Madden NFL 09 (Xbox 360)
It's a big, glorious game, but does it score a touchdown?
8/12/2008 6:25 PM | 4 Comments | Page 2 of 3
What's Hot: Utterly beautiful graphics; BackTrack lets you see rewind the play to learn from mistakes; 80+ enhancements
What's Not: Online league play needs fine tuning; Not enough Madden commentary; BackTrack can be misused
If Drew Bennett misses the pigskin, you can try again in BackTrack.
Veteran players won't like the fact that there's this time-travel thing called BackTrack. On the surface, it's pretty intense. You go back prior to the play to discover, via Collingsworth, what went wrong with your coaching, passing, catching and the like. What I don't like is that you can then re-do the play. It's supposed to level the playing field between veteran players and the novices, but those five-minute quarters could go on for hours if a novice wants to remake every play. I have nothing at all against newbies. But let eager young noobs play against other noobs, or against those vets who have more than an hour a day to play at Madden. The solution? Thankfully, the ability to redo plays can be limited.
I always struggle to understand other reviewers who say online play is seamless when they review a game. Look, with any online game, you're going to have glitches and frame rate drops, especially if you play for, say, an hour or longer. The glitches in Madden NFL 09 for the Xbox 360 are minimal. But they will happen (although I was never kicked off a game due to technical errors). Also online, the trash-talking on the parts of players who I don't know is annoying at best. These folks are, more often than not, the worst players, anyway. Just play the game online and shut your pie-hole. Your banter isn't going to be as semi-witty as the guys in the new Madden commercial, anyway.
Oooh, snow so real, it'll make you want to build a steroid snowman on defense.
The one potentially great, new online feature allows us all to form leagues and take those leagues all the way to the Super Bowl. Probably the best way for this to work is to have 31 friends and acquaintances become part of the fray. If you have just a few friends to round out the league, the draft function will likely give you and your friends the NFL's top players. I suppose you can think of that as the best versus the best. But if you're a sim junkie, it's just not as close to reality as Madden is supposed to be. EA needs to work on these online leagues for Madden NFL 10.
And having Brett Favre on the cover in his no-longer-valid Green Bay Packer uniform does make the game seem somehow dated even on its first day of launch. Favre, after all, is now a New York Jet. (You can download a new cover, but who wants to take the time to do that? And then what do you do? Scotch tape the Jet's Gang Green goods over the Green Bay uniform? I still wonder why EA didn't choose New York Giant and Super Bowl winner Eli Manning for their cover athlete. Favre is the past, albeit an amazing Super Bowl winner, but Manning is the future, not to mention the game's demographic.) If you can forget about the cover, inside the box is one of the most technologically forward Madden games since Madden NFL 05 for the PlayStation 2.
