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Activision and Eutechnyx continue to deliver fresh “NASCAR The Game: Inside Line” challenges via DLC, this week taking virtual drivers back to the Toyota Owners 400 at Richmond International Raceway.

Using the actual telemetry data from last weekend’s race, gamers will have the opportunity to relive four of the biggest highlights from the event.

Here’s what’s in store for gamers who download the pack when it goes live later this week:

Highlight 1: Not Breaking Brad
Type: Relive
Who: Brad Keselowski
Description: Jimmie Johnson has spun out and hit Kyle Busch. Can you keep Brad's ride in one piece as you dodge the wrecking cars on Lap 327?

Highlight 2: Green-White-Checker
Type: Relive
Who: Kevin Harvick
Description: After taking fresh tires for the green-white-checker finish, Kevin Harvick restarted on the inside in seventh place. Take advantage of the grip and go for the win.

Highlight 3: Target Acquired
Type: Relive
Who: Kurt Busch
Description: Kurt Busch and Juan Pablo Montoya are battling hard for second place. Can you relive history by crossing the line coming into Lap 171 in second place?

Highlight 4: Holding the Lead
Type: Relive
Who: Juan Pablo Montoya
Description: Montoya had a strong race at Richmond and looked at one point like he would take his first Sprint Cup oval victory. Relive the restart on Lap 350 and hold the lead over five laps.

Utilizing the advanced artificial intelligence of “NHL 13,” EA Sports simulated the NHL playoffs, predicting a New York Rangers victory over the Chicago Blackhawks in six games in the Stanley Cup Finals.

According to EA Sports, the big storylines throughout this year’s playoffs will be:

• The New York Rangers win their fifth Stanley Cup in franchise history and their first since the 1993-94 season, defeating the Chicago Blackhawks in six games.

• Rangers forward Brad Richards wins the Conn Smythe Trophy, the second of his career. Richards notched 24 points in the playoffs to lead all players.

• Richards becomes the sixth player in NHL history to win at least two Conn Smythe Trophies, joining Patrick Roy (3), Wayne Gretzky (2), Mario Lemieux (2), Bobby Orr (2) and Bernie Parent (2)

• The Chicago Blackhawks looked unbeatable as they progressed through the rounds, winning each series in five games before falling to the Rangers in six games.

• The Western Conference saw two upsets in the opening round with the Detroit Red Wings (7) beating the Anaheim Ducks (2), while the Los Angeles Kings (5) defeated the St. Louis Blues (4).

• The Toronto Maple Leafs were eliminated in the first round of the simulation, although they did manage to take their Original Six rivals, the Boston Bruins, to seven games.

• The Pittsburgh Penguins, who looked to be a strong favorite to win the Stanley Cup, fell to the Rangers in seven games in the Eastern Conference Semifinals.

“Mike Vick: GameTime” is a 4-on-4 football game for iOS that I find myself completely addicted to. It has the old-school charm of a classic sports title like NES “Ice Hockey” (still love my team of two fat guys and a skinny guy) and to me, it's the first football game for the iPhone that really delivers any type of serious fun factor.

And, according to producer Damian Griffin, the similarities to “Ice Hockey” aren't by accident. Gamers get to pick the body types of their three wide receivers, including a smaller, fast receiver similar to Wes Welker, medium-sized receivers, tall receivers, and even huskier-sized wideouts who are slower but more difficult to tackle.

“Everyone starts off with four different guys, but the different body types play differently on the field. Through free agency, you can buy players and level up. ‘Ice Hockey’ was one of my favorite games ever, and that was the entire motivation behind it,” Griffin said. “We wanted you to have that different feel between the receivers, and they all have different potentials, too. Every character has different skills and different potential, so even if you have two thick receivers, one might have better hands while the other has better strength.”

The game is simple, yet effective. After you call a play, the receivers run their routes and you tap on the screen to throw the ball. The big difference here is, like real life, you don’t throw to where the receiver is: You throw to where he is headed, as you actually need to lead him with your passes in order to be successful.

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The company that churns out a million points of data for each NBA game is now looking to go even deeper, mining those numbers for insight into players' fitness and training with an eye toward someday preventing injuries before they happen.

STATS is the provider of the SportVU system, a set of high-speed cameras now installed at 15 NBA arenas that track the movements of all 10 players, the ball, and the referees throughout the game, recording information 25 times per second. As a result, teams can see how far or fast a player runs during a game or uncover specifics. For example, in Game 1 of the playoffs against the Houston Rockets, Oklahoma City's Nick Collison had six touches from the elbow and the Thunder scored 1.5 points per possession in those instances.

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Marshawn Lynch stiff arms Clay Matthews in the grill, jerking the defender’s head back violently and knocking him to the ground. Lynch has transformed into full beast mode, trucking his way over the linebacker, spinning out of the corner’s weak arm tackle, and hurdling high over the standing safety on his way to paydirt.

These are just some of the moves featured in “Madden NFL 25,” a game that enables virtual ball carriers to combine moves via the right analog stick, stringing together everything from trucking defenders to shaking them out of their cleats with controller manipulations that will elevate gamers with the best thumbs.

