Posts filed under 'Madden NFL 2007'
Only 8 days between updates. I’m starting to get into the swing of things. I do promise longer reports coming soon, even if they’re less often.
I really want to say that my opinion has shifted for the better on at least one facet of this game. I want to come here and have a good quarter of this post say that “while x, y, z, alpha, and beta all still suck, I enjoy q somewhat more now.” I wish I could point out that subjecting myself to the string of code on this DVD has bettered me in some way, other than wishing I was playing the cooking chicken stage of Parappa the Rappa in place of this moderately warm heap of bovine anus void.
But I cannot.
I’ve been able to roll up a nice 6-1 record with my team, on the standard difficulty level. I figured it was time for me to up my level, that maybe I’m getting so bored with the game cause it’s not a challenge. (Even though I threw 4 interceptions against the in game against the Bears and STILL won the game, more on luck and Willis McGhee’s counter play running).
So I upped my difficulty level, and got stomped. Like, everything I thought I knew, I didn’t. Now, I’ll grant that a higher difficulty level should be hard, and God help me, I’m going to continue on playing at this to better myself, but it is a real, noticeable, ego-stripping, emasculating step to take.
The other issue I’ve had with this game lately is that most times I’m blindly mashing buttons. This was a major beef with the game I had, there seemed to be very little skill, just pressing the button at the right time. Let me say that a game, I was pissed at this game because I thought a skill ONLY REVOLVED AROUND PRESSING BUTTONS AT THE RIGHT TIME.
Think about that for a second. I just started playing Kingdom Hearts II, and a major skill of that video game is PRESSING THE ‘X’ BUTTON AS FAST AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN. So Madden 07, I forgive you for the hatred of making me master a video game skill you have to master for every video game; for making an issue when there was none really.
The Good: I don’t hate it as much because I discovered hypocrisy on my part.
The Bad: Given the choice, I’d rather play City of Heroes, Kingdom Hearts II, or Pong still.
Opinion Change: Still miss Techmo Bowl…..8 bit is still better than DVD and authentic playbooks
September 20th, 2006
Wow, eight days without a report. Want to know why? Nothing much new going on with Madden. When I’m playing it that is.
One of my fears has come true. Now that the regular season of the NFL has started, playing the game has lost some of the little appeal it once had. I’m involved in two fantasy leagues, and my Sundays are now handed over to the almighty god of football; the pigskin my new religious icon. It’s true that before the season started, there was sort of a “Well, it’s the only game in town, so I might as well” feeling toward the game.
I still can only play at most one half of a game at a time, but the reasons for stopping are starting to increase. I got mad while playing the Chicago Bears that I had to quit. They intercepted the only two passes I’ve thrown. Part of me wants to just reset the game; on the plus side, I understand that urge to do so now.
Having the Bears play so well on defense actually mirrors last year’s real life Bear’s team. It’s kinda eerie seeing things like this. The stats in game really match up well to their real world counterpart. Defensive teams are good on defense. Fast wide outs are really faster than the slower ones. On this point, it does suck you into the simulation, and does it well.
The Good: I guess having as accurate a simulation as possible where you don’t have to actually stand up and put on pads is a good thing…
The Bad: I still see very little reason why a gamer would want to play this. This is not like other video games, it is very much a you like it or hate it game…
Opinion Change: …and I still hate it.
September 12th, 2006
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!
September 4th, 2006
It’s been almost a week since I made a post about the actual game play and game experiences. I wish I could say something cool and epic was holding me back, like having to fight Satan himself for the souls of all humanity, and his chosen battlefield is the grid iron of Madden ‘07. I want to say that, yes, after the seemingly infinite jabs and pokes from all the demons in Hell itself, as well as The Fallen One using perfect control of the blocking feature to break a few long rushes, I emerged victorious in the most perfect game of football ever, score of 2-0 in overtime, 95% rushing plays on both sides.
But I’ve just been lazy. Still not in the habit of updating a site with words and stuff.
