Madden 06 (Warning: A graphic review in which I use the word 'nuts' not once, but twice)
I’ve wanted to write about my impressions of Madden 06 for at least a week now, but one thing has been stopping me: this game bores me to death. Madden is as stale as five-year old bread. It’s so bland it makes you wish for oatmeal just to jazz things up a bit.This is not my fault. Don’t shoot the messenger. And I freely admit that I only spent ten hours with this game, because it was just too boring to go on. It’s the curse of the annual sports franchise: new features get added and never finished, and the design becomes an incremental hodge-podge with no clarity of vision. Add to that some unbelievably misplaced priorities and you wind up with—a mess.
What exactly is Madden right now? Who the hell knows? This might be the single most muddled design I’ve ever seen in a long-running sports franchise. It’s muddled across platforms, it’s muddled across features, and one thing is totally clear to me after I play it this year: it isn’t fun.
Here’s what I like about Madden:
--The playcalling A.I. is much better than NCAA.
--The mini-games are fun.
--The authentic NFL Films music is fantastic.
--The player models on the PC version look fantastic.
Okay, that takes care of the “pros” section.
Animation? Not very good. The animation in this engine is several years old with some new animations tacked on each year, much like what happens with the NCAA engine (although the Madden engine is significantly better). The tackling animations are lousy. Plus, players sometimes (and I don’t mean rarely) just bounce off each other. Oh, and don’t forget the ball physics—they’re awful.
This is for the premier sports gaming franchise in existence, mind you. And in the PC version, players look like they’re running through quicksand. It is unbelievably slow (not a framerate issue—it’s a game speed issue). Pro football is an incredibly fast sport, but not here.
Design clarity? None.
Here’s an example of how this game lacks design clarity. The “big” innovation this year is “the passing cone.” It’s a yellow flashlight beam extending from your quarterback that simulates his field of vision.
I haven’t seen any big-ass flashlight beams on the field when I was watching football last weekend. At least in the two games I saw.
There are two ways to control this flashlight beam. The first is the right analog stick, which is bad design and horribly unrealistic. The second (thanks to DQ reader Erik Noble for this tip) allows you to hot-select a receiver by holding down the right trigger and pressing the receiver’s corresponding button. That’s much, much better. Even better, when you change to another receiver, the quarterback turns both his head and his shoulders.
Well, that’s a great feature (and I’m not being sarcastic)—the quarterback needs to be looking at his receiver, and if he’s not, you need to select the receiver and the quarterback will turn toward him. Outstanding. The first time I saw something like this was in TV Sports Football by Cinemaware—in, um, 1988. Regardless, it is the correct way to design this.
Now let’s watch EA totally screw this up beyond all comprehension. First off, they have it designed properly without the flashlight beam. It’s a fantastic bit of nuance that makes the game feel more realistic. But guess what? Nuance doesn’t work in screenshots. It’s tough to sell subtlety to people who have bought the game fifteen years in a row. So here’s an idea: let’s hose the feature beyond comprehension by adding this blatant, intrusive beam that indicates a quarterback’s vision. Never mind that it’s totally unnecessary. No worries, because it will look FREAKING GREAT in screenshots and preview videos.
Selling the game is more important than playing the game. And that’s the problem: EA is designing features that make the game easier to sell, not better to play.
Like Superstar mode.
Superstar mode? It’s like getting kicked in the nuts, lapsing into unconsciousness from the pain, then dreaming about getting kicked in the nuts. If that’s what being a superstar feels like, then this game is right on. It is the most convoluted, illogical, half-baked mode I’ve ever seen in a major sports game. It’s not that the idea of role-playing is bad—it’s excellent, actually—but the half-ass implementation makes it worthless. The highlight of Superstar mode is endlessly looking for the right DNA from your parents. Seriously, that’s the best part—by far.
Misplaced priorities? The tackling animations suck, and there are no weekly highlights (which should be mandatory for any sports game at this point), but I can set the price of my garlic chicken sandwiches and foam fingers.
