Madden 10: A Humorous Review!

When I came up with with the idea to write a review for Madden 09, it was during a time when for the first time in my history of playing the Madden series, I was getting my ass handed to me by the CPU. My wide open throws were being knocked out of the air by forces more powerful than I could fathom. My offensive linemen lived up to the name very well. My defense got torched like the California hills every summer. I was crushed. Only then, in my moment of rage and dejection, did I try to look further for the first time at the game as a whole. Just to try to wrap my head around what I was experiencing, I ventured far back into the recesses of my Madden gaming memory.

I've played the game since Madden 01. So, this will be my 9th year in a row of shelling out money to play EA Sport's version of their NFL football game. I've probably played well over 1000 games against the CPU and probably about 500 or so against human opponents online or in person. I've watched a fuck ton of football in the past 9 years and I trust that I know quite a bit about the sport and how it works. Madden 09 was a fucking disgrace to the game of football. The new gimmicks to lure in "casual gamers" sucked nuts. The AI of the game on all sides of the ball was absolutely imploded. The jump from Old Generation Systems; PS2, Xbox, Gamecube, was a complete disaster. Rushed, half finished, buggy games that you often felt like, when you were playing, that no one play tested at all.

I posted quite a lot on the Madden forums and communities to try to get my voice heard. I quickly found that I was BY FAR in the majority of Madden players griping about this steaming turd of a game. EA decided that they would listen to us and make a concerted effort to make Madden 10' one of the best games they've turned out in years. Anyway, let's bury that useless pile of fuck, Madden 09', and move on to this year's version!




Madden 10' is here! I received mine as a birthday gift from my ever-generous roommate. While it does take away my ability to gripe about having to shell out $60 to play it, it makes me feel even worse that a good friend of mine made this sacrifice. So anyway, I got home, popped the fucker in the PS3 and BAM! An all new presentation, a cool introduction to the game including Troy Polamalu and Larry Fitzgerald and each player's journey through the postseason last year to reach the Superbowl. Nice touch. Meanwhile, John Madden is narrating some bullshit about goals or something. Speaking of John Madden, I really miss his color commentary in this game. Chris Collinsworth is a complete faggot. Combine him with the corpse of Tom Hammond and you'll want to turn your sound off after about a quarter of play.



The new menu presentation is functional and I don't really have much to complain about here. One thing I would like to bitch about is the in game music. Here's the rule EA: If you're going to put a song into your game and you have to change more than half the words in the fucking song because they are curse words or not "politically correct", don't have the fucking song. Have the fucking "Baby Bop Hop" song instead, assholes. Take for example Painkiller by Judas Priest. You can have a band as controversial as Judas Priest on your game with the song "PAINKILLER", but you can't say "Atom Bomb"?? What the fuck? How many Rage Against the Machine songs do you know that have repeated use of the word "Fuck" in them? Yep, there's a RATM song on this game's soundtrack. Not so you'd notice though, since every other word is changed to something on the complete end of the spectrum of what the original word was trying to convey.




ALRIGHTY!!! There's a host of new shitty gimmicks that EA drummed up for this year's version so let's dig in!

First up we have the new "Pro-Tak" system. It's a new animation system that finally lets you gang tackle a player with up to 9 players!!! And you know what? 9 people tackling the ball carrier is probably a little bit less than the actual amount you need to bring the fucking guy down. Yes, the broken tackles in this game are in fact, very aptly named! It just so happens that on about probably 80% of all plays, at least 3-4 tackles are broken. While this might be realistic with some of the more elusive players in the league or power backs, it's not quite as acceptable for Marc Bulger (QB-St.Louis Rams) to throw 3 of my grown men defenders to the ground. Apparently the "Tackle" rating, or make that ALL RATINGS, MEAN JACK SHIT ONCE AGAIN THIS YEAR. So to sum it up, "Pro-Tak" is a cool feature when it works FOR YOU (which is hardly ever) and more frustrating than watching the United States Men's soccer team compete on the world stage.




Fight for the Fumble! Er, we mean MASH THE FUCK OUT OF YOUR CONTROLLER IN THE VAIN ATTEMPTS TO GET THE BALL THAT NEVER SHOULD'VE BEEN FUMBLED IN THE FIRST PLACE! This feature is beyond retarded. Basically, whenever a ball is fumbled in this game, the screen goes to a big pile of guys laying and humping on each other trying to get the ball. You have to mash the corresponding button that pulses on the screen to get this progress bar onto your team's side. Basically tug of war with button mashing. The only problem is, I could slap my dick on the buttons and have a better chance of ever recovering a fumble. Many times I've won the tug of war only to come out of the pile without the ball. Doesn't fucking work. To add insult to injury, you'll look like a fucking asshole in front of your friends and your hand will hurt after you don't get the ball back. If EA wants me to break the fuck out of my controller, they should just announce that they hold exclusive rights to make an NFL game until 2030. I'd break it right now.




"Fight for Every Yard". That's pretty much the catchphrase for this years game. If it were an accurate slogan and actually gave you a realistic vision of what actually transpires during a game, it would be "Fight for Every 70 Yards". Which, is really what every game seems to boil down to. Big play after big play due to fucking retarded AI, Shitty tackling and other inexplicable faults in the system. I guess it would be accurate playing on ALL-MADDEN difficulty considering the AI holds the power to change the physics of every aspect of a play in it's advantage. We can also call this cheating. If the CPU doesn't want you to complete a pass because you found the hole in the coverage... well... you're not going to complete that pass! It's that simple and the really sad part about it is when you go back and watch these replays of fucked up broken plays, it doesn't even TRY to hide what it just did to fuck you over. Go youtube "Madden 10 Glitches" watch these videos of the AI physically LOCKING YOUR PLAYERS IN PLACE SO THEY CANNOT DO ANYTHING until the CPU has the advantage. Unbelievable that this could EVER be acceptable to the Madden Dev team.

