Madden 360: Arrgh
I've gotten quite a few e-mails about Monday's Penny Arcade:http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php?date=2005-09-12&res=l.
It's a funny comic, as usual, and it clearly illustrates that Madden 360 does not, in fact, look like the early screenshots that were allegedly from actual footage. Instead, it looks, well, shitty. At least it does based on this video:
http://www.xboxyde.com/leech_1649_1_en.html.
Now when I use a highly technical term like "shitty," I mean next-generation shitty. It looks awful compared to both how it allegedly was going to look and how other next-gen games look. I saw a video of Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter earlier this week (I can't remember the damn link, though--sorry) where someone was narrating in-game action as it happened, and the game just looked absolutely phenomenal. And that video was from May, at E3.
This is what I mean when I talk about EA not managing things well, either in a strategic or tactical sense. They've allegedly poured a huge number of resources into next-gen Madden, but they seem utterly unable to make logical decisions about development priorities. Identifying Donovan McNabb's freaking face is less important than replacing those utterly lousy tackling animations. Yet I watch this trailer and on two different occasions I see a guy tackled by bouncing off a defensive player. No wrap-up, no struggle against the tackle, nothing. Pinball. Besides the detail in McNabb's face and additional stadium detail, the "new" Madden looks an awful lot like the "old" Madden, even though we were (again with the marketing promises) promised a new product from "the ground up."
And releasing those early screenshots, when they bear absolutely NO resemblance to the final product, just reeks of bad leadership. And if you remember, it's even worse than that--we were told that those early screenshots were "conservative" because the dev kits weren't final. Remember?
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