You can guess which finger I’m thinking about.
I’m even guessing that there are unique items in each team’s concession menu that correspond to the real stadiums. For instance, as San Francisco’s owner, I had garlic chicken sandwiches, sushi, and San Francisco super dogs on my concessions menu, along with some staples like beer and popcorn.
CPU field goal kickers almost never miss, but at least I can price the sushi.
Can’t return a punt, though.
See what I mean? There are all these layers of meaningless bullshit, while basic gameplay has been neglected for years. Even worse, that meaningless bullshit isn’t even fun. Does anybody really give a shit about setting the price of sushi? It’s exactly the kind of spreadsheet torpor that people have complained about for years in text games.
Here’s some personality, though: weekly headlines from local newspapers. Except that, um, they’re complete crap. Incredibly bland, absolutely repetitive, zero flavor. They’re nothing like the outstanding SI covers that NCAA has, which are a wonderful feature of that game. Why even include them?
Maybe it’s because of what I saw in the Dallas Morning news last Tuesday:
WIN MADDEN NFL 2006!
The Dallas Morning News is proud to be the official newspaper of the Dallas Cowboys in the new Madden NFL 2006 video game.
There you go. Those headlines are just a shitty-ass way to get co-op advertising out of newspapers. Just like EA Trax is a shitty-ass way to get recording labels to pay money to get their bands on the soundtrack. Guess what’s coming next (I guarantee it): every single advertiser in NFL stadiums will have their stadium ad locations duplicated in the game—if they’re willing to pay for it.
One more example, then I’m done. Let’s look at the draft. You select fifteen players a week to scout from the full list of eligible draftees. It’s a spreadsheet, basically. You do that for four weeks. You get comments about players after the scouts check them out.
Wow. Oatmeal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, baby.
You’ll never see who seems to be moving up or down in the draft and rumors as to why. You won’t have teams contacting you, trying to trade up or down. You won’t watch any guys in action at the combine.
By the way, suck-ass Superstar mode designers, here’s an idea for next year: have a bunch of mini-games that represent the Scouting Combine: 40-yard dash, shuttle run, bench pressing 225, vertical leap test. That way, the better you do on the mini-games, the better your place in the draft. And let us see how the outcome of each mini-game has affected our potential draft slotting as the weekend progresses.
Back to the Franchise draft. Why do people watch the real NFL draft? Because things happen that people don’t expect. Guys rise in the draft. Others fall. Teams make bizarre picks. Other than that, the draft is absolutely, totally boring.
So how many of those things does EA capture in the Madden draft? Um, zero. There’s a phone ringing in the background, but nobody answers the damn thing, as far as I can tell.
A ringing phone should mean something. Like a trade offer. In this world, though, it’s just a sound effect.
Shouldn’t we have an option to be “on the clock” just like in the real draft? With a ringing phone that might offer a trade, which we also have to evaluate in real-time? With coordinators and scouts arguing with each other over who we should pick? And a list of players whose stock is rising or falling the most?
Even better, as your pick approached, you should start hearing rumors about which the players the teams in front of you were going to select. Want that running back from Auburn? Rumor has it that the Bills, who are two picks in front of you, are going to take him, so you need to start looking to trade up. Fast.
It’s not that trades never happen during the draft—they do, occasionally. But if a team offers you one, it’s via a pop-up box and nothing else. Welcome to the fun vacuum.
Wait, there is one fun thing about the draft—your fans attending the draft cheer or boo depending on the quality of your pick. And that is a great, fun idea. The problem is that great ideas in this game are like giant pandas—they never travel in groups and are rarely seen.
Believe me, I’m barely scratching the surface of what’s not right with this game. There are so many things I could mention that I’d make “War and Peace” look like a greeting card. Here’s one last note, though: after the first year of my franchise, the Dolphins relocated to Mexico City, where they became the Wasps.
Realism also relocated. It remains missing.
Like I said earlier, this is supposed to be the premier sports franchise. Why doesn’t it have premier design and execution?
In brief: suck.
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