Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

Madden NFL 10

1. Official Site
2. Platform: ps3
3. Publisher: EA Sports
4. Developer: Tiburon Entertainment
5. Release Date: 08/14/09
6. Genre: Sports

by Jason Ballew

When it comes to game releases, some games simply stand alone.  People will take days off work, call in sick, and do whatever is necessary to get the game as soon as it's released, and be some of the first to play and experience them.  In Japan, titles such as Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest get this treatment.  Here, one of the games that experiences this the most is Madden. 

One of the longest-running franchises in gaming history, EA Sports and Tiburon have released the 21st iteration of this venerable franchise, Madden NFL 10.  The past few years have seen Madden do a rather awkward dance, as it seemed to go one step back for every two forward, with a few steps to the side for good measure.  This year's version sees a new development team, a concerted effort to bring realism back to the game, and a shift to make player ratings matter much more.  Also, the birth of Online Franchise, as well as the introduction of the new Pro-Tak system, which gives this year's Madden it's tagline:  Fight For Every Yard. 

I Feel Pretty, Oh So Pretty...

While Madden has always been a very good looking game on HDTVs, it's obvious that Tiburon has gone above and beyond on much of the game.  The amount of detail on grass fields is stunning, even at 720p, and you can almost see distinctive blades of grass on the field.  The level of detail continues on the jerseys, with a huge number of small details - such as field degredation as the game goes on, or the sun shifting - rendered with exquisite detail.

This isn't to say the game is graphically flawless, as there are still a number of things that stood out as being sub-par.  For one thing, created players all seem to look the same on the player information screen.  While they have different facial features and skin tones, the positioning and expression are the same across the board.  It comes off as feeling very generic, especially when you're playing a franchise, and are getting a number of years down the row. 

The additions of the special patches for the Super Bowl and such are very nice as well, and add that little bit of authenticity to gameplay, even though you won't notice it too much during game-play.  This year also brings the addition of more presentation features, as the game has added half-time and end-of-week highlight packages, the addition of the USAF Thunderbirds in pre-game ceremonies, as well as post-Super Bowl ceremonies.

For the most part, these touches are nice.  However, and this seems to be a trend with the game, it's just not quite where it needs to be.  The USAF Thunderbirds are great, but having them before every game, including pre-season games, is simply dumb.  The pre-game cut scenes are a nice touch, but when the time of day doesn't match the game itself, it loses its impact.  The cutscenes for touchdowns and first downs with the referees are a solid touch, but when you only have two cutscenes for each, it becomes very obvious what the result is going to be before it even plays out.  Would it really have cut into the development budget so much to have four cutscenes, with both positive and negative outcomes both starting the same with the same camera angle? 

Then there's the half-time show and end of week shows.  The positive is that when they're on-camera, Fran Charles and Alex Flanagan are spot-on.  However, when the screen is showing highlights or stats and standings, the cut and paste job becomes very obvious.  It's so bad, actually, that it's almost out of the lowlights of the 1990s in sports video game history.  "The GIANTS .... are leading the ... PACKERS."  Yes, it's that bad.  The worst part about this, honestly, is that you don't have a choice in any menu anywhere to disable these.  You have to sit and press X on the controller a half-dozen times, and wait upwards of 30 seconds to a minute to cycle through this trainwreck in order to get back to gameplay. 

The presentation continues to suffer in the game itself.  While John Madden is only present in the game for brief bits during the Ask Madden, can't the game recognize that he's speaking, and not have the commentary from Cris Collingsworth and Tom Hammond coming in over the top?  It feels like the commentary itself lacks a certain intelligence.  Doing the Madden Moments became annoying fast when you're doing a specific event in the 4th quarter, and Tom Hammond comes in talking about how it's amazing that the other team has kept your receiver from catching the ball in the first half.  Really?  The game can't recognize that this isn't a full-length game, and not have that issue?  Not only that, when playing as the Colts, a number of times in one Madden Moment I heard them talk about how it was Peyton Manning's first reception of the game.  Clue:  He's a quarterback, not a wide receiver. 

