this to happen.

A few posts ago, I previewed the first gameplay trailer for NCAA Football 2012. I didn't really have the time to go into depth about what the trailer showed and what the trailer didn't show, and I accepted the trailer on face value. Now, I'd like to spend some time and break down this trailer in a similar fashion as the Madden NFL 2012 teaser from back in March. Except unlike the Madden teaser, this time, I can actually see what's going on!

Table of contents

• First, a little eye candy: Presentation
• Onto the main attraction: Gameplay!
• Will the game really be "better"?
  • Line play
  • Tumbleweeds keep on a rollin'
  • Receiver play and coverage
• Has it earned my $60 yet?

First, a little eye candy: Presentation

Before I get into the gameplay trailer, I want to show you the presentation and tradition trailer that was released at about the same time.

There's some very nice stuff in this trailer!

Time travel is a difficult subject. It also happens to be a very popular subject of many stories in books, television, movies, video games, and so on. But human kind's limited understanding of the workings of time and the possibility of time travel (especially the limited understanding of the casual book reader, movie viewer, or video game player) leads to depictions of this subject being wrought with logical inconsistencies, paradoxes, and plot holes.

One of the most common problems with time travel stories is the creation of paradoxes. Of these, some of the most common paradoxes are the "predestination paradox", the "bootstrap paradox", and the "grandfather paradox" (or the "reverse grandfather" paradox). You're probably familiar with all of these, but you may not know them by name, so I'll take a moment to define them for you:

This April has been a busy week for video games, and a very weird one, too. And the news has varied from good, to bad, to ugly, and everything in between. Here's some of the stuff that caught my attention:

Table of Contents

• Nintendo to reveal Wii 2 at E3 this June?
• PlayStation Network down for days
• Portal 2 available
• First NCAA Football 12 gameplay video
• Civilization V patch due out