My Love/Hate Relationship with Madden

I have been playing Madden NFL football since its conception on Sega Genesis. And I have always loved the game. I have fond memories of running all over my friends with Randall Cunningham, and creating our own franchise mode keeping stats and records with a school notebook. And when the game graduated to playstation 1 then 2 it seemed to always impove, and though it had its faults me and my boys were always drawn in enough to overlook the faults.

Well Maddens leap to PS3 and XBOX 360 ("next gen consoles") has been very ugly so far. What happened to my beloved Madden? It has turned into an utter mess!!! Glitches galore, unrealistic physics, boring franchise mode but it looks pretty.......

Since when is FB dive a go to play for every NFL team in the league? Especially with a back like Warrick Dunn at FB.

Or why do the DBs react to the ball 100 times quicker than the reciever? And they Jump so high!!!!!

Why isnt Champ Bailey able to put fear in the QB with his ball hawk skills? I can just run a drag route and get my guy open on him every play. With any reciever as long as he has decent speed.

Why is speed the only rating that matters?

Here is one of many Youtube videos posted showing the bad gameplay of Madden 09.



There are many specualation on why Madden has regressed as a football game. One is that they are catering to the tournament crowd. I dont believe that to be true, because the tournament crowd evolves with the game. They will play the game regardless of how realistic or unrealistic it is. And they will find the glitches in the game and exploit them in order to win.

The reason I believe madden has regresses is because they have no compitition. For those of you who play sports games you know that EA has a NFL exclusive liscense agreement that they won in a so called "bidding war" and that they are the only company legally allowed to make an NFL football game. This eliminated thier long time rival NFL2K. And Madden has not improved since........

Well the new guys making Madden 10 seem to be listing to what us Sim (Simulation gamers, we like our football games as realistic as possible) gamers are looking for and they seem to be improving on the core gameplay and keeping lines of communication with the online community. This gives me hope for Madden 10. You can check some of thier posts over at Operation Sports Online Forums (the best sports gaming forums on the net). Or you can check thier weekly blogs over at EA Sports.

My relationship with Madden is like that of an abused girlfriend. Madden keeps beating me and abusing me with its crappy gameplay yet I keep coming back year after year hoping to restore that love that was there at the begining.