I spent some time last night with the Madden 09 demo, and to be honest, I am not sure what to think.
You start out by taking a serious of Madden IQ tests. I’ll throw up mine for all to laugh at (grins and giggles all around please) …
- Rush Offense (All-Madden @ 20%)
- Pass Offense (All-Pro @ 40%)
- Rush Defense (Pro @ 80%)
- Pass Defense (Rookie @ 80%)
I ended up with a measly 509 rating. Ouch. So offense was fairly straight forward and easy, but rush defense was really just a guessing game. If I picked the direction the running back was going to take, I ended up passing the test. If I guessed wrong, well, that’s why I ended up with a Pro rating. Pass defense was the worst; I really did not know what buttons to press, so I failed most of the test.
It will be interesting to see how Madden IQ comes into play with the overall experience. Bill Abner has the full game (360 version), and as has been reported all over the place, this year’s game does not include CPU sliders.
That is very much a WTF moment. First, the sliders in NCAA Football 09 were broken. Now this; no sliders at all. In theory Madden IQ will somehow level the playing field, which is probably fine for some online games, but not so much for single player games. Why not just use the NCAA Football 09 “equal teams” feature?
After doing the Madden IQ junk, the demo lets you play a “Madden Moment” – last year’s Super Bowl. You are the Giants, down 10-14 with under two minutes. Fourth and one; Patriots on defense. You score a TD, you pass the “Madden Moment.” Fail to score, and you fail the test.
That is the extent of the demo. You do not get a chance to try out the defensive side of the ball.
More to come later.
I didn’t like the description of the demo when I first heard about it.
But really, these demos for very familiar and popular series aren’t going to influence buying decisions that much.
The NCAA demo is a real game but with short quarters so you have to play them over and over again to get an idea of what gameplay tweaks they made.
It sounds like people had a positive reaction to it but were surprised by many aspects of the actual game, which had issues with the punt and kick returns as widely reported.
The Madden demo doesn’t let you play defense but you can kind of see what the CPU defense is doing. However, I don’t think it will give anywhere near a complete picture of the quirks of this year’s edition.
I’ve never touched sliders because you can’t use them online anyways. But I can understand why people are upset. I’m kind of skeptical that they make much difference because the core logic of the game seems to me to have been static for a long time.
Like I said, I am really not sure what to think. I usually play sports games on default settings for the first few games to see what the developers intended for the “average” gamers.
Sliders are screwed up in this year’s NCAA (they may get patched), so I doubt sliders in Madden would make much of a difference. I usually use them to adjust a game to help me – too much passing, not enough running, too many ints, etc.
I will put in some more time with the demo this weekend before deciding if I should invest some money in Madden this year.