To be fair, Cris Collinsworth sounds very good in the game, and while his comments do repeat after a while, which can be expected in any sports games, he actually sounds like he's involved in the game.  Tom Hammond though, honestly sounds like he's reading from a script, without any life or real emotion involved.  Tiburon really needs to take their cue from the NHL 10 team with their commentary and presentation.

We Got Game!

As with Madden NFL 09, Madden Moments make their return, highlighting some of the best football moments from the previous year, giving the player the opportunity to relive and rewrite the events as they see fit.  The events themselves are actually rather fun, although again, there are a few issues gumming up the works.  For one thing, every team has their 2009 roster, for 2008 events.  Which means instead of Jay Cutler leading the Broncos back, you have Kyle Orton.  Instead of Sage Rosenfels leading the Texans during that disasterous day in October after Matt Schaub was injured, you have Schaub in the pocket leading the charge.  Not only that, but the 2009 rookie class are on their teams as well.  It would add a bit of authenticity to have the original rosters for those games available only for this mode, although admittedly there may be technical limitations on those.  However, the inability to have custom sliders in this mode is maddening, especially when you're failing to hit 40 and 45 yard field goals because of it, while the CPU is nailing 53 and 58 yarders with ease. 

Next up are two modes that honestly should have been left on the cutting room floor.  First up is Superstar, which is similiar to NCAA's Road to Glory mode, except anything even remotely interesting in this mode last year was completely stripped out.  In this mode, you create a player, or import a character from NCAA Football, and you start out viewing a calendar, with the NFL Draft looming.  When you select the draft you see ..... who drafted you.  That's it.  No suspense, no interaction, no signing an agent....just "Drafted by Insert Team Name Here."  You don't even know what round you're selected in, much less who else got selected before or after you. 

Not only that, the character creation itself is lacking in any style, as you just allocate points to your character.  Also, each character, no matter the position on the field, has the same stat categories to add points to.  Do you really need to add Kick Power and Kick Accuracy to your quarterback?  Throwing Accuracy for your middle linebacker?  It's not even based on your ability to play the game, and generally means that in order to create a character who doesn't have an OVR of somewhere in the early to mid 70s, you have to min-max insanely.  Not that it matters, of course, you're the starter no matter what your score is.  Make a quarterback, and get drafted by the Colts, and suddenly you're starting in front of Peyton Manning.  Want to be a running back?  Get drafted by the Vikings, and you're taking snaps instead of Adrien Peterson. 

Once the draft is over, you go to a practice mode, where you simply replay one play over and over again until you're completely sick of it.  Again, your position doesn't seem to matter, as the first play available to my wide receiver was a rushing play.  Choose to try another play, and it just goes to the next in the playbook.  While you might receive points for your on-field player in this mode, I couldn't play it long enough to find out, because of how it was designed. 

Game play is very nice, on the other hand, and is very similar to NCAA Football, although with a much better camera angle, set low and close to the field, just behind and to the side of your character, which puts much more emphasis on what you're doing, and less on the team as a whole.  It's really the only place in Superstar mode that honestly feels engaging and fun.  The rest of the mode is an exercise in drudgery and unimaginative gameplay.  To be honest, if they were going to strip it down this much, they should have just removed it altogether.

The other mode that should have received the same treatment is the new Online Franchise mode.  This mode is nearly exactly the same as regular franchise mode, where you and up to 31 other people can create an online franchise and go through up to ten seasons with the CPU controlling any teams that don't have human owners.  The person who created the league takes the role of the commissioner, and can set all of the rules that the franchise will obey.  One of the truly nice things about this mode is the integration with both the internet and other devices, as you can perform any of your non-gameplay decisions on the franchise's website, as well as the upcoming iPhone app.  This means that you don't have to be in front of your console for your draft, or if you want to trade players, adjust your depth chart or what have you. 

