Madden NFL '09 Football is Complicated...

Let me just explain something to you at the very beginning of this review: I am not a sports guy. I enjoy sports, but I haven’t taken any of them very seriously since I played basketball as a youth. I’ve always enjoyed sports games but football games, along with soccer (oddly also called football), have always eluded me due to the complexity of the sports. I’ve played a few football games in my time, most notably “TV Sports Football” for Turbo Graphix 16, but I have never fully understood what they were about even while I was playing them. I picked my plays at random, thinking “yeah that one looks OK” just before I headed to the line of scrimmage. I always seemed to get my ass kicked which would explain why everyone always told me that 90% of football is the play you call. So, rather than continue to wallow in ignorance I made the decision to buy Madden NFL ’09 specifically for the purpose of learning more about football and football games. I was inspired into this action by one of the recent episodes of PurePwnage where the Nahtzee cartoon explains how games have kinda gone the way of movies lately and that we don’t have much raw competition in gaming anymore. So, I decided to make a study of all the ’09 EA sports titles. I must say there were 3 times that I seriously considered giving up on Madden NFL ’09, as my attempts to learn the sport and play the game proficiently were failing. I refused to give up, however, and persisted in my education. When I found the football training camp guide over at sportsgamer.com I finally found my way out of the muck. I also got a Prima Madden ’09 guide which was, humorously, vastly inferior to the free online alternative at sportsgamer.com. Thus begins my first major complaint about the game: Why are the manuals and virtual training SO BAD that I absolutely NEED to go to a 3rd party to explain to me how to play the damn game? The manuals are so piss poor they barely reach the level of a reference guide, and the virtual training in the game does nothing to prepare you for real game situations. Instead of teaching you how to run down the field dodging attackers, it has you running down the field and you simply have to press the correct corresponding special move to make it past an attacker, but that move would have had you stopped dead on the actual field. Personally, I found the virtual trainer absolutely useless. Fortunately that’s pretty much my only complaint about the game. Once I learned enough about football and Madden to play the game I started having unreal amounts of fun. I seem to be enjoying this title even more than NHL ’09 which is very surprising to me as Hockey has always been my favourite sport. Football is like a game of chess with large sweaty men. Once you learn how to read a play and setup a play the game turns into this incredible match of wits and predictions. Someone brings out an offensive line-up and you quickly realize the defensive play you chose will not work, so you call an audible, then the offense calls an audible, then you call another audible, and then HUT! The action begins and you do your best with the final audible you chose. The offense can then chose to force the play without a huddle if they did well then the defence has to compensate even more, but now having a rough idea of what play they are going to choose. That is, until they call another audible, and the cycle begins anew. The number one question I’ve been asked by my fellow gamers since I learned the game and have been extolling its virtues to the world is: “Isn’t football just a lot of guesswork?” Well, if you think so I’d like you to come by and watch me get trounced online once, or watch the game where I beat a guy 17 to 14 with a team that was 23% worse overall than my opponent. You can clearly see how some players just understand football strategy to such depth that they walk all over a n00b like myself. I haven’t figured out the magic of it yet, but there is an amazing skill involved in knowing what play to pick and to know, sometimes it seems psychically, how to counter the play you think your opponent is picking. Then, you throw in the players who do all their tackling, intercepting, and catching manually and you get another level of competition that is what I imagine every game of two very skilled players comes down to. Aside from the horrible manual and virtual trainer, the game actually does a nice job of welcoming the new user. You can make the difficulty very easy if you want, and you can even adjust the level of play-calling. You can set it so you have full play-calling control, or you can set it so that you only pick Pass, Run, or Special, or you can even have it set so that the computer always picks the best play for you. Also, you can hop into Superstar mode and focus on one position at a time in the game. Want to work on your QB skills? Then make a QB in Superstar mode and you’ll only be on the field for when a Quarterback is needed, simulating all the other parts of the game. Same goes if you want to work on your Running skills, or your defensive lineman skills. You can pick any position on the field and play as that superstar through his entire career, getting experience points and building your guy along the way. Without these features and the ability to slowly increase the difficulty I probably would have never learned how to play Madden. I’m told the graphics have much improved from last year, making this the first TRUE next-gen Madden football game. I thought they were pretty nice, yeah. I love when you play in an outdoor stadium and the sun is going down, and you can see the yellowish shadow from the stands cast across the field. I have never seen any slow-down in this game either, just perfect all the way through. Sound, also, is impressive. I have a kick-ass surround sound system so I really appreciate it when developers pay attention to details that, really, they don’t have to if their only intention is to satisfy their core audience. Every hit sounds fantastic, making louder crunches the harder they are, and the crowd reactions are incredible, ESPECIALLY during a rivalry game. When you are playing a rivalry and the fans are on their feet, and you break out a great running or passing play, are heading for the goal line, and the crowd is screaming it’s a fantastic rush. Online play has also been a dream so far, no complaints at all. I’ve never seen an ounce of lag and I have had some incredibly exciting games. When matchmaking I can go so far as to specify what team I want to be and what team I want to play, and it will go find another person who fits that bill perfectly and may even be looking to play my exact team. That’s only the tip of the iceberg for matchmaking options, as well. There are great online leagues and I’ve already joined a couple. Seeing who is online and how many games you have left to play with them is a breeze, and it’s quite rare that I send out an invite to someone and the game doesn’t start within 30 seconds. Sometimes they just aren’t there and you can’t blame EA for that! :)

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