National Madden Day

I hear there’s an online petition to make today a holiday. I think that’s a bit excessive, but I don’t blame anyone for calling in sick. I would if I had the sort of job that allowed it … as is, I’ll have to hitting the stores tomorrow.

What other losers marked this day on their calendar?

IMO, the ESPN Football series was far, far superior to Madden. When I heard about EA getting the exclusive NFL contract, I shed a tear for my beloved ESPN series, and then went out and picked up Madden 2005. I figured since EA relized the only way it was going to put out a superior product was to stifle any and all competition, I may as well get used to their gameplay. It was…ok.

My biggest complaint is the skill dividing line. I set it to All-Pro, and my Giants won six straight Super Bowls. After each season, I’d kick each skill slider up one notch, and just kept rolling. Then, when I hit that magical 7th notch above All-Pro, suddenly the AI went into full shutdown mode. I was being held to 3 completions for 13 yards in a game…going 0-16 for the season. :dubious: Hopefully, they’ve addressed this in Madden 2006.

About two months ago, I buried a 50-dollar bill in the bottom of my wallet, earmarked for today. Now that it’s here…I dunno…I suppose I can blame some of it on the fact that I don’t have nearly as much free time as I used to, but I just can’t get excited about the launch. I’m sure the first time I go over one of my buddies’ places and have a scrimmage or two, I’ll be hooked again, but so far I’m just not feeling it this time around.

I don’t know if I’m gonna get Madden 2006 or not. With Madden 2005, the game was way too easy on Pro and practically unplayable for me on All-Pro. I don’t know how much of this was just my bad playing, though I’m thinking I should just stick with platformers and get myself Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal. Though I wonder if the game will be more playable if I put it on a larger screen (I lost my wide receivers every time they ran down the sidelines on both my little 19" TV and my 17" computer monitor.)

I felt the exact opposite, due to unbalanced scrambling, lack of a spy assignment, the ease of DL blitzing cheese, the inability to play multiplayer franchises, lack of an owner mode, no playbook editor, the amazingly tedious and overly crafted weekly training, the inability for any receiver other than the intended one to catch the ball, the lack of awareness in the secondary, the omission of a roster list (to see, for example, all the wide receivers in the league), and the slapdash approach to player progression.

On the plus side, it saved every play in the game to the hard drive, had nice player contract options, allowed independent defensive front assignments in the playcalling screen, and the developers clearly spent a large amount of time perfecting the barbie dreamhouse. So it wasn’t all bad. (Despite my derogatory sneer, I actually kinda liked The Crib.)

Although I must admit that I’m nowhere near as excited about this year’s release as I was last year’s. We’ve been playing a lot of NBA Live in our gamer nights, and there truly never was a better 4-player game ever devised.

Keep in mind, I never once played 2k5 against the computer, and I haven’t played Madden against the computer since I got an Xbox back in 2001. Sports games always struck me as exceptionally poor singleplayer games. I’m not looking forward to the plethora of sitting out that football will entail when compared to basketball.

Also, 2k5 was about a jillion years ahead of Madden when it came to coop players switching off calling plays, and made customizing the league a breeze in comparison to Madden’s painfully labor-intensive Create-A-Team.

I think I’m going to wait for PS3 before buying the new Madden Franchise. I kinda suck at Madden 2005 anyways, so I see no point in upgrading just yet. We’ll see, when the price drops and Sony pushes the release date back I may reconsider.

In terms of fun-to-play, I think many of the major competitors have been better than Madden over the years, at the times when both were current - the two most notable are the GameDay line, which essentially caused Madden to revamp into the modern monster it is, and the ESPN line, which caused Madden to buy out the license because they were losing market share. In terms of realism, I think Madden has always had the edge, and it certainly has tons of fun things to go with it… but I think we’d have a more fun world out there if we had healthy GameDay and/or ESPN lines still running.

That said, they’re still pretty good games, but I’m not touching anything like that 'till the PS3 comes out.

Who votes that Sega/ESPN (presuming Sega makes the ESPN line) brings out a revamped Mutant League line of sports? Now that they have no official license, just make the stuff up.

MUTANT LEAGUE FOOTBALL
MUTANT LEAGUE BASKETBALL
MUTANT LEAGUE HOCKEY
MUTANT LEAGUE SOCCER
MUTANT LEAGUE BOXING

thats what im looking forward to :slight_smile:

If they wanna have a day to madden me, well, they’re too late.

Nope, ESPN is now with EA. Look for the some of the 2k# goodness to enter the Madden franchise starting with the 2007 version.

I remember Gameday. We played Gameday that year because Madden sucked so hard. That was our only non-Madden year.

Except, of course, for Dynamix/Front Page Sports Football. Now that was a football game.

???

You don’t want the rookies and free agent team changes?

I agree there were some key things that were not done well in ESPN. Offensive linemen sometimes just completely missed their block or the scheme would let a defensive tackle come untouched. Defensive players would instantly run towards the ball the moment it was thrown. You could have two guys running paralell slants and throw it to the deep guy and the back covering the short guy immediately turns and makes a play on the ball.