It used to be that if you were smart and knew what you were doing in the course of playing through a game, you would come out with a victory and feel a sense of accomplishment in beating the CPU on ALL MADDEN. It was hard, and a real challenge. That's a far cry from what it is now. I guess in the push from old generation systems to next generation, EA exploded everything and decided that it was okay to make ALL MADDEN a complete joke of a difficulty.

What is this absolute fascination with the right stick in all sports games now? God forbid you ever have to press a button to do any kind of sports move anymore. Just jerk off the right stick in different directions to do anything. The right stick is certainly more intuitional for a few acts but to base the entire pass rushing game around it is just being fucking lazy. This leads me to another gripe. STOP CHANGING THE FUCKING CONTROLS FOR THE GAME EVERY GOD DAMNED YEAR. Leave it the fuck alone. Why do I have to relearn all this little gimmicky shit every year? Why isn't half the shit in the instruction manual for when I have to figure out why what I'm used to play for 8 years is different? The playstation and xbox controllers haven't significantly changed, button layout-wise, since the inception of the original consoles. So, knowing this... why does EA feel the need to alter controls every year? Why is X not fucking sprint anymore? Why does a trigger have to be EVERY MAIN SKILL IN EVERY GAME NOW. We GET IT. You want us to fucking kill each other with guns, I UNDERSTAND THE SUBLIMINAL MESSAGE but PLEASE, stop changing the shit every year. I know EA is trying to play up to the demographic they sell to but I'm white and maybe I'm not born to play football and shoot guns, especially not both at the same time!




Part 2 Coming Soon!!!!
-Improved Blocking Schemes
-"Threshold"
-Duck Passes
-Injury System
-Defensive AI
-Trades
-Challenges
-Accelerated Playclock
-Robo-QB and MUCH, MUCH MORE!!!!

Michael Jackson, Xbox 360, Pacman Jones, Michael Vick

I guess in the last 5 years or so, I've fallen into the social sway of opinions on Michael Jackson. I don't really remember much of his music as I was growing up because it wasn't really my thing. I knew about Fleetwood Mac, Mariah Carey, and Gloria Estefan. That was about the limit of my musical knowledge, thanks to my mother playing the hell out of it on the den speakers. So, the cultural impact of his music doesn't really impact me the way it probably should. Sure, some of the artists I listen to probably cite MJ as an inspiration, so I guess in some roundabout way, it affects me one way or another. Anyway, I find it hard to believe everyone who dumped on MJ for the past 10 years suddenly had an awakening when he bit the big bazooka. What happened to all the jokes? What happened to him touching little boys and disfiguring his face being the topics of choice when casually chatting about the man? I didn't expect so many people to just give him a free pass, especially considering how the American Culture had treated him for an extensive period of time. Sure, it's courtesy to the dead... but whatever happened to courtesy to the living? Do people have to die nowadays to garner any sort of lasting respect at all? You can't have it both ways, America. You can't ridicule a man for the duration of his latter years for crimes he didn't even commit and then all of the sudden forgive all perceived wrongdoing and rant and rave about his cultural impact. It bothers me that it took his death for people to shut the fuck up.

I've been gaming since 1989. If you were able to go back and figure out how much wattage I've used over the course of my lifetime while console gaming, I'm sure the figures would be astronomical. Perhaps with the energy I used to game all these years, you could power a small town for several weeks. We'll never really know. What I do know, however, is from 1989 to 2009, no console I ever owned just upped and died. The days of the super nintendo, sega genesis, playstation 1, N64, Dreamcast, Playstation 2, Gamecube... All of them played from the day I started running them to probably today, if I dared dig them up. You may notice that I left out 2 notables that I've owned in the past few years. The first is the original Xbox. This big, ugly fucking pile of plastic was made I guess to melt things. I never could play on it longer then a few hours, just to avoid it melting my entertainment center and all the things around it. Xbox360 is here now. I picked mine up last April and enjoyed playing on it until about a month ago. Apparently, it's so cheaply and poorly designed that about 6/10 ever made will suffer a hardware failure at some point in the unit's lifetime. Basically, you continue playing until you get yourself the Red Rings of Death, indicating a hardware failure. Now get this; This hardware problem was/is so prevalent, Microsoft was basically forced to extend every Xbox 360's warranty by 3 years to avoid massive litigation. You still have your basic 90-day Warranty and all on top of the 3 year addition. I find it funny. What I don't find funny is the incredible amount of neglect that must've went into production of the system. Microsoft was in such a hurry to launch before Wii/Ps3 (to saturate the market and get a good base from which to compete with) that they forgot to build a console that was actually worth a fuck. So, now I get to feel like a jackass when I'm doing the "towel trick" to temporarily fix and major hardware flaw. Funny, I don't ever remember wrapping towels around my SNES.

"You can take the man out of the hood, but you can never take the hood out of the man."

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/otl/news/story?id=4333957

All I really have to say is there are so many more out there just like him. I will never understand Black "Gangster" Culture and the insane emphasis it places on material objects. I know some well educated black men, and they say this is exactly why Black America will never amount to anything. It's not really fair to these kids to be brought into a lifestyle where they have no future. It will continue, however, regretfully.

Michael Vick is another polarizing figure caught up in the whole "trapped by culture" phenomenon. From a fan standpoint, sure he's entertaining to watch on the field. If you've never watched him play, there's simply no way to describe the electricity he brings to every play on offense. I remember when a young Michael Vick went into Lambeau Field and single handedly defeated the Packers in a playoff game from about 5 or 6 years back. Then he got paid. Hung around the wrong crowd, blah blah. We've heard it a