So, yeah, three games into my season on Madden ‘07. My Bills are 2-1, losing the first game that was close in the first half but pulled away from me in the second half. I won the next game against the Dolphins, who are arch-rivals with the Bills. This last game I wiped the floor against the Jets, beating them 40-17.
But it’s taken the whole week for me to play three games. I can, at most, play two quarters of football in one setting. And it’s not like I’m playing long periods either. It’s the five minutes per period that’s the standard for Madden games. I’m just finding this very, well, boring. It’s boring when I’m winning, it’s boring when I’m losing. Boring in the morning, boring in the evening, boring at dinner time. I’m going to try and bump the difficulty from rookie, the lowest, to pro, or what ever the next easiest is.
Maybe part of it is that I’m starting to get the controls. My rushing game has definitely improved, I understand having to wait for the blockers to do their jobs and for the lanes to open up. I am reading the defense well, and calling hot routes. Hot routes are sort of audible that change the route a receiver is running. When I call a pass play, and break the huddle and get to the line, if I see a defender somewhere, I can change the route to exploit the weakness. A week ago I would have been totally lost at what to do. Now, I am master of buttons in a game!
If I’m not bringing the funny, it’s well, despite my new found mad skillz, it’s the game is dull. I pass, I run. I throw a few completions, I throw an interception. Defense comes out on the field, and it’s just the opposite of offense. I pick plays at random, end up not controlling a player cause if I do, the other team will get my precious into Mordor. Or something…
…and I know if I had bought the PS2 version, I’d enjoy all this bantha poodoo somewhat more. The PC version lacks Madden Points. These are little bonuses you get for scoring a touchdown, making an interception, rushing for x yards, and other little in game milestones. Save up 100 Madden Points, spend it on a deck of cards that’s pretty much worthless. But I think this would solve a lot of my boredom issues with the game. It’s the same reason I enjoyed the Tony Hawk skate games. Sure you just skate around the same eight stages, but there’s different special jumps and grinds and things to do. You’re not playing to complete the game of skating, you’re playing to collect all the hidden actions in the meta game. The sad thing is, this might be the sort of crap that’s in Superstar Mode, and I may, if the increased difficulty of Franchise Mode doesn’t help, have to submit myself to that.
There is one bright spot, and it’s in a location I thought I wouldn’t like. The soundtrack. No, I don’t like a lot of the R&B-slash-hip hop-slash-rap music, but dear god, if these files are mp3s on my system somewhere, I’ll be putting them into my iPod. When iGetOne. When iHaveEnoughMoney. No, not the R&B songs, but Madden’s dealt with NFL Films to get a lot of the classic background music the NFL Films have produced. It’s odd, when one of these cue up, it’s like I’m watching a highlight reel or something, yet I’m playing the game myself. It goes back to that make it real/make it enjoyable ratio I’m sure I mentioned sometime before. I hear this music, and I think back to the best the game has to offer. The tape of the Bills “Greatest Comeback In NFL History” has songs from this soundtrack. The heroes I grew up watching, waiting in line for two hours to meet, cheered and jeered every Sunday, those memories flash through my head while I try to pretend I’m on the other side of that fan exchange. These classic tunes, if nothing else, make the price of the game money well spent.
Short, blunt, and to the point. I’m like Fox News, only smarter. And full of truthyness.
Positives: DUN dada DUN dada DUN dadatdada DUN dada DUN dada DUN dadatdada…NFL Films soundtrack.
Negative: In the rain or in the snow, pass the ball and run it for’d. All I ever want is for this to get interesting…
Opinion Change: Game itself much decreased. Though I’ll be poking through the files to see if I can grab me a few NFL Films mp3s, it’s not like I didn’t pay for them….
September 1st, 2006
Session Time: None.