The draft was a pain in the arse becuase it didn’t rank players in hte combine or the draft. You had to keep going back to ESPN.com which was a pain. For some reason it seems to heavily weight a certain position at the top in a draft. One of my franchises had maybe 3 WRs total go in the first round in 5-7 years while there were 7 HBs and 7 CBs a year. A player could only play his assigned position. For example if you have Ed Reed and Sean Taylor you couldn’t play them together no matter what. The free agents bugged me too, you would go to sign someone mid-season and they would refuse to sign unless they got 1 million or something. I mean they are sitting on their arse you would think they would take anything.

That being said, those are all really minor tweaks that could have easily been made or atleast thats what ignorant me thinks. If they had redone the draft, free agency and made a few tweaks on the gameplay it would have been great. Even with all the faults of ESPN I found it to be superior to Madden especially in game play.

I wish they would have spent less time on that crap and more on the gameplay. I haven’t ever gone in there and don’t even save my VIP.

I think I am doing a quasi-boycott of Madden this year. I am still happy playing ESPN and heck when you are 3-5 years in a franchise the missing year of players doesn’t really matter that much.

MUTANT LEAGUE CURLING!

Well, I have my copy but I didn’t take off early yesterday or call in sick today. I’m what you might call a functioning Madden player. :slight_smile: They moved some of the buttons around offensivly and I’m having to adjust. Any advise on the Superstar thing? The best I can do is 3rd string RB with the Browns. I’m rated an 81 overall though. I also don’t see the EA Sports BIO in the menu any longer, and I haven’t heard a word about it either way on any review sites.

A question re: Superstar mode…

So, you go through everything you need to do to make a team. You get drafted as, say, a backup QB. Week 1 comes, and your team loses the toss. Your defense takes the field, and…then what? Do you play the D-side, or just watch from the bench? Do you spend the season waiting for the starting QB to get hurt?

I guess what I’m asking is: do you only control “your character”, or do you play it like any other game of Madden?

Agreed that they were seemingly minor bugs that could have easily been fixed, but holy shit were they annoying “features”. The most annoying was the “multiplayer franchise” mode, which they touted as a new feature. That’s the only way I ever play. But you could only play as human teams, so we would have had to play human vs computer while the other three guys watched, and rotated. That’s lame beyond description. It’s painfully obvious that the reason they did this is so “cheaters” couldn’t sandbag the offteam to boost their VIP crib points. In other words, they considered the fucking crib more important than head to head play. Morons.

Our workaround was to make all 32 teams human controlled. This made every single aspect of the game a nightmare beyond words. Weekly Prep for 32 teams? Free agents? Draft? Trades? It was a gigantic clusterfuck.

But the absolute worst, most annoying problem was the depth chart issues you mentioned. The depth chart simply did not work. Period. You could do substitutions, but substitution are a micromanagement nightmare, and effectively useless in both 2k5 and Madden. Madden of course offers actual depth charts, and even better, introduced changing a player’s native position. Now that is a feature. The depth chart issue dovetails into the larger issue of player development being poorly implemented, and that’s probably my favorite aspect of playing franchise football. Oh well.

I do look forward to the cool aspects of 2k5 being incorporated into Madden 2007. Don’t get me wrong, Madden 2005 has it’s share of moronic “features” that drive me nuts. I could write a dissertation on how annoying the controller config was.

Anybody who already has the game: Can you configure the controller? Is there a way to set it so that the “sprint” button is always the same? (Controlling a WR before, during and after the catch is annoying as shit.)

Oh, that reminds me, 2k5 had the most pathetic turbo button ever. Track & Field from the 80s, anyone?

I have bought the PC version in the past, but I am considering a Playstation. Is the performance much better on a PS2 vs. PC these days? (I have a pretty fast PC)

If today is National Madden Day, does this mean we’re supposed to celebrate with a turducken?

Robin

What I’ve read is that the big Madden tournament (whatever it’s called) is for the first time ever being done on Xbox, as opposed to all previous years being played on the playstation format.

The reason is because the button layout on the PS2 (with 4 triggers) makes it noticeably awkward to throw to the R2 receiver. There is griping because many of the regulars only have PS2s, only have ever had PS2s, and Xbox 360 is coming out maybe two months after Madden, so if you want to practice for the tourney you have to shell out a couple hundred bucks for, in effect, a two month window.

The Xbox is faster, has a hard drive, and has a better online setup in general, if not necessarily better for Madden in particular.

The reviewer commented that there was an even number of PS2s and Xboxes at the demo he went to. The first day everyone was lining up to play the PS2s, and only one or two Xboxes were even used. By the third day, due to the awkward R2 receiver (the running back), the distribution was exactly the opposite, with the PS2s gathering dust.

There is no R2 reciever. There is an R1 reciever, the R2 button is for changing who the QB is looking at. Good luck playing any of your old Xbox games after you get the 360. I’ll wait for the PS3 and keep playing Madden 2003 for PSOne no less,2004,2005, and 06.