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Ex-CART and Formula 1 driver Jacques Villeneuve once (jokingly) said that his favorite part of piloting open-wheel racers was listening to the radio while he burned around corners at 200 mph. You'll get the same thrill in Need from Speed NITRO.

NITRO was released Tuesday for Nintendo Wii and DS and one of the coolest parts of blowing past your opponents is hearing music from 26 different artists on its bumping soundtrack.

Several different types of music are on the NITRO tracklist, from Canadian hip-hop mogul k-os to the riffs of British alt-rock kings Placebo. You're going to find something you like with NITRO's soundtrack. For an audio sample of what to expect, click here.

We're starting a new contest for Need for Speed fans on Twitter this week, the NFS Scavenger Hunt. Every morning on our Twitter account (www.twitter.com/needforspeed) I will be asking you, our loyal followers to Twitpic something car related, so follow us on Twitter and keep your camera ready for a chance to win!

The first NFS Scavenger Hunt was a success, with 14 people Twitpic’ing a Ford Mustang, but you’ve got to be quick, so keep your camera phone locked and loaded.  Each scavenger hunt will end at 5pm PST and the winner will be announced the morning after.  Winners will receive Need for Speed swag.

Keep your browser locked on our Twitter page every morning, because random instructions will be sent out bright and early.

-NFS Kev

The only European city to be featured in Need for Speed NITRO, Madrid is the capital of Spain and the third-largest metropolitan area on the continent.

When you venture over to Madrid, you'll meet a street racer named Luis, whose hot pink Audi R8 and flashy cape leads one to wonder if his street racing career is a cover for his true yearning, the life of a matador.

In this video, the importance of keeping your car in tip-top shape is emphasized, because if you start taking damage, you lose your ability to gain nitro.

Need for Speed NITRO drops in less than 24 hours. Get your copy November 3 for the Nintendo Wii and DS systems. Click here to see the NITRO Madrid video.

Need for Speed NITRO drops tomorrow (November 3) for Nintendo Wii and DS and in that spirit, we're going NITRO on needforspeed.com this week.

In NITRO, you'll be driving through some of the world's most beautiful and creative cities on the planet, from the sexy charm of Rio de Janeiro to the towering skyscrapers and dizzying opulence of Dubai.

We've taken a few screenshots of the cities here so you'll know what's whizzing by your supercharged dream machine while you tear up the streets of NITRO.

Framed by the towering Plaza de Castilla, Madrid is the capital of Spain and one of five cities you'll race at in NITRO.

With a growing economy and burgeoning industry, Singapore is one of the most scenic tracks you'll encounter in NITRO.

Featured in last week's track guide, Cairo is the largest city - with nearly ten million people in the city and surrounding area - in the Arab World and capital of Egypt.

It was recently announced that Rio de Janeiro, Brazil will host the 2016 Summer Olympics. While that may pale in comparison to being one of the five cities featured in NITRO, it's an exciting achievement nonetheless. Rio was featured in our first NITRO track guide.

With the world's second-tallest hotel, the Burj Al Arab, staring down upon racers from its mighty 1,050-foot peak as well as dozens of concrete towers creating much-needed shade over parts of the city, Dubai can be an intimidating place to race.

Strap in and swallow your nerves, because in NITRO there's no time to waste. Tear up the pavement in Dubai and you'll be well on your way to becoming a NITRO king.

Need for Speed NITRO is in stores tomorrow. Check needforspeed.com for the most up-to-date information about NITRO and other NFS games.

Hi kidz!  Well, it took us awhile to get this one up, but we have a great excuse!  The hamsters that power our mixing board came down with a rare case of hamster flu, which made them incapable of running fast enough to keep the gears moving.  We had to nurse them awhile and read them stories, but now they're feeling fine again, thank goodness.  It was a scary couple days there.

Anyway, look, we're on Episode 10 already! What a milestone!  Why, it seems like it was only two weeks ago when we weren't even in double digits yet!

To help us celebrate this big occasion, we brought in Sims senior producer and Jeff's former boss Rachel Bernstein, who just finished up MySims Agents, but has lots more interesting stuff to talk about besides that.  Not that that part isn't interesting. It is!  Also, the game is pretty rockin' too, which I say with all the credibility I can bring as a former games journalist who also happened to work on the game.  I'm particularly fond of the parts that I did.

Okay, so, here it is. Podcast 10.  Bask in the glory!

