OK, so I feel a little guilty because I know you guys all want the goods, and I want to deliver them. But, I'm pretty much a wreck after about eight hours on the E3 show floor today.
I captured a ton of footage, played a ton of games, and was just running around trying to cover as many bases as possible, and I think I succeeded on that front -- I played
NHL 10 for about an hour (embargoed until June 16),
FIFA 10 for about an hour (embargo is now up but I will not write about it until this weekend), I saw
Backbreaker (embargoed until June 15), captured a ton of
Madden NFL 10 footage, captured a ton of
NCAA Football 10 footage, and captured some
Fight Night Round 4 footage as well.
That being said, I have to get up early tomorrow and do it all over again. I'll be on the show floor for the whole day, and then I'll head on over to LAX for a 10:30 p.m. PST flight and get back into Philly at 6:30 a.m. EST. (I'll have a nervous breakdown somewhere along the way as well.) But the flight is set up that way because I wanted to have another full day on the show floor to get some more hands-on and snag some more videos and screens.
So, I cannot wait to do it all over again in the morning because I want you all to get as much out of this event as possible. I have an interview with Peter Moore in the morning, and then after that I will be trying to capture some footage of some racing games, before trying to capture some more football footage and find some off-the-beaten path sports games.
Returning to the original point, though, while I'm not going to write any detailed impressions tonight, I have to give you guys something, right?
Madden NFL 10
-I see that a lot of people like the new Ray Lewis
video. My understanding is that there are not a ton of those types of signature player intros in the game, but there are over 10 signature stadium intros. I'm pretty interested to see all of them once August rolls around.
(On another note, I see a lot of people complaining about the highlights within the halftime show. While I understand some of the complaints, I want to be clear that the reason the highlights are bad is because I Super Simmed to get to the halftime show quickly. When you Super Sim, the game does not create manufactured highlights from the simmed plays. In other words, the game only had a handful of plays from the half to choose from, so you saw things like a 4-yard run and so on.)
-In-game saves are not in the game.
-You can user control all 32 teams in offline franchise mode, and you can also edit every player on every team within the franchise mode. So if you don't like how a rookie was rated on so-and-so squad, you can change everything about that player's rating within the franchise mode.
-When you put a player on IR within franchise mode, you do get cap relief.
-Within franchise mode, there are still 53 players on a roster during training camp.
-There was a lot of talk about the lack of a salary cap in online franchise mode -- at the very least, it will not be there at launch. While that is a bummer, it's not a total loss. Since the commissioner can control every single move in an online franchise, it would be very possible to create "house rules" for who can sign what player and so on. Many people (including myself) play in things like fantasy baseball keeper leagues where you have house rules in place to figure out what players you can sign from free agency and so forth. It is more legwork for sure, but at least there is a way to get around the lack of a salary cap.
-Either way, you will want the commissioner to have full control over what moves happen throughout the online franchise mode, because any AI teams that are in the online franchise mode lack trade logic. If commissioner control is not on, you could hose any AI team in the trade department. Once again, house rules will be in effect here. Personally, the house rule I would enact would involve showing the whole league a trade you want to propose to the AI; then the league votes on the trade, and it either gets accepted or rejected.
Grand Slam Tennis
The game comes out next week, but I know some people were wondering what was going on in the "career mode" department.
First a couple little details:
-The career mode lasts 10 in-game years.
-Your player will be rated on a five-star scale.
-You create your own tennis pro before hopping into this mode.
OK, so within this mode you will only play at the four Grand Slam venues, but there are different courts within each venue. So you won't be playing on center court when you are a one-star bum, but you will be playing on it when you are a five-star stud.
But just because you are playing at these Grand Slam venues all the time, you are not actually in the French Open or Wimbledon tournaments at the start of the mode. Instead, you will be playing exhibition matches against generic players, rather than Nadal or Sampras. As you get better, you will unlock stuff (see: apparel) and eventually you will qualify for the Grand Slam tournaments.
At this point, you will then be facing off against some of the legends and some of the best tennis players in the world. In addition, if you beat someone like Nadal at the French Open, you will also acquire his speed ability. Simply put, if you beat the best players, you get their special attributes. Basically, it seems like your created pro will be like a sports version of Mega Man.
Operation Sports
06-04-2009, 03:44 AM
Linear Mode