Unfortunately, the mode in general feels unpolished and unfinished.  Currently, sliders are not in effect, and there is no salary cap, so no free agency to speak of.  Also, there is no CPU trade logic, which means that if you want to trade a scrub for Tom Brady and the Patriots are CPU controlled, there's nothing to stop yo unless the commissioner is smart enough to disable unlimited CPU trades.  There's also no pre-season games, which normally would be a huge issue, but as pre-season games in Madden are completely meaningless for the most part, this is more acceptable.  Admittedly, EA has been very up front about what would be missing in online franchise mode, and they have the ability to add things to it via server-side work.  However, the general consensus is that this won't happen, which leaves the mode feeling unfinished and unpolished.  Essentially, my feeling is that if a mode can not be completed and polished in the time available, it shouldn't be in the game at all.  Especially when it's something that was built up as big as this mode was in the four to five months before the game hit shelves.

Next up is what I consider to be the meat of the game:  Franchise Mode.  Not a lot has been changed since previous iterations of Madden.  You take a team and are given the ability to control everything about the game, from how much beer and hot dogs cost, to the uniform and even where the franchise is located.  The mode then starts you at the pre-season, which brings up the reason I stated that pre-season games in Madden are almost pointless:  For years, Madden has been limited to 53-man rosters, which is what the NFL has as limits for the regular season.  Since your roster is already basically set, there's no point in having these games.  After all, in the NFL, each team starts the season with nearly 80 players on the roster, goes through training camp and pre-season games before trimming the roster down to 53.  That's the entire point of the pre-season, as well as getting the players ready to go.  Without that option, the pre-season is really completely useless, and is only good for risking injury by your players.  Not only that, there's no way to mass-swap the second team in, you have to play the entire first half of each pre-season game with your starters, then have the game auto-swap to the subs in the 2nd half.  With all the talk about realism and authenticity, this long-standing issue becomes more glaring.  While this may have been a technical limitation in the past, the time for that excuse to be valid is long passed. 

One of the things I checked with Franchise mode, as it's important to a lot of long-term players of the mode, is stats and player progression.  To do this, I simmed through ten seasons of play, long enough for many of the stars of the game to have faded or retired and time for a number of rookies to take on those roles.  This led two a few conclusions, both good and bad.  First, the good:  Player progression is very solid, with cycles of how many players of each position was rated at 90+ and 80-90.  After five years, there was a large bubble of 80-89 rated players, as the stars were still in the game as well as the rookie classes.  Over the five years after that, though, the bubble eased as older players began retiring and leaving the game to the younger ones. 

The player stats as well were very solid, with two very obvious exceptions:  Touchdowns.  For some reason, rushing touchdowns in the simmed games were insanely low across the board, with only one or two players each year having more than 10, compared to the number of players in the NFL in 2008.  On the flip side, passing touchdowns were way up, with almost every starting quarterback managing over 25 TDs thrown in the year, compared to a much smaller selection in the NFL last year.  This may be something that can be patched, and is honestly a minor issue, especially in a franchise with a number of human players. 

The other thing that became obvious was in the inclusion of the NFL Head Coach 'created' players, which are thinly-disgused knockoffs of NFL retired players.  When you see 'Boar Jackson' and 'Erick Nickerson' in your draft, it doesn't take a leap of logic to recognize Bo Jackson and Eric Dickerson, especially when the colleges and other data matches up.  While it isn't a bad thing in general to have these players in the game, making it obvious means that it's very easy to load a team up during the draft, if they're available.  Beyond that, an option to have them in or out for a franchise would also have been nice to see.

Once you're actually on the field, the gameplay is very solid for the most part.  The addition of the new speed levels, especially on Slow, definitely makes the game more dramatic, and gives the player time to see the plays building, which means that you get frustrated much less often.  On the default settings, including sliders, difficulty and quarter length, the game plays like a dead fish.  It's not fun, and it's really bland.  Once the game is tweaked via sliders, quarter length and other changes, the game becomes much more challenging and fun, not to mention realistic.  Here's the problem though.  In a game where you're promoting realism, and have even publically stated what settings should give the most realistic stats and game play, why not make that the default?  Why is the default settings for the game set to 5 minute quarters, everything in the middle and Pro difficulty, when the 'realistic' settings are 11-12 minute quarters, accelrated clock on, and All-Pro?  It just sends a mixed message to the players, and while some players enjoy playing with the settings, not all do.  If you're going to promote a certain ideal, then the default settings of the game should rise to that ideal as well. 