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Like the title says. What's interesting to me is that NBA Live 10 is actually out, cuz I totally missed that. But hey, that's my fault, not the game's! I have two--no, wait, three!-- good excuses for why I missed this:

1) I've been busy trying to sort out my new gig here at EA.com

2) I live in the Bay Area, so my home team is the Golden State Warriors, which means that the NBA season, for me, is now synonymous with pathetic loserdom

3) I've been playing ANOTHER EA game, Brutal Legend, in stores now!

That said, it's still my job to inform you that a patch is now out for the Xbox 360.  And from the looks of it, it's a big one!   You PS3 people, don't worry: Your patch is coming on the 29th.  I don't know why there's a three-day delay, but hey, don't complain.  At least you get the patch. PC gamers like me? We don't even get the game!   *Sad trombone*

Anyway, there are far too many fixes and enhancements to go into here, so if this is of interest to you, I encourage you to click the link above. I will note one bug fix that is NOT yet in the game, which makes me sad:  The one that would let you permanently erase the Warriors from the game, or at least reverse time back to the day before Latrell Sprewell choked coach PJ Carlesimo in 1997 and started the 12-year-and-counting curse this "team" is on.  And no I'm not bitter.

Also! Hey! Tomorrow brings the very exciting start of NBA Live 10's Dynamic Season mode for both 360 and PS3 players (yay!), which will dynamically update game rosters, stats,  shooting percentages, and more on a DAILY BASIS. I put that in bold and caps on purpose, because for an old dude like me, this is like some kind of insane voodoo magic.  Why, back in my day (the early 1800s) we had to manually input all the updated information ourselves, if the game even let us do that!  Now EA Sports does it all for you, automatically.  Why? Because we care. Because we're awesome.  Because we love you.

Okay, so go get the patch! Me, I'm gonna run over to the store, in shame,  and get the game.

GO WARRIORS!

Hey there, fashion victims! Yes, I'm talking to you.  You with the smelly gaming t-shirt and cargo shorts!  Oh wait, no--that's me.  You may actually be quite the fashion diva.  Nevertheless, we are gathered here today to announce the arrival of the first ever FASHION VICTIMS AWARDS for Battlefield Heroes,  the free-browser based Battlefield game that, if you haven't played yet, you should probably do right now, even if you're at school or work.  The heck with your boss and teachers.  1) It's Friday,  2) You've earned this kind of break, and 3) If they yell at you, just tell them "Jeff Green said it was okay."  That should shut 'em up.

So, anyway, the Battlefield folks, being the festive, holiday-oriented types they are,  are going to release a Halloween clothing bundle in their store, revolving around the zombie and skeleton outfits.  I don't remember reading about those outfits in my World War II books, but okay. It's not my game.  So here's the awesomely cool part:  They want your input.  Yeah, you!  They want your suggestions on outfit combinations to use in the bundle.  It's almost like you're on Project Runway--minus the TV show, models, prizes, and Heidi Klum.  In fact, I don't even know if there ARE prizes for winning.  Maybe?  Or maybe it's just the bragging rights to your friends that you are the Ra'mon of gaming.  And that should be good enough for anybody.

So go here for more info.  And if you haven't played Battlefield Heroes yet, go here. And happy Friday!

love,

Jeff

I was sitting here trying to come up with some clever way to introduce this blog with Beatles lyrics, but, sadly, the Muse has failed me today.

Here's a few sample attempts:
1) Would what you think if I blogged out of tune, would you listen to this podcast anyway?
2) I am he as you are he as you are me and we just recorded this podcast.
3) Let me take you down cuz I'm going to Podcast Episode 9.

See? Pathetic. On the plus side, you still get a podcast about The Beatles: Rock Band! Woot! Chris Foster, the lead designer of the game at Harmonix, graciously sat in with us (via the magic of that newfangled "telephone" contraption) and weathered all the questions we could throw at him, about the game, the Beatles, the Rock Band franchise in general, and more. On a sadder note, this podcast was recorded on the last day of Intern Extraordinaire Dan "Husky Hog" Lingen, who sat in with us one last time to go out all blaze of glory style. But who knows? Maybe if we all protest loudly enough, and, say, storm the EA offices with torches and pitchforks (just kidding, you psychos!) we can get Husky Hog back in the game.

Anyway, stop reading this drivel! Listen to the podcast! You know you will be glad!

