BOO!m (And yes, that’s spelled correct)
It’s pretty sad when a game you’ve hated for a week, a game you’ve tried your best to like even though every rational neuron in your brain is telling you to walk away, doesn’t let you play it.
I figured I was being overly harsh on Superstar Mode; that I needed to jump a year or two ahead for my player to take their rightful place in the team. So I made a new superstar, a running back, and I simulated an entire year. The New England Patriots drafted me, and my entire first year, I didn’t get to play on the field at all. No problem, Corey Dillon’s starting to age, in a year or so I should be able to replace him.
So the second season starts, and I start up a training camp day. In this mode, training camp and practice sessions are more important than the actual game. It is where you get to fight for position, to prove yourself to the coach. So I hit the start event button, and the preseason mode loads. And loads. And loads. And Control-Alt-Delete tells me five minutes later the program’s not responding.
No big deal, random crash. Kill the process, start it up again. Same thing. And those three moments of zen like Madden bliss have been enriched into raw, energy filled hatred worse than any Iranian uranium will ever be. I start up a new random superstar, and I can go into the first year training camp no problem, but any second or beyond year training camp, and the game just crashes.
Which is just great, as I was liking (GASP!!! I KNOW, SHOCKING!!) superstar mode. I could idly play it when I didn’t have the time, simulate a week or a season and move on, and had all sorts of little mini-things aside from the game that I thought I would hate, but proved to be nice distractions. I think my initial impressions with Superstar mode were so poor because I was on the defensive side of the ball. On offense, at a skill position (QB, RB, WR), Superstar mode, while it isn’t good, we’ll just say it sucks much much less.
One more comment about Superstar mode that leads into the other half of this tough acting rant. I had a QB superstar (First year, of course, fscking bug…) that is not calling any snaps, but does get on the field to hold the ball for the place kicker on extra points and field goals. Except it appears that there is something I am supposed to do to place the ball on the ground. Everytime I’ve done this, the kicker misses his kick, and horribly as well. If there was a practice mode to tell me how I am supposed to plant the ball, or an in game menu to explain how this is done, all would be good. But Madden, while driving around in his fricking bus, seems to have forgotten how to tell the players of his bug riddled game HOW TO ACTUALLY PLAY THE STUPID THING.
Yes, I’m getting used to how to control all the various permutations of actions in the game. The practice mini games do really help in this. But the in game help for controls is poor. There is a drop down menu that covers the basics for rushing, passing, and blocking, but there have been multiple times where I needed a specific command, and I just could not find it. Sure, the drop down lists of doom in games like Unreal Tournement or City of Heroes was hard to sort through, but I know the command I so desired to use was somewhere within, and all I had to do was spend at most five minutes looking through. In Madden, even though they tried to ‘help’ the user out by classifying controls, things got cut, and when your only two actions in a game are holding a ball for your kicker and you fail at that cause you have no idea how to order it, in pre-season games where the entire intent of your play time IS TO PROVE TO YOUR MAKE BELIEVE COACHES THAT YOU’RE A GOOD ENOUGH PLAYER TO PLAY, which making your kicker mis kicks is what you DON’T want to do, things get annoying.
Man, that was a run on sentance. Sorry, Madden are do be causing the baddest grammers.
The Good: I want to play Superstar mode….
The Bad: …but a bug THAT CRASHES THE GAME prevents me from it. In game help (IE. help while actually playing the game) is almost as bad.
Opinion: How much longer do I have to put up with this steaming pile of computer compiler dung? Three more weeks or I find those mp3s I talked about. I’d rather have every hamster dance clone installed on my computer rather than this stupid, stupid program. I’m not sure I can even call it a game at this point. Hell, calling it a program assumes some level of logic was intended with its creation. It seems the programers just threw random 0s and 1s into a heap and called it a day. I had thought about trying to review its on-line play, which is an option in this waste of hard drive space, but I’m afraid my firewall would correctly not only catagorize this game as a virus, but would force my machine to become sentient, electro-telekineticly animate my mouse, wrap itself around my neck and strangle the precious life giving oxygen out of my body to make up for being exposed to the files that compose Madden ‘07. Honestly, at this point, I’m almost of the opinion that Madden ‘07 is a terrorist plot to poison the youth of America. And now that I’ve said terrorist and uranium in the same blog whose URL is The-Unbelievers.com, everyone welcome the NSA, CIA, and FBI to our video game experiment!
Add comment September 4th, 2006