Sports Reviewers and Madden 08 (360): The Big Cut-and-Paste
I was going to write up a long, long post about Madden 08, but really, there's no point. Tiburon has been making this game for twelve years, it's always full of loose ends and broken bits, and it's going to be that way as long as they're the developer. That's their track record, and there's no reason to think it's ever going to change.So no detailed impressions this year, although I will note that Franchise mode is very poor (I spent about five hours taking a look, and that was enough)--awful draft A.I., incredibly low injury frequency, head-scratching statistics, and a serious bug where rookies that get cut before the season begins simply disappear instead of being added to the free agent pool. That means you'll be seeing less than 150 free agents in the free agent pool for all positions combined after a few seasons. There will be years when a position pool is simply empty.
One short note about draft A.I., and this doesn't even address the bizarre position logic the CPU seems to use. Draft choices in the NFL have a standard value in relation to other draft choices. It's so standard that you can Google the subject and find a chart with round, position, and point value (for instance, see ESPN's here).
In other words, this is widely available, public knowledge.
So in the first season of my test franchise, when the Falcons offered me the number one pick in the draft for my first and second round picks (both tenth in their respective rounds), that seemed wildly incorrect.
And it is. Basically, the Falcons offered me the top pick in the draft for 60% of its value. That's barely more than half.
It happened a second time in the first five years, this time for about 65% of the pick's value.
My point is that Tiburon has been developing this game for over a DECADE and they still can't get incredibly simple things like draft pick value correct.
It's discouraging, to say the least.
Oh, and you can look forward to Mark Brunell, Trent Green, and Brad Johnson in the Hall of Fame. I don't even know how stoned you have to be to think that's correct.
That's not what I'm writing about, though. What really amazes me are the reviews, because I read them.
All of them. At least, all 38 of the linked reviews at Metacritic.
What's amazing is how similar they sound, and how often they use similar phrasing. Many times, it sounds like they've basically regurgitated the previews of the game that appeared a few months earlier. It sounds like they're just re-wording EA marketing materials in their reviews.
And the reviews, for the most part, are incredibly shallow. They read like the reviewer played the game for two or three hours, then wrote it up. There are potentially hundreds of hours of content in this game, but no one identified which modes they played or how long they played them.
In other words, many of these reviews are complete jokes. Here, don't take my word for it--take a look here. You'll see quite a few reviews that are only one page, and very few that are three pages or longer. Incredible. And take special note of how many of the reviews sound like marketing content, not review content.
So, of these 38 crack reviewers, how many actually tried out franchise mode? Well, as far as I can tell, 2.
Seriously. 2 out of 38 reviewers appear to have tried out Franchise mode. In other words, 5% of the people who reviewed Madden took the time to try out the cornerstone of the game. The other 95% mention Franchise mode, but again, they're basically retyping bullet points from feature lists.
Which is crap.
The 2 people who gave a damn and tried to actually include hands-on information with Franchise mode deserve special mention. The first, and it's no surprise, is Bill Abner, who reviewed Madden here. The second was Clay Shaver over at Operation Sports, and his review is here.
Both Bill and Clay noted the poor draft A.I., which is impossible to miss if you actually play the game in Franchise mode.
There's a tremendous disconnect in how sports games are reviewed, and unfortunately it gets worse as the games get more complex. With almost any other game that gets reviewed, a basic requirement is that the reviewer actually have played and finished the game. With a sports game, though, who the hell knows what they did?
One thing is certain, though: the reviewers aren't telling.
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