[dp68]

I really want to love this game. The presentation is fantastic, the Free Agent Bidding is handled realistically. I like that your team has to decide what it wants to work on in practice. It is highly motivating.

But after a year or so of fiddling around with this game, I have given up on it. Because it uses the old Madden engine, it suffers from the same inability to accurately simulate the passing game that all the Madden games suffer from.

I've played Madden 99, 06, 08, and 11. Heck I even played the first Madden on my commodore 64. And Head Coach 07 and 09. They all have one thing in common - ridiculous yards per reception.

Whether you are in coach mode or cpu vs cpu mode, all of these Madden versions and HC07/09 are terrible with the secondary. I've never seen a Madden game where the yards per reception was less than 16.0, and more times than not it is pushing 20 yards per reception.

That's horrendous. It's like having a baseball game where the leading power hitter hits 100 home runs in a season. Why hasn't it been fixed in two decades?

I can go 15-1 and 16-0 in HC09 without breaking a sweat. All I have to do is throw, and throw, and throw. Even if I only complete 40 percent of my passes, the ones I do complete go for huge yardage. It's garbage really. It doesn't even feel like football.

I didn't consider Madden 12 this season. The secondary play has been broken since day one. Day one as in the early 1990s. And I've given up on HC09, despite loving so much about it. It's just a broken passing sim, and way too easy to beat because of it.

It's sad that I need to play a text game in 2011 just to get a realistic football simulation.