The new Pro-Tak system is a very solid addition to the game, and actually makes you feel like you're having to fight to get the yards for the first down.  No more is it a case of you're touched, and you're down.  Now you have the ability to struggle out of a jam, although it does seem like there's always going to be one big broken tackle per game, making it a bit less random.  Still, the piles of players pushing at each other to get the guy to fall one way or another is a very refreshing touch. 

Fight for the Fumble, on the other hand, is the most ill-advised in-game minigame to ever come out of EA Sports.  Sitting and going from skillfully directing offense or defense to madly mashing buttons to match the on-screen display is both frustrating and maddening, and is the feature that most players will likely turn off as soon as possible.  Like any other cutscene with the referees, however, it quickly becomes obvious that there's only a few different cutscenes, and you can soon easily tell if you have the ball or not based on the placement of the referee and your players.

While for the most part, the gameplay is solid, there are a number of things that stand out, and really detract form the game play itself.  Again, some of this is just my tendency to want everything as authentic as possible.  First, kickoffs:  Both the kickoff team and receiving team have players that have no business being on the field in those situations.  My first string offensive and defensive players should not be on the kickoff line.  While I can accept a starting player being the return man, the man on the end of the kickoff should not be my starting cornerback, with my starting tight end being on the other side. 

Second, there's a very obvious bug with holding penalties on kickoffs and field goals, specifically on the offensive side.  This is a huge problem specifically because if you're on offense, and are kicking a field goal to win the game, or an extra point, and get called for holding, the game ends.  This is inexcusable, and either should have been fixed before launch, or been a launch-day patch.  I realize it'll get patched 'soon', but that's no longer good enough. 

Third, object collision is still an issue.  It isn't all the time, and many of the issues with it such as suction blocking, and people running through each other are in the past, there are still a number of times that a pass is deflected, and I'll go and look at the replay only to see the defender put his hand through my receiver's chest to knock the ball away.  I've also seen the ball go through a player to cause either an interception or a dropped ball.  This really should have been done away with years ago. 

The soundtrack for Madden NFL 10 has taken a step back from previous years' efforts, and brought back rock music from the 80s and 90s, with a bit of old-school rap, which better reflects the ages of many of the game's players.  While it was nice in the past to hear some good stuff, it's much more appealing to hear songs I enjoy rather than some group I've never even heard of.  For full authenticity, however, you can disable the soundtrack and have the NFL Films music play in the background, which really makes it feel like it's time to play football, which is a definite plus in my mind. 

While this review may seem that it's focusing on the negative aspects and completely ignoring the positive, it isn't meant to be.  Madden is a solid, engaging football game.  The new features, for the most part, are good, and don't detract from the game itself.  It's unfortunate, however, that my overall feeling of the game, and the quote that sums up everything I feel about Madden NFL 10 is "It's a solid game, but man, if only!". 

Tiburon and EA Sports can make a very good, if not great football game.  The only question in my mind is, will it be Madden NFL 11, or Madden NFL 12, or later down the line.  Part of the problem is the hype that surrounds this game every year.  When you set expectations as high as EA has this year, any let down from that high is magnified, and leads to disappointment.  Will Madden NFL 10 change your mind about the franchise as a whole, and get you to buy it if you don't normally do so?  Probably not.  Like most NFL teams, this game is not quite ready for the Super Bowl. 

Maybe next year.

Gaming Trend Score

82

1. Graphics: 87
2. Audio: 78
3. Controls: 95
4. Gameplay: 78
5. Value/Replay: 78
6. OVERALL:82