Madden NFL 09 Review

So its been 20 years, and I have somehow played every one of them at sometime in my life,  maybe not in chronological order, but none the less. This also makes me rather old, as I was in high school when the original Madden came out. The journey has been long and hard. Some years representing peaks and others valleys, and many of us feeling the last few years have been the same game with the roster the only change.

When Peter Moore took over as President of EA Sports back in July ’07, he said he was going to change the face of EA Sports and the titles that they have charge of.  Its now Madden’s turn on the red capet, but can it hold the hype. The first thing I had a problem with is the cover, you know if you are going to change the game and make it more accurate don’t you think you could get the player in the correct unif.......  oh, wait, uh, nevermind.

I’m going to do this review a bit differently. We are going to review based on the features that EA has been hyping up and see how it really stacks up.

The first is what they have been calling Accessibility to the game. I read somewhere that they claim  Madden is one of the most complex and intimidating titles on the market. I’m not so sure on that, how hard is it to play football on a console. It is mostly picking a play and hoping they carry it out. The last few years has been much of the same so, what’s there to learn? The coolest thing about this is that they modified the game for what we now call the "casual gamer" without  dumbing it down for the hardcore Madden player.

There were a couple of features here that impressed me, which are the Handicapping and the the BackTrack. The Handicapping results in two players who are playing against each other, to "level" the playing field. It is fun for those who want to have a competitve game no matter who you play, but I am glad that you can turn it off, because Madden is not quite Madden if you can’t kick the heck out of your buddy 77-10 (sorry Scott).

The BackTrack, to me, is one of the coolest features, I hope they keep it as it brings in the reality of a football game on TV. BackTrack will essentially breakdown a play and show what you could have done in a certain situation. For example, you throw an interception into coverage. Once the play is over it will back up to the start of the play and with graphics and the soothing (?) voice of Chris Collinsworth show you where you could have thrown it.  The one thing that stuck out in this division of the features that just irritates me is what they call EA Rewind. Its another word for a mulligan. When you claim you are trying to go for realism, adding something that never happens in a real game, isn’t the answer. Thankfully you can turn this off, and it is not available online.