[I Peench]

Quote: Originally Posted by Trackball

Seriously, have you PLAYED Madden 2005 lately? Go on, boot it up if you have it. And if you don't, it's super-cheap on eBay or Amazon. We get it--it had a ton of awesome features that sound like they were a ton of fun. This was necessary, due to ESPN NFL 2K5 coming out that year. I will grant, competition usually drives quality. But ask yourself: Has Madden 2005's on-field gameplay really aged THAT well? Would you REALLY rather play that than Madden 12 or 13? I'm seeing people raising a big fuss over such minor things, like whether players are planting their feet before a move, or whatever. Seriously? THAT'S your big problem? No, the game's not perfect. The number of perfect video games since 1972 can probably be counted on one hand--and the more bytes of code there are, the more bugs will slip through on launch day, especially when you're forced to work with a development cycle of just one year, like EA Tiburon. Remember that "Greg Jennings with a broken leg" video from Madden 10? Look again at how Aaron Rodgers scrambles. His legs move, but his torso stays in place, like a puppet. (WARNING FOR LANGUAGE.) This was just four years ago. It's the little things like this that get fixed every year, one by one. We got better scramble animations later, I'm sure. But seriously, why are we raising a fuss over such tiny things that few people outside these boards will notice, like the exact shade of the team helmets? We're sounding like Al Davis, when he would start every year by closely analyzing the new shipment of uniforms, making sure they weren't gray. They were silver and black. He would not have it otherwise. (ADD geek-out moment: I hope Al Davis is one of the legendary owners in M25. What a quirky guy. And yes, he really did that, every year.) But would the vast majority of players notice? I certainly wouldn't. And I wouldn't care, as long as the product on the field played well. The Texans could wear yellow, for all I cared, as long as I was having fun. Yeah, the defensive-line play could be better, I admit that. That's important to me, since I like to control a DE when I don't have the ball. But come on, can't we show some love for Josh Looman and the other EA Tiburon devs? We give them a lot of flak for "this game is the same as last year," but we forget just how hard it is to program something of this magnitude. That's why I'm giving Looman the benefit of the doubt when he says that editing ratings would cause a lot more harm than good (introducing bugs regarding goals and such), so maybe once the game is out, a programmer on here or at Under The Code can get really down and dirty with the source code (like how people proved that SimCity 2013 CAN be run offline just fine for a while), and prove to us whether or not changing ratings after a franchise starts really does cause as many bugs as Looman claims. If it does, Looman is vindicated. If it doesn't, then we can blame the suits for not letting us do this more easily. (That said, I'm not sure that's legal...in terms of the law. But it would answer a lot of questions.) All I'm saying is that I'm giving Josh Looman and the dev team the benefit of the doubt. I'm still really excited for the new Owner Mode, and the chance to kick Jerry Jones and Bud Adams' butts out on the street and show them how a team SHOULD be run. Yes, Madden 06 was a mistake. A huge mistake. But I'm willing to blame the suits for that--perhaps they ordered the game be gutted. We all remember that CGI trailer they showed, which led to a particularly well-regarded Penny Arcade strip in 2005, coining a term using the name of a male bovine, plus the last four letters of "screenshot." (Afraid to put the actual word here, in case I get a yellow card for bypassing censors. But I'm sure you know the word.) But if this game is as good as I'm hoping, (almost) all is forgiven. There are little things to fix, yeah. But the point is that they get the BIG things out of the way first--making sure the game doesn't crash and whatnot. I remember NHL 12 crashing a lot on my PS3, and that was never patched (NHL 13 hasn't crashed at all yet, thankfully). It doesn't matter how good a game looks or plays if it's unstable. Keep at it, Josh and Tiburon. I'm rooting for you.

Not often I see such a logical post around these parts. Bravo.

I despise the notion that they purposefully took everything out of the game such that they could re-introduce it and sell it as a "new" feature. As I said above, the dev team made a HUGE mistake by rebuilding the game from the ground up on the 360. They thought doing so would be the best chance at creating a truly "next gen" experience, when in actuality it was a marginal product stripped of all the features they'd built up. They won't make the same mistake again, and the ignite engine (the thought process behind it, not the engine itself) is reason to be optimistic.