Jeremy_Stein's Blog
More recently, I've been helping out the Quick Hit guys on their new online football game, Quick Hit Football. It's not a competitor of Madden's. But if you like football, you'll probably dig QHF. It's only in alpha and I'm already enjoying it enough to be playing it just for fun.
And if you're a Minnesotan, I recently started a local sports website dedicated to the type of sports fans who hang out here. You should visit www.funkytownsports.com if you're a Minnesotan who likes more video games and fantasy advice with his sports news.
Since I have a game AND a site to pimp, and the game I used to work on just released a new version, I figure now is the time to finally start blogging on OS.
My completely honest, completely biased take is that I like Madden 10 more than any Madden since Madden 2003. Read on if you're in to specifics...
Things I like about Madden 10
The in-game ticker
I don't think Madden is light years ahead of its brethren, NCAA 10. NCAA 10 is pretty fun. But the litany of useful info fed by the ticker is one reason Madden's presentation is getting such high marks this year. It makes the game more immersive by expanding the narrative of each game and each season. Factoids, streaks ending or extending, events tied to relevant info ... all in a ticker. It's great.
I got sacked by Robert Mathis tonight, and a single ticker banner told me it was his first sack of the preseason and that he had 11 sacks in 2008. I used to have to make up that narrative in my head. Very cool.
The cut scenes
Steve covered this pretty well in his review. Heck, everyone who's reviewed Madden seems to mention the cutscenes. And with good reason ... they're great. They're at least as good as anything I've seen in any other Next Gen sports game, let alone previous versions of Madden. I remember 2k5 having some rad cut scenes, but I bet if I went back they'd be beaten out by what Madden 10 brings.
Being able to run with power backs
The "normal" demo of Madden, with the Giants and Cowboys, was overly short. Two minute quarters wasn't enough time to do much, but it was enough to showcase how much fun power backs are in Madden 10. Pro-Tak will certainly see some fleshing out and tuning in Madden 11, but the way they've improved the animation system in 2010 is already fantastic. Bowling defenders over with Brandon Jacobs was fun, and so far I'm liking what I can do with All Day and Chester Taylor.
Wider rating ranges add gameplay variety
Helen: Everyone's special, Dash.
Dash: [muttering] Which is another way of saying no one is.
The above exchanges from The Incredibles describes a problem Madden had before Madden 10. If everyone is special, no one is special.
Donny Moore and Co. listened to what some of you in the OS community had been saying for a while, and the result is a game that feels more varied than any Madden I remember playing.
The improved franchise interface
Franchise still has a lot of problems, but at least it's showing signs of life again. Just look at the initial screen. The contrast between 09 and 10's franchise interface is stark.
Madden 09 franchise had no soul and no pulse. Not so with 10. The initial screen provides better context to the events of the season, and makes the current event more prominent and interesting.
Playing the Colts this week? You get a picture of Lucas Oil Stadium and immediate access to the Play/Sim option. It's the little things, sometimes.
Throwing horribly while being pulled down
There's even an achievement for this! This gameplay feature is implemented in NCAA 10 as well, though in that game your ducks often turn in to interceptions. I've yet to see a duck-INT happen in Madden, and that's just fine by me. I'm just happy to see QBs throwing out of wraps.
Things I don't like about Madden 10
The microtransactions are whack
I like DLC and I like microtransactions as concepts. I want you to like microtransactions too, because Quick Hit Football will be supported in part by microtransactions.
Unfortunately, Tiburon did us no favors with Madden 10. If you go on XBL and look at the user ratings on the various content, the DLC is getting a rating between one star and two stars.
The "Not Done Yet" DLC lets you keep one player from retiring for one season in Franchise mode. That's cool, I'd use that ... but is that worth $1?
I honestly don't know if QHF's microtransaction pricing will be more fair, but given that the base game is free, I imagine players will cut us more slack. No matter what, I wish more thought was put in to the pricing and utility of Madden's microtransactions. I play Madden, you probably play Madden, and I don't mind paying a fair price for convenience.
Draft class importing remains broken
Maybe I'm the only person who got hooked on NCAA after learning you could take your NCAA class and import it in to Madden.
