Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Madden 2008

So about two weeks ago I purchased Madden 2008 for my PS2 (yeah, I still use PS2). After playing for a bit I have some impressions that I would like to share.

I should state upfront that I am a Madden Guy, but I only buy it every other year, unless there is something really revolutionary. So I am judging 2008 after playing 2006 for the past two years. With that in mind, I am pretty disappointed overall.

Don't get me wrong there are some great things about the games that I love. I love precision passing, the hit stick, the audibles and line adjustments, even the alternative jerseys, but all of that was available in 2006. My biggest issue with 2008 is that there is very little new. They added some new tackling animations, which are really cool, the roster update which is expected, and a pretty interesting training process, but the took away some things that I liked. First of which is Tony Bruno. You may be asking yourself WTF?!? Who the hell is Tony Bruno. This is the guy who did the "radio show" in between games. It was nice to hear discussion about what was going on each week while trolling through the menus.

They did add a great deal of texture to the game, making it look really good, but this causes the game to preform pretty badly, it is slow, sometimes herky jerky and don't even try to pull up the national or local paper. You will need to wait quite a while for those articles to load, even when you are just switching between them.

This brings me to my final point, there are to many things in the game that are EXACTLY THE SAME in this version when compared to 2006. Finish a training camp drill, here there is the same cheesy cut scene. Win a game, you will see your QB, TE and RB with there silly poses. The news articles are the same... SAME SAME SAME.

Look EA does a great job with Madden, and If i was on a next gen console I may have a different experience, but at this point I am just not as impressed as I have been in the past. Don't get me wrong, I will be playing Madden pretty much non stop for a while, I just wish I was playing something better.

Overall, i am going to give Madden a punt for this year. Hopefully Madden 2010 will be different.

1 comment:

Matsie said...

Unfortunately, all of the development effort really goes into the X360 and PS3 now. Those versions of Madden are dramatically different than what you experienced, and much more impressive.

Because of this "split" in the development, there are really 2 very different games, with the PC and PS2 platforms both getting shafted.

PS2 I can sort of understand being phased out, as the platform is hardware limited, and there is no way for it to get better, however PC's are an upgradeable resource, and are, given the right hardware, capable of many of the same things (if not more) than the Next-Gen consoles are. In this case, there is simply too small a market to devote tons of development time and dollars to the PC when the console game sales dwarf a PC game.

So instead, EA has decided to churn out what is essentially the same game over again with updated rosters.

Hey, atleast with the MVP NCAA Baseball game they didn't even bother with a PC version instead of taking MVP 2005 and changing the uniforms. :)