I haven’t picked up the controller at all today. I don’t want to. Yes, yes, I know that’s the whole point of Unbelievers, to force oneself into the bowls of their own digital personal hell and face off against one’s personal gaming demon. But the initial flurry of passion to play; the excitement of something new, from the weekend has faded into a haunting specter of disinterest and loathing just at the sight of the box for my chosen combatant.
Also, I just read a book on how to write really flowery prose; a fancy word primer if you will. That and the extra semicolons I obtained this weekend; punctuation purchased at a mighty fine discount though I don’t know how to use them, my attention turned to writing rather than NFL this fine evening.
I’m not sure I had accurately shown that I hate this game enough to warrant a spot on Unbelievers. Thus is the author’s curse, to always be triple and quadruple guessing one’s work. When I found I lacked the energy to finish my Week 1 game against the Patriots, down 24 - 14 in the third quarter I had saved at the end of Sunday’s game session, I turned my focus to *WHY* I didn’t feel this game deserved any attention.
Here’s the thing. I’m an old school gamer. I played AD&D 2nd Edition, where calculating THAC0 was a rite of passage. I can still fondly remember the excitement of figuring out the maze of Super Mario Brothers 7-4. Up up down down left right left right was a code when I was a kid, and a DDR step file when I’m an adult. Video games have been a part of my identity ever since I first took control of a tank in Combat.
The thing is, like all other fringe markets and fads, my one true love over time became less faithful to the geeks and nerds that took it to the dance, and started mixing it up with all the other kids. She slow danced with the Goth kids to the haunting tunes of Resident Evil, but the Goths were like us nerds, outcasts with different dress codes, so I didn’t mind. My girl, video games, is a nice girl, much better than I deserve, and wants to make all the outcasts feel special. She danced a line dance holding hands with the gearheads when the first Indy 500 simulator was released.
But she had to go and slap me in front of the whole school when she started to bump and grind with my mortal enemy, the jock. The same guy who would beat me up and take my lunch money, the brickhead who made my gym class a living hell, and with Madden, she’s whoring herself with him, and everyone knows it. Sure, after the dance, I take her back home, being the perfect gentleman so her parents won’t be mad at me, but I can still smell the foul stench of my mortal enemy on her like an ethereal Eau du Jock.
Video games were not only my haven, they where part of me. Other people scoffed at them while I gave them the attention they always deserved. Madden, I realized this evening, was video games available to the people who least respected them. The frat boys who I observed in college obsess themselves over this game weren’t video gamers, they were posers on the secret society I had sacrificed years and social skills to gain entry too. I had resolved myself then not to embrace this rogue game into the collection of titles I knew and loved; I would not recognize this abomination against video game nature as it went against my perfectly formed view of not only what a video game should be, but what a video gamer was.
This is a harsh realization to make, to be honest. I didn’t realize how much hatred I had built up for the fans of this series until this evening. After the first emotion of shock at this flash of understanding, the next was shame. My enemies, those same jocks who made my life a living hell, should I not embrace them into the brotherhood of the gamer? Instead of the black sheep, should I not look at Madden as the missing link between homo nerdicus and homo jockidian?
I can’t say I’ve sold myself to the latter. Video games these days are wholly apart from the 8 bit wonders of 1986. It’s no longer the sole haven of the geek; rather all walks of life play a wide variety of games as unique as the populations playing them. My hatred of Madden, and more so of the stereotype of Madden players, is as much at home in the blast processing and Turbo Graphix 16 days as the cherished childhood memories that go along with them.
So maybe as I continue on with Unbelievers and Madden ‘07 I’ll drop this stereotype. Yet, as much as I want to better myself, like letting go of any other stereotype it’s just not as simple as that. I need to walk those miles, or in this case run those 40 yard sprints, in another gamer’s shoe, before I can even approach dropping my deep seeded hatred.
But, every journey needs its first step. Mine is just deciding on to use a 4-3 defense or nickel package on my next play…
(and apologies to the Tuesday Morning Quarterback Gregg Easterbrook for borrowing his phrase for the title)
August 29th, 2006
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