Madden story on ESPN

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Good article, he kinda lost me at times though. I really gotta say I dont agree with him however. I'm far more compelled at the sense of realism todays games display than what we had yesteryear. As technology advances, I often think back to those "Tecmo Bowl" days and I often get the strong urge to download...err...I mean replay those games. And when I do, I find that its utterly impossible to look back at the past. Believe me, I tried. When I first heard about emulation, I immediately went searching and spent hours upon hours getting the greatest and best of my youth. After I boot up....meh, it seems hard for those games to hold my attention longer than a few minute.

My friend on the other hand has no problem with it. He even went as far as grabing Midways greatest hits collection and Atari's greatest hits collection. And while he did spend a nice amount of time playing those golden oldies, after the smoke clears and he's had his moments, those 2 games have sat on the shelve since he took them out the console. While we enjoyed the few games of Arch Rivals we played, it does nothing to frecapture the feelings we had pumping quaters in the machine, wasting away hours at the bowling alley, begging grownups for a few quaters while someone watches the machine and keeps the end game countdown on 10.

Dont get me wrong, we often get sudden urges to relive the past. We even got a nice 4 hour, 4 player game of Goldeneye in just last weekend and we once broke out the Original Twisted Metal and beat it co-op 4 times straight. Its just that once you pop it in and get taken back to nostalgia-ville, you quickly start to miss the newer technology and better graphics and indepthness that todays games provide.

The good ol days were great but its defintely time to move on to bigger and better. Its not that I'm less compelled and pick apart todays technology. Believe me, I'm not one to rant about uniform colors and like the writer said, blurry tats, its just that once something is done and the bar is rasied, I expect better. Thats why I'm so hard on EA like I am. I may sound like a broken record in this forum but pay attention when I say, I find it hard to go backwards. Hard to hold my attention as my wants and needs rest on what I have already been spoiled with. If any of you have a Ipod, you find it rediculously hard to go back to standard CD players. And anything less is'nt worth your time. Same thing applies to me when it comes to video gaming.

Its been brought up many times that we all should be greatfull for how far we have gone in video games. I really, truly am despite how much I bitch here. I remember playing simple 1 on 1, blocked shaped basketball on Atari. I remember the "lets all move at 1 time" controls of Ten Yard Fight. I remember the simple 8 play playbook of Tecmo Bowl. I remember the simple red and blue teams of Joe Montana football. Yall get the point by now. Times have changed for the better. I truly appreciate how real sports games have become in such a short time span. But it is impossible to go back. We like to cherish those times but they are dead and forgotten. Cant do nothing but look ahead as we are at a time when these so called "robots" the writer speaks on should do everything they do in real life. Well not everything but we're steadily coming close. When you've been blessed with the opportunity to see what can be done in terms of AI and physics in relation to player collisions and objects, I want to see it improve and be a standard in each and every game I play. And when a company(EA) refuses to apply something that can clearly be done and has been done, thats when I get a little irratated. So many of you need to keep that in mind when I go on these lil tirades of mine. You should clearly see why I'm upset. I'm not one to bitch and moan about the smallest of minute details like shoe strings and light reflections, I just want what everyone else should want. Thats for the games to look exactly how they do on my television. Is that much to ask for?