“This year, ‘Madden 25’ is all about running free,” producer Thomas Singleton said. “It’s about unlocking the power, the precision and creativity of NFL ball carriers. Whether you’re a running back like Adrian Peterson or a dual-threat quarterback like RG III, it’s about unlocking the ability of these players.”

To do this, gameplay designers added 30 new moves, built on an all-new precision modifier system.

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This story appears in ESPN The Magazine's April 29 NFL draft preview issue. SUBSCRIBE TODAY

In the weeks leading to February’s NFL combine, the draft hopefuls at the IMG Academy sweated through an intense battery of drills and workouts. But they may have exercised their synapses hardest of all, thanks to an electronic version of Whac-a-Mole called the Dynavision D2 machine. First, the players stood in front of a large board studded with blinking lights, which would each randomly flash for a few seconds. The players would then slap each light as quickly as possible while a technician evaluated their response times. Did we mention a screen just above the middle of the board that would display numbers, letters and math equations, which the players would have to read aloud as the lights flashed?

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Die-hard “FIFA” fans can spend hours upon hours in career mode, tinkering with their lineups to put the perfect squad on the polygonal pitch. “FIFA 14” enhances the experience with its Global Scouting Network, as EA Sports attempts to add elements of professional scouting services into its video game.

“The Global Scouting Network is our biggest change to career mode this year,” producer Sebastian Enrique said. “In the past, if you want to hire somebody to play for your team, what you do is look for hard numbers. You might only want someone who has an 89 rating or higher. Imagine a coach doing that in real life. It would be impossible. What they do is they look at player traits. You get a scout, and you tell them you want someone who is a speed dribbler who sends good crosses.

“What we’re doing this year is introducing this scouting mechanism in career mode. You’re no longer searching for players with hard numbers and attributes. You’re going to be searching for traits.”

While playing GM outside of the transfer window didn’t offer you much to do in “FIFA 13,” in “14,” the scouting takes place throughout the experience.

“You can start searching for players early then refine your search, so when you finally do get to that transfer window, you know who you are targeting,” Enrique said. “If you’re a fan of the MLS, you probably don’t need to scout those players because they are known to you, but if you want a player from Brazil, and you don’t know much about him, you’re going to need to hire a scout to find out everything you need to know to see if he fits the playing style you’re looking for. This really changes the way people play career mode. You’re giving instructions to the scouts, you’re getting preliminary reports, you’re refining your searches. … Now it’s really fun to play career mode all season long.”

For more on “FIFA 14,” check out our first-look preview.

EA Sports and NHL.com are teaming up for the second straight year to give fans the opportunity to vote for the “NHL 14” cover athlete.

The first round begins today, pitting teammate versus teammate in hopes of advancing to the 32-player leaderboard. From there, the top vote-getters will advance to a Sweet 16 bracket, facing off in head-to-head battles until the final winner is announced in June.

Candidates include everyone from Zdeno Chara and Evgeni Malkin to Joe Thornton and Dustin Brown, and according to “NHL 14” general manager, Dean Richards, the winner has nothing to fear, as the cover curse only seems to take down “Madden” athletes.

Said Richards: “Players who have graced the EA Sports ‘NHL’ cover in the past have historically had banner years in the season that followed. Patrick Kane scored the Stanley Cup-winning goal in 2010, Steven Stamkos notched a league-leading 60 goals in 2012 and Claude Giroux became the captain of the Philadelphia Flyers this season.”

So what are you waiting for? Vote today and help your favorite player become the face of hockey video games.

Last week, we broke the news on everything from “NCAA Football 14’s” neutral site games to the “Seven Nation Army” crowd chants.

Now’s your chance to see what it will all look and sound like in the upcoming game, as EA Sports has released a trailer showing off all of the new presentation elements in "14."

From player celebrations and trademark gloves, to enhanced commentary and weather effects, “NCAA 14” seems to finally nail all of the little things football fans have been asking for.

My name is Jon, and I’m a goon-aholic. I’ve been a goon since “Blades of Steel,” and anybody who plays me at EA’s “NHL” series knows I go out of my way to check, chuck and smack opponents around the virtual ice until they lose their cool and drop the gloves.

So when I hear “NHL 14” executive producer David Littman talk about this being the year where hard hits, aggression and brawling are bigger and badder thanks to both a new physics and fighting engine, the game instantly jumps to one of my most anticipated titles of 2013.

Then I got my hands on the game, ran full speed and blasted an opponent off his skates -- and I didn’t want to put the controller down.

My inner goon is happy again.

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The morning after the Miami Heat defeated the Boston Celtics last June on their way to LeBron James’ first NBA title, Rick Gehman woke up, turned on his computer, and checked his Twitter feed. The tweets read, “Can you believe this Heat game?” and, especially, contained chatter about a “great shot by LeBron.” Gehman had no idea what moment they were talking about, since he went to bed before the game was over.

