The Herald Sun has an article on AFL Premiership 2006 by IR Gurus. They chat to IR Gurus developer, Justin Halliday, on the new improvements added to AFL Premiership 2006, and how the team gathered inspiration from previous AFL games on systems like the NES. There are a lot of other developer related insights on the AFL series of games as Halliday mentions how a rebuild of the AFL engine being completed for AFL Premiership 2005 has allowed them to concentrate on gameplay for 2006 (and the furthermore the next iteration), and that the AI involved for an AFL game being much more complicated than other sports games like soccer or rugby...
"You see soccer games that are doing effectively half as much computing to actually get the game to run as we have to do with AFL," Justin Halliday of Melbourne-based games company IR Gurus says."I'm not making excuses, but I don't think people sometimes appreciate the complexity of the game."
Halliday also reveals that Sony (the current publisher of the AFL games) has no plans for a PS3 game just yet.