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Sometimes you plan things.  And sometimes those plans fail.

In this particular case, our plan was to have Chris Foster, the lead designer of The Beatles: Rock Band as our guest on the podcast.  It was all worked out.  It was like science that way.  Chris was going to call in to our podcast studio from the Harmonix office in Boston  at 2:30 PM. Which he did, in fact, do.  The problem?  We meant 2:30 Pacific time, and he meant 2:30 Eastern time.  This is what you call "miscommunication. The good news is that Chris is going to be on our podcast next week.  So at that time we will be all about Rock Band, both Beatles and otherwise.

Not that this week is bad!  Au contraire, mes petits cochons! For while we did not get Chris Foster,  we DID get our very own Daniel Lingen, a.k.a. "Husky Hog" (@huskyhog), who might just be the hardest working intern EA has ever had in the entire history of the universe.  And boy does this kid have stories to tell! Some of them even made it onto the show! (The rest will be featured some day in a special "EA Podcast Gone Wild!" DVD).

Listen, learn, laugh, love now, as we present you with The EA Podcast, Episode 8!  And as always, leave your feedback here, or at @greenspeak and/or @samanthics!

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Among the many fun things we do here at Electronic Arts--like rolling around and laughing in our beds of money--we sometimes have special events on our big lawn, which is actually called "The Great Lawn." Hopefully that's not like some big top secret EA thing that's gonna get me fired. Because that would suck. "Hey, Jeff, how come you got fired from EA?" "Well, in this blog post, I publicly revealed that our lawn is called the Great Lawn. Now Activision is building their own Great Lawn." [Note to self: Delete this paragraph and start again before publishing!]

Anyway, yeah. We do fun things here at lunch sometime. Can you blame us? We're a game company. What should we do at lunch? Cry? Make PowerPoint presentations? Kill small animals? On Fridays during the summer, we have barbecues, usually accompanied by a live DJ. I gotta be honest with you though: The BBQs don't really do it for me. The meat is usually overcooked, and they charge us more than if we just went into the cafe and got it that way. The DJ's tend to be good, but I always think it must kinda suck to be DJ'ing at a corporate lunch, where everyone is just eating and ignoring you, rather than getting all ravey and dancey and taking the shirts off and stuff. I mean, I do that, but, I'm like the only one who ever does. Also I have a pacifier.

This is not what the EA BBQ's look like.

So last Friday, we had a different kind of special event. In this event, we were all invited to bring our classic/vintage/badass cars out on to the lawn at lunchtime to show them off to our fellow employees. I'm not much of a car guy. I pretty much hate to drive. And I don't have that particular fetish that lots of guys seem to get about engines and carburetors and all that other assorted jibberjabber, probably because I've been living with girls too long and now enjoy shows like Project Runway, Gilmore Girls, and Glee. Heck, I'd probably write this post in girly script, complete with circles to dot the i's, if only EA provided such a tool. But I'm nothing if not loyal and dedicated to all things EA, which is why I felt it was my duty to attend the car show, if for no other reason than that people would see me there and think I was less of a girly-man than I actually am. Support EA plus gain valuable Man Points. Win win.

So you probably want to see pictures of cars. Well, guess what? I don't have any. Just kidding. I have lots. The problem is that not only do I have to click a bunch of buttons and do some HTML rigmarole to share them, but then I also have to match the cars with my list of the makes/models that I wrote down on a piece of paper. But here's where my lack of car knowledge bites me in the proverbial tuchus. It's like a math test I didn't study for. I can't match the photos in column A with the captions in column B. So I'm gonna let you do that for me! It's an interactive blog post! It's a game! For which you win nothing! Yay! Go you!

Okay, so here's what I wrote down on my trusty reporter's notepad (And there's no guarantee that there are photos of all the cars listed. Look, I've been out of journalism for a year--sue me):
1971 Pontiac Firebird
1957 Porsche 550a
1955 Porsche 550 Spyder
1962 Chevrolet Impala Sports Coupe
1972 Alfa Romeo

Okay so here are some of the cars now:

There ya go. Cars. Oh yeah, there was one car out there that I did remember. And that is the Tesla owned by EA's Glorious Leader, John Riccitiello. Here. Here's what it looks like:

The most amazing thing about the Tesla was not necessarily it's super-cool James Bondy look, or that it's all electric, but the fact that it was left unattended on the secret lawn, rather than surrounded by 12 security goons, like it would've been had it been my car and I was the guy running EA. I mean, there we were, all the EA proles, right there. We could have done anything! We could have keyed it! Or TP'ed it! We could have put peanut butter in the locks! That's some serious trust right there. And I think it says everything there is to say, really, about why EA is so awesome. BECAUSE OUR BOSS TRUSTS US WITH HIS TESLA. And let me tell you something right here, Mr. Riccitiello: Your trust is not misplaced! We guarded that Tesla like it was our own. We looked at it like the druids in ancient times might have gazed upon Stonehenge, minus the strange religious chanting. Err, but to be perfectly honest, I did, in fact, touch the car. But only for a second! And only for fact checking!