“I watched 'SportsCenter,' trying to figure out the play [to see if it was] a dagger shot. That’s how far I took it,” he says, recalling how frustrated he felt.

But what if there was a way to add the real-time scores to those mysterious tweets so when you read them, you’d know exactly what moment the tweets referred to? That’s what inspired the 24-year-old to create Cibos, an app that’s nearly ready for release.

Cibos (which he says means “feed” in Latin) puts a stamp on tweets about events marking the teams playing, the quarter/inning/period and the time, giving readers the context they need if they’re not watching a game. The technology behind it? An algorithm that started with Gehman poring over endless strings of tweets.

“I have read tens of thousands of tweets to figure out what people say when they’re talking,” he says. “It’s helpful with hashtags.”

Since Gehman’s life is spent working with sports and social media -- the King of Prussia, Pa., native runs the Facebook and Twitter feeds for Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center -- he was aware not everyone uses a hashtag. So he looked for patterns, like users writing “LeBron” and how much that corresponded to a game played by the Heat. Nearly a year later, the algorithm is 99.6 percent accurate. Nothing would make him happier than to continue to get that stat as close to 100 percent as possible.

There’s another function Gehman and his two partners added to Cibos: Say you’re at your child’s birthday party and trying your best to avoid hearing the score of a game because you’d chosen instead to record it your DVR. The app will use the same algorithm to pull tweets about the contest from your timeline so you won’t see them in advance of watching. Though he says the app will focus on sports when it’s launched, he can see a future in which it has uses for TV shows and movies as a digital spoiler alert.

It won’t, however, stop you from overhearing random strangers in your local Starbucks ruining the past two episodes of "Game of Thrones" sitting on your queue. But at least you’ll know exactly what “OHHHHHH!!! WHAT A SHOT!!! #weareallwitnesses #lebron” meant.

Baseball insiders may need to expand their reading list to keep up with the game's latest developments.

Tucked into the latest edition of Biology Letters, among articles on emperor penguin surface temperatures and predator-prey size relationship, is a study that suggests that the shape of your face may indicate whether you'd make a good power hitter.

University of London researchers Hikaru Tsujimura and Michael J. Banissy tracked nearly 200 Japanese players in one of that country's two pro baseball leagues over the course of two seasons and found that players with short, wide faces tended to have higher-than-average home run numbers.

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“Oh … oh-oh-oh-oh, oh, oh!”

The White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” is the crowd chant of college football, so it’s no surprise you’ll hear the virtual fans singing along when EA Sports’ “NCAA Football 14” hits stores on July 9 (Xbox 360, PlayStation 3).

“We went out to about 30 stadiums this year to record crowd chants,” says the game’s producer, Ben Haumiller. “We licensed songs like ‘Zombie Nation’ and ‘Seven Nation Army’ because there wasn’t a single game that I went to or watched, where these anthems weren’t playing and the crowd wasn’t chanting along to them.

“It’s all about the crowd chant on top of the songs, so we have recordings of these chants that we’re going to play, and these aren’t just for during a timeout, they’ll start pumping these between second and third down, and it really adds a lot to the atmosphere to make the game feel more legit.”

But enhanced crowd audio isn’t the only thing new about the “NCAA 14” presentation, as the design team made some monumental changes across the board to deliver a smoother-playing, slicker-looking game.

“The main purpose of our presentation this year is to make it quick, make it clean, and get you moving,” Haumiller said as he shows me the game.

The ESPN menus and backgrounds in the front end looked great last year, but they were such a resource hog, it made the game lag.

“We stripped that out for more of a whiteboard style font, and it really speeds everything up,” Haumiller said. “ESPN is still in the game in terms of in-game presentation, but in the front end, we wanted to go with a quicker, cleaner look and have something that’s more 2-D based.”

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What started off with 65 NFL candidates is down to the final two. And what a final two it is, as two of the greatest running backs of all time -- in real life and in the world of virtual football -- square off for a shot at the “Madden 25” cover.

After weeks of fan votes, it’s Barry Sanders versus Adrian Peterson. It’s fitting, considering all we know about “Madden 25” to date is that it focuses on running backs thanks to a new “run free ball carrier” system that will offer “unprecedented ball-carrier control and precision,” according to EA Sports.

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When it comes to sports video games, the term “player intelligence” can be quite the oxymoron.

But EA Sports hopes to change that with “FIFA 14,” a game that promises the smartest set of teammates and opponents to ever step on the virtual pitch.

“When you look at ‘FIFA 13,’ players were thinking every frame, ‘Should I do this? Should I do that?’” said Sebastian Enrique, the producer of “FIFA 14,” as he showed the game to reporters. “It was just based on one frame, what was happening that second. But now, the players are trying to predict what will happen next, and their thinking incorporates multiple frames of thought. They have much better decision-making. On ‘FIFA 13,’ the defense played so loose, it gave the player too much room to sprint and it caused the game to be in this constant state of sprint, and there’s nothing rewarding about that. So one thing we’re introducing this year is dynamic defensive pressure.

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