I have a lot of anger in my heart towards Madden. The feeling must be akin to the feelings one has towards a former spouse. You have those great memories - the good times - but you also have the bitter breakup and angry feelings from when the relationship went south. I guess I’m the sucker who is willing to give that ex another chance. Some quotes from a producer that make me want to reconsider:

• “you choose to go to the holographic training center and you have a bunch of training drills for you to practice. You can do things like work on pocket presence, you can work on receiver timing, focus on defense. I believe we have a total of 12 different drills that you can try. The mode looks really nice — the players are holographs, you’re in a holographic stadium — it’s pretty cool looking. And coming out of that mode, we actually assess your Madden skills, giving you a Madden IQ. Obviously, you want to do as good as possible in those drills, and from your Madden IQ, we actually set your game skills, so if you have a high score, we’re going to make the game really challenging for you”
• “As you’re playing the game, when the game recognizes that you’re doing something improperly, we’re going to break the moment down for you. It’s a higher, nicer version of instant replay with the graphics laced on the field. We actually showcase guys with colors and arrows — very cool. So if you take a sack for example, when there was a receiver wide open in the field, we’re going to tell you that. We’re even going to show you why he was wide open and how he ran into the space between the zones. And for those who have a high Madden IQ, we even add another layer of information where we break down the actual plays that were used, the hot routes that were called, and we show you on a statistical basis how successful that play typically is versus that defense. And the nice thing with backtrack, we don’t want to just tell you what you did wrong. We’re actually letting you rewind a play now. We call it EA Sports Rewind, and by just hitting a button, that situation actually rewinds and you’re able to try the situation again, and hopefully take the game’s advice.”
• “For the first time ever in Madden, you’ll be able to get together with 32 of your friends and participate in a league where you can play through a schedule, play through the playoffs, play your own Super Bowl. There’s draft support, there’s trade support, and we actually implemented flex scheduling in the online leagues. We’ve had tournaments before online, but the problem with tournaments is that having more than two or three people together at the same time to complete a series of games is very, very challenging. So with flex scheduling, you can actually play your games in any order. It’s more like a round-robin style. We did this because it’s online and we wanted to make sure people can actually play through their seasons. If you and I are scheduled to meet in Week 10 but we’re both online today, we can just play our Week 10 game now.”
• Web support is a big factor and we definitely want you to be able to go to the Web and take a look at league statistics, but a lot of the interaction will have to take place using the product itself.
• Typically in Madden, when the play is dead, we give control over to the AI, but now when you score a touchdown, you still have control and if you run to one of the hot spots and hit the Y button on the 360 or the triangle button on the PS3, he’ll do a celebration depending on where you are. So if you’re under the goal post, he might dunk the ball or if you run to the hot spot by the wall and you’re in a stadium that supports it, you can do the Lambeau leap. Hit the button and jump up in the crowd.
• The biggest thing is bobble catches. We had a lot of drops in the game last year and it’s no fun when you drop a pass. We’re going to turn a lot of those drops into bobbles. It’s definitely cool when you see the ball hit a guy’s hands then it goes flying into the air and then he goes and tries to make that catch.

Anybody else up for an online league? Dibs on the Colts.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 11:08 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.