I'm pretty sure I'm not, which means at least a few of you reading this are similarly unenthused with how Madden handles imported draft classes. You play your dynasty, generate a draft class, import the players in to Madden ... and all hell breaks loose. Madden applies a random number generator to a variety of stats, and depending on the dice rolls, your 97 OVR QB could be a 63 or 75 or a 51 OVR in Madden.
This is not realistic and it's not fun. Going in to a season not knowing how good a college player will be in the pros adds intrigue and some realism. But if you're a GM for an NFL team, you knew Graham Harrell would not turn in to a pro prospect by the first time you (or your scouting director) watched him play at Texas Tech. Likewise, you didn't know *exactly* how good Mark Sanchez would be as pro just from watching a little college tape, but even a junior scout could tell if Sanchez had the potential to start in the NFL before the 2008 college season was even over. They were both great college quarterbacks, but one has a skill set that obviously translates to the pros (Sanchez), and one does not (Harrell).
In other words, if Sanchez and Harrell were legit 99s in NCAA, it's fine if Sanchez exported as somewhere between a 70-80 and Harrell exported somewhere between a 50-60. That's a big range for both, retaining the mystery (and maintaining scouting as a useful mechanic) while not chucking realism out the window. But if Harrel exported as a 79 sometimes and Sanchez sometimes exported as 51 ... that would suck. And that's what can happen right now.
There are lots of other ways to do draft class importing wrong, and this problem does not lie solely at the feet of Josh Looman and the other Madden Franchise devs. When your NCAA dynasty has 10+ players at a position, all with 99 OVRs, there's some tuning that needs to happen on the NCAA team's end. Hopefully the NCAA dynasty devs and Madden franchise devs care enough about their busted synergy and are willing to devote the dev hours needed to fix it.
Steve was right about the announcing
I can't think of a sports game with an on-field announcer that is more inaccurate. The incredible amount of interesting, useful info pumped out by the new ticker makes up for the awful announcing, but hopefully improved announcing is on the roadmap for Madden 11.
*************************
Thanks for reading and make sure to check out Quick Hit and Funky Town Sports, should the mood strike you.
-Jeremy Stein
Jeremy_Stein
12
354 Forum Posts
4 Blog Entries
14 News/Blog Comments
0 Reader Score Votes
1 Friends
0 Chalkboard Messages
0 Screenshots
0 Videos
22,581 Arena Visits
Jeremy_Stein's Blog Categories
Jeremy_Stein's Screenshots (0)
Jeremy_Stein does not have any albums to display.
Jeremy_Stein's Friends
Recent Visitors
The last 10 visitor(s) to this Arena were:
Jeremy_Stein's Arena has had 22,581 visits
Jeremy_Stein's Arena has had 22,581 visits
Working...
As I said earlier, Madden 10 has a lot of qualities and flaws which I did not touch on in this post. I'm having more fun playing it than any Madden since Madden 2003 (the Gamecube version). That does not mean it's anywhere close to perfect.
The DB AI has a ton of problems. A ton. The coverage of backs in the flats is quite flawed. Again, it's something the devs @ Tiburon are already reading about over and over again in the OS forums, other posts, and in more than a few reviews.
On top of that, I know how complicated it is to design good DB AI. I've yet to see a football game that gets DB AI right. I think the last two things we'll finally see done right in football games -- be it Madden 16, QHF 5.0 or whatever VC cooks up next -- will be DB AI and line play.
Finally, the incorporation of head-tracking in to the DB logic was a big step forward. I think even that is imperfect in Madden 10, but it's definitely a step forward. And I'm sure they'll build upon it for Madden 11.
@BIGROC:
Thanks for the kind words. I don't get Madden's direction when it comes to user stats, trophies, highlight reels or any other feature/mechanic meant to encourage a sense of individual heroics (or failures). Even the achievements this season are unfriendly to players who focus on offline or online franchise mode.
I like user stats and that sort of stuff. Tiburon's own NCAA series often does a good job with this stuff. Outside of Tiburon but still @ EA Sports, if you look at FIFA 09, that game had a great user stats interface. It was tucked away a bit, but they had a lot of cool stuff.
And if you like user stats and that sort of stuff, you're probably going to <3 Quick Hit Football. More on that later...