Couple Gaming

Every year I purchase maddens, and not because I think it’s the best football game out there, but actually because for the past few years it has been the only football game out there.

This year is different, this year we had a couple different football games come out, but unfortunately maddens has a lock on the NFL license and so the only way to play your favorite team or player is to use maddens. Am I dissapointed in this? Not this year, despite the large amounts of hate generated on EA’s forums for Maddens the game is actually much better then last year.

For startes no longer are you required to use the QB view, something that I hated about last years game, but instead of removing it, they just made it off by default, which I thought was a smart move, because although I thought it sucked, it’s my opinion and no feature should be changed based on a few opinions. Also the addition of icons for players is a huge bonus, now you can see that Randy Moss has great hands, or westbrook is a truck or Brady Quinn can run, bullet passes and throw long balls. Now to those of us who play Fantasy football and get excited for the draft we know all this, but for those who don’t dedicate much time to football but enjoy maddens it allows you to see what your players are capable of.

the physics in this years edition are also much improved, no longer can you toss up a pass and have it almost always connect, last year I relied heavily on curls, this year those are almost always picked if the right defense is called. And passes straight down the middle? Only if your receiver beats the saftey and your QB can throw it that far. This makes it so people must change between passing and the run game fairly often. The physics isn’t just on gameplay either, run a runner gets hit it looks like he is being hit, he flies backwards or goes sprawling to the ground, if a reciever is hit in mid air a lot of times he will get flipped if hit hard enough. It makes the game look like much more realistic.

But this years maddens isn’t all roses, it has it’s share of problems, for instance you can effectively sack the QB most of the game calling blitzes if the other player doesn’t go from the gun, this is why I almost always pass from the gun. Even quick passes are hard to get off and they are designed for blitzes. And remember those physics I was just praising? Well sure enough this year I have seen more then a few times the ball will pass through my defender into the arms of my opponents receiver and vice versa, or the defender will teleport into the path of my throw, or worse yet a pass will be deflected but bounce around the players a bit and then be caught.

So to break this down, this years madden is indeed better then last years and is fun as hell to play, but isn’t without it’s flaws. If you’re a football fan, go play it, but this is one game you may want to avoid playing with your wife, either she won’t be very good (and maddens has a learning curve) or she will be to good and show you up, either way you lose

BTW due to how often I have been playing this, I asked squidpunch to create a application to keep stats for each game I play in ranked games online, it has turned out so well we created a website for it. Feel free to take a look and use it if you like. madden-stats