Submitted on: 08/12/2009 by
Jayson Young
As a follow-up to our NFL 2K5 roundtable, I'm here to talk about an EA/Sega rivalry from another era: the Sega Genesis era.
Read on to discover the results of this classic matchup as it's re-examined through a modern lens.
Two Different Systems, Two Different Maddens
An interesting note about the 16-bit Madden games is that, up until Madden '96, the Genesis and SNES versions were developed independently by different game studios, with each version having its own distinct style -- the Genesis version was typically the better of the two overall products.
The '94 version of Madden was no different, with it and the SNES Madden '95 (as well as the SNES version of Bill Walsh College Football) coming from the hands of newcomer Visual Concepts, the developer who would later swap sides and join EA’s arch rival at Sega to start up the now-defunct NFL 2K football series.
But the story of Visual Concepts is one for another day, as the team behind the superior Genesis version of Madden '94 was actually High Score Production. This studio made its football debut with the Genesis release of Bill Walsh College Football, and held the reins of EA’s premier football franchise from Madden '94 all the way up to Madden '98. As an interesting aside, the final version of Madden on the Genesis was turned over to Game Boy/Game Gear specialists Tiertex Design Studios in light of the sagging 16-bit market and growing push towards the new 32-bit/64-bit consoles.
Classic Teams in a Classic Game
Building on the success of Looking Glass Studios’ John Madden Football '93 -- a company that is actually known more for PC classics like System Shock and Thief than console games -- Madden '94 ended up having a couple very important additions in it. The first addition was the appearance of the NFL license (the NFLPA license was still absent). The second addition was a fully-implemented 16-game season mode, complete with battery backup for saved stats.
Aside from those two additions, the only real standout inclusion in Madden '94 was its roster of historic teams and franchise all-time teams. Want to pit the '68 Baltimore Colts against the '85 Chicago Bears? You could do that in exhibition mode, or you could set up a tournament of champions with any of the game’s 38 historic teams or 12 franchise all-time teams.
"He’ll Feel That Tomorrow!"
While Madden '94 may have been fighting a losing battle against Sega’s feature-packed Joe Montana series, EA’s breadwinner made up for it in the one area that mattered most: gameplay.
While Joe Montana '94 had all kinds of issues when it came to the passing game, Madden '94 -- archaic passing windows aside -- offered a great gameplay experience through the air and on the ground.
Defense in Madden '94 was just fun as offense. The "big hit" shoulder charge could cause some violent collisions, usually resulting in a "POW!" or "BOOM!" from Madden himself, who frequently chimed in with his signature one-liners from the broadcast booth.
But as great as the gameplay was in Madden '94, a major blow to the game's fun factor was the fact that the playbooks were incredibly limited (not to mention, completely identical for all the game's teams), leaving most game plans centered around only a handful of plays.
If there is one common trend over the years when it comes to Sega Sports, it's that, for better or worse, the company's games often seem to be well ahead of their time.
"I Can't Believe It!"
When booting up Joe Montana '94, the first thing that immediately stood out was its tremendous wealth of features.
While Madden '94 only boasted the NFL team license, Joe Montana '94 had both the team and player licenses, making its season mode a much more enjoyable simulation experience.
Once you took the field, Joe Montana '94 continued to impress with its live play-by-play commentary, a feat that Madden would never match during the Genesis days.
Unlike Madden's single, stationary camera, Joe Montana '94 featured no less than three functional camera views -- two vertical and one horizontal -- as well as the unintentionally hilarious blimp view, which gave an overhead view of the stadium and reduced all players to the size of a square dot. Impressively, users could even turn a zoom effect on or off, regardless of the type of camera view being used.
The game made all this camera manipulation as easy as possible by allowing players to mess with the camera directly from the main play calling screen, where the amount of plays and formations to choose from is simply staggering compared to the few dozen offered by Madden '94.
Joe Montana '94 even allowed players to substitute different player packages (say, two RBs and three TEs) independent of the many formations in the game, which gave gamers a ridiculously large number of personnel/formation combos to tinker around with while playing the game.
"Look Out! It's a Fumble!"
The running game in Joe Montana '94 was a nice change of pace when compared to Madden '94. It had a slower pace to it that forced you to patiently wait for blocks to develop before sprinting through the open hole. However, the passing game proved to be the game's downfall.
Regardless of whether you were throwing with Elway, Aikman or Montana himself, every pass in Joe Montana '94 came out as a lofty, wounded duck that seemed to stay in the air forever.
Manually catching the game's UFO saucer passes proved to be even more difficult thanks to the jerky player movement -- too often the CPU defensive backs would establish perfect position in front of the target circle, which would prevent your receiver from coming in to make a play on the ball.
Ultimately, Joe Montana '94 was a feature-rich game -- even by today’s standards -- but the gameplay was too unbalanced to make it a true challenger to the Madden franchise.
The real test of any sports game is how well it plays on the field, and though it lacked the bells and whistles of Sega's Joe Montana series, EA's Madden '94 proved itself as the champion of Genesis football in 1993.
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