Cause We Really Need Another Set of Madden 12 Demo Impressions - therockstar2005's Blog

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Cause We Really Need Another Set of Madden 12 Demo Impressions

Posted on August 9, 2011 at 10:08 PM.

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Everybody has something to say about the Madden 12 demo. Here's my initial thoughts:

First of all, this game looks really good. Yes, there are some issues, some pixelation on shadows in places, and there are some odd transitions during some of the cut scenes, but given that this is a demo that (presumably) isn't taken from the final build, and that it's a video game, I'm really impressed. This game graphically does not look like Madden 11 to me, and that's a good thing.

Gameplay...eh, it's nice. It's not blowing me away yet, but it isn't shockingly awful either. I like that you can (finally) get pressure and sack the QB without having to put the pass rush slider to 1,000,000. The QB doesn't magically get rid of the ball by making your rusher freeze in midair for a second anymore, so right off the bat I'm happy. I like that you can run the ball...even if it seems a bit easy. Will need to spend time messing with the difficulty settings...Pro is way too simple, but I bump it up to All-Pro and suddenly can't do anything.

And I'm convinced the Bears are screwed this season cause Jay Cutler sucks.

In fairness, a lot of what I'm looking for in the game will come in the Franchise mode, and hoping that it isn't broken, and at least in the context of the demo, DPP seemed to work without breaking anything (Cutler's attributes/tendencies/whatever went down, but then completed a hell of a deep bomb, and they shot back up, which was cool).

But...I'm not really leaving the demo feeling excited for Madden 12. Maybe I've just been spending a lot of time playing 2k5 again and having fun with that, but what I think really set 2k5 apart for me was the character of the game. That's what keeps me coming back to it, even now. And I'm not sure just what Madden 12's character is going to be for me. In playing it, I was actually surprised, as it didn't feel like a rehash of Madden 11 (which, to me, DID feel like a rehash of 10). But I really want to hear the commentary, just at least to finish out how a game will flow. I want to see how the Franchise works (if it does).

Am I going to get it? Probably...even if I convince myself I should just get a set of rosters for another game and go through all the craziness in order to do that...and put up with the problems that do exist there, honestly, I'm still probably gonna go and get it day 1, like I imagine most of the people on here will. At the end of the day, if the game was really that terrible, we wouldn't get it (see Backbreaker...sorry BB fans). It's not like Madden 11 wasn't good, it was. It just didn't happen to hold my interest. I mean, it's understandable - year 2 of grad school, it was hard for anything to hold my interest. Now that I'm actually employed (thank God for that), I'm hoping that changes this year.

But maybe it's just me. Maybe I need to stop looking through the forums here, and stop reading every post about every "gamebreaker" that exists or go through the pages of people complaining that "Hey, Aaron Rodgers actually runs the ball in this game," or "I'm too good at this game, so why doesn't EA do better to make it more difficult for me and f*ck everyone else over," and just try to enjoy the damn game. Because in the end, I think that's what has changed the most about games as I've gotten older - me. I've become more cynical, more judgmental, less able to just enjoy that my un-athletic person can sit on a couch and play football and have it look like it does on TV. Some may call that "becoming an adult," and maybe so, but perhaps I am expecting too much from a video game. Maybe I should look for more fun in it, and not let the issues it has distract me. Maybe I should actually let it be catharsis for me, instead of needing catharsis because of it.

...What the hell was I writing about again?