by jwin on Fri Oct 10, 2003 4:14 am
madden is the best football game they have put out yet, but it could definately use some of the new features coming out in live. owner mode is nice but when you start having money trouble you may have to gut your team for cheaper players, or could even lose your team. and some of the features are misleading. when you go to set prices in the off season you may notice you're below the league average and hike them up to get on par with everyone else, but you may actually end up losing money and fans depending on the area you are in. especially with merchandise prices, it's better to be below the average because fans will stop buying if the prices are too high for the economy range. with contracts you have to be careful what moves you make because you can accumulate a lot of cap penalties if you release players, trade them, or they retire. so it can become a pain after a few seasons, and the fun of it may lessen some.
the preseason training camp is another thing that can become useless after some time. if you have a rookie hb you want to get some rating points, but your starter could use a higher break tackle rating, you have to choose which you want to do or what will benefit your team more. you only get one shot with each drill whether they improve or not. you should actually be able to at least run every player through the drill that will help them once, thus you could improve your veteran a little as well as that rookie.
from the looks of live's off season activities, it will be beyond madden in feeling like the real thing. madden is supposed to have crowd booing at the draft, which the pc version didn't even get, but i would rather have live's draft studio and the draft boards and such. and with the training modes madden could use more specific drills for improving skills for instance moving or stationary targets for qb's to improve accuracy, instead of throwing to three different receivers but having to get the ball through a big ring first, and not getting any credit if the wr doesn't catch the ball. or db's should have to go against real wr's in their drills instead of running and catching or batting down passes from a machine to different spots on the field. live appears to be more skill specific with their drills, but it is yet to be seen how far you can go with one player in improving them.
the editing features are purely below par. if the cpu relocates their team to another city, and after a few years they will and very often, the team will have from that point on a generic helmet with no emblems on it, and a uniform that looks like a high school team. the first time you see it is not so bad, but when you have six teams that have relocated and four of them all have the same basic color scheme but different variations of the uniform's, it looks like every team is penn state only with different colors and stripes. the stadium editing feature which supposedly has millions of combinations is not what was advertised, the actual options that YOU can change are maybe around 20 if that many. you can't really design anything it's more like do you want four or eight stadium lights, tunnels or stairs, or an open dome or closed roof etc. not really much to play with. the uniform editor has restrictions, for some options if you change sock color the pants color automatically changes with it.
as for presentation and cutscenes, there are some serious bugs there. when a rb is stopped behind the line at midfield , you may see a scene where he throws the ball over the crossbar as if celebrating a td. or the qb down on his knees pumping his fists as if he threw a td, when he was really just sacked for a 12 yd loss. replays seem to be accurate, but the cutscenes appear to be random, and not specific to the play at all sometimes. in live i haven't seen a player giving high fives after getting his shot smacked to another zip code. they are nice but in madden, but live is more accurate to the reality of the game.
madden is a fun game, and i am enjoying the owner mode, though the roster restrictions limit what moves you can make too much, and it is very easy to get in debt if you make too many moves, or sign players to long or high salary contracts, but i think madden can benefit more from some of live's new feature's than live can from madden.