ADDICTED LIKE A CRACK**!!!(LONG, but please read)

[jfsolo]

Like a lot of you here I've been playing Madden since the ORIGINAL pc days.
When I was young I played against my friends-the chedder was oozing out of the controllers- but hey I was young It was fun. As I got older and became more of a student of the game, the cheese became intolerable. As many of you in your thirties like me know(hell I sure some of you in your twenties know, poor bastards) Life changes, friends move away, and you don't have a much time and as many friends to play with.

Talking to me you wouldn't know it, but I'm kind of a loner, not one to suffer fools lightly. So when FRANCHISE MODE worked its way into PC and console games It was Nirvana. I could just be by myself and ball vs the CPU. The CPU would play Straight(as best they could with the programing they recieved anyway) No nonsense.

Online play was born, and while it had a certain appeal, my pesimistic nature imagined a cyber world full of the cheesest of the cheesy. Being on OS and other boards reading so many horror stories fullfulled my worst fears I took a pass. Every year when the new sports games would come out there would be the cries from the Franchise people and the Online people. The online people would Rail about the need for quality default settings for the games
Being a franchise guy I would think to myself "sucks for them-and spent 2 months working on sliders.

When I was a younger sprite I had unlimited energy to edit rosters, ratings, fix anything that needed fixing. Now that I'm older I just want to open the box and get my game on. So when this years madden rolled around I thought about all the roster fixing I needed to do(Rickey, Quincy and so on.)
I started, then stopped and said "Screw this, what the hell I'll get XBOX live, download some rosters and get my Franchise groove on." Yea, 50 bones a year is a little steep for rosters(I didn't want to deal with maxdrive and all that other computer stuff) but maybe I'll play Rainbow 6 or something.

Geting connect was a pain in the rear with dealing with my modem an dynamic ISP(or is it IPS, hell I don't know) address I was 5 minutes from saying "screw it" and giving up. But I got it to work, downloaded EA's roster update and was ready to roll, but... Hell(I need to find a new mild expletive)
I'm oline I might as well give online play I try.

I kept waiting for someone to open the OS room(I didn't feel confident enough to do it myself) Finally someone did(Sorry dog,I forgot your name)
I played him, he beat me easily (24-7?) I hadn't played another real human being in about 7 years!!!! I was so nervous- I was so afraid of making a mistake that there was no way I could win or even compete, but when Marshall Faulk, slipped a couple of tackles and scampered for a 60 yard TD right before halftime I knew I was online to stay.

The next guy was a random guy who was a Vick cheeser. It was mild not sharp but it was cheese nonetheless. Part of me wanted to quit- but I said NO I will never quit- I may have a techincal disconnect sometime but I will not give up. Needless to say I wasn't ready for his tactics, but I made a few plays and only loss by 10 or so.

I've played 8 or 9 games or so, won 3 I think, all against guys I didn't know
and only 1(Vick Boy) was chedder-could be luck?? We'll see. I will say this
I HONESTLY don't think I will EVER play franchise again. Until the A.I. becomes as dynamic as a human being I'm done with it.

I'm a intermediate player I don't have the fine motor movement(twitch) skills anymore(35 will do that to you-I'll still ball you up thou) to be an elite player, C'est La Vie, but if you want to play against a straight baller with pretty solid gameplaning skills look me up.(tomorrow- I'm going to bed now I gotta get up and play ball in 4 hours.(Sorry if there are a lot of typos I'm to tired to proofread.) goodnight(or shall I say goodmorning!!!)

gamertag: jfsolo