It's a big, glorious game, but does it score a touchdown?
8/12/2008 6:25 PM | 4 Comments | Page 1 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
Twenty years of Madden? Twenty years since Trip Hawkins and John Madden hammered out the idea on a train to Oakland, and Electronic Arts made skinny fans feel like a little bit like self-confident, football-playing Masters of the Universe? Once Madden was released, we were all Paper Lions, just like George Plimpton.
Madden NFL 09 in all its HD gridiron glory.
A damn score of years, two long decades. How old does that make you feel? It makes me feel utterly ancient, yeah, but somehow inwardly proud to have seen virtual football players evolve from stick figures on the Apple computer, to cartoon sprites on the Sega Genesis, to near-reality in Madden NFL 09. As anthropologist Ashley Montagu wryly spewed, "I want to die young at a ripe old age," and playing Madden, when it's good, is one of the gaming joys that keep me young.
The biggest spin from the EA folks regarding Madden NFL 09 is the idea that the game will adapt to your style of play. Yeah, in the past you've had everything from Rookie to Superstar difficulty modes to help you become accustomed to gridiron play. But this is supposedly a more intelligent thing altogether, although they make it sound more impressive and scientific than it is by calling it the Adaptive Difficulty Engine. It involves carefully testing your abilities before you start the season and taking the results into the season.
Your guide to the tests is a holographic John Madden (who is see-through and ghostly, like something out of Dickens -- the Ghost of Super Bowls Past). With easy offense tests and difficult defense tasks, in essence, ADE appears to be somewhat based upon the kind of artificial intelligence that gives stats to the NFL players every year in Madden. Cool as it sounds, I'm not sure it works that well if you're a more casual gamer. The idea of ADE is an admirable one, but needs to feel more real. It may well be that hardcore Madden fans will flock to this feature, and less seasoned fans will still start in Rookie mode.
Nothin' sweeter: male bonding in the end zone as the stars twinkle.
While the movements of players in John Madden's game have become more natural over the years, they still have been somewhat robotic and alien-like. This year, the movements are more like the complex human engine that we are. As they run the field, they're not completely lifelike, but it's as if they possess more than a few of our 206 human bones and 639 muscles to move. Players seem to have a kind of personality, too, as if some of their signature plays have been added to the offering. I'd still like to hear, say, Ray Lewis' trash-talking before plays, but then Madden wouldn't be an E-rated game.
One of the things I don't like is that each year, there's less and less of Madden in the game. Some have said this is a good thing, indicating that Madden is too old, even that he's going senile. In my mind, the game isn't complete without the folksy, knowledgeable persona that John Madden has so carefully crafted and honed over the years. (Right, I know. He uses the "F" word in off-camera conversation a lot. But in the game, he's Big Daddy Football and that's how I want it to stay.) The cheeky Cris Collingsworth is smart and talkative enough, but he's not the big man. Madden has to be used more in the future for color announcing as the game progresses, not just for brief tips on plays and as the ADE Ghost.