Not being a car guy, I didn't even really know what a Tesla was. Some guy near me said the car was all electric. I saw that there was one of them little flappy-things where a gas tank normally is, so I was curious. So, even though I was fairly certain I was about to set off some $20K alarm system complete with armed robot attack, I manned up like the hardened journalist I am and flipped the little flappy thing open, just to check. Here is what I saw:

So, yeah. There ya go. It's electric. Pretty neat! And very modern and green and forward-thinking of our great leader! See? He rocks! Which is why we rock! And you know what? You rock too, just for reading this!!! Yay! We all rock!

Hi kids!  Jeff Green here! How are you? Good! I'm good too! I had swine flu, but now I'm back! So don't worry, this blog post is not contaminated! LOL!  Sorry, this is a little too perky.  That's what happens after you drink 3 cups of coffee, 1 Coke Zero, and then decide to blog. Maybe now I'll have 3 candy bars!

Anyway, I was gone from here for awhile, but now I'm back. And, uhh, you're gonna see a lot more of me too. Well, not "see" me, as we're not going to install a live webcam over my cubicle,  but I will be posting more. Honest! And this would be the first of those posts, in which I am here to tell you that the brand spankin' new EA Podcast Episode 7 is now up and live and available via RSS, iTunes, or--hey HEY hey--right here!  You don't even have to leave! You can stay here and hang with us! And why should you leave! We're cool, we smell nice, and we have fruit punch!

Here ya go:
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This week's podcast features two of the team members of the illustrious Need for Speed team at EA Black Box--Producer Jesse Abney and Art Director Mark Raham--talking about the just-released Need for Speed: Shift, which I am here to tell you is like a gazillion degrees of fun, even though I'm a non-car guy.  You car guys, I don't know. That's for you to decide.  But I think it's fun, and this is my blog post, so there. Anyway, these two guys are on the podcast, and they were real good sports as we grilled them with super tough questions like, "How awesome is your game?"   There'd be like this totally awkward silence as they tried to deal with this kind of 60 Minutes style interrogation, but then they'd justify their million dollar salaries by responding, "So awesome!"

Anyway, we hope you like it.  And by "we"  I am do not mean the royal we, which means "me", as in, "We would like to have our hot toddy now!"   I mean "we" as in Samantha LaPerre, Jon Long, Jay Eckert, and me.   Leave comments here, at podcast@ea.com, and on our various twitter feeds: @greenspeak, @samanthics, and @weezul.

Thanks!

Hundreds of games, thousands of fans, and millions of bacteria. Although these may be the important things to making any video game convention succesfull, it's missing one key element; an interview with Tom French. I had just that opportunity the last day of PAX 2009, when I cornered him into giving me yet another playthrough on Pandemic's newest title; The Sabotuer.

Tom was kind enough to give us a playthrough of one of his favorite missions, in which we get to blow up a train and send it falling into the river below. Don't believe me? Take a look at the above video, and check out the rest of The Sabotuer's recent media coverage over at The Saboteur's official site.

Hey EA Fans!
Hosted by Jon (@weezul) & Samantha (@samanthics) Episode 6 of the EA Podcast is now online and ready for download via RSS or your favorite podnet. This week's episode features an interview with Jay Eckert (aka @sargonas) discussing his role in PC Compliance as well as Julie Wynn who heads up our EA Outreach program.

Leave plenty of feedback and comments as we definitely listen to them all or drop us a line at podcast@ea.com. But please leave your name so we can give you props!

Happy Friday!

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This was my second year attending the PAX show and it was very different from the first year. Sure, we had a solid floor presence that year, but my role then was slightly different then it is now. I went to PAX this year with the single objective of covering the show for the company but in peeling back the layers, it became so much more. It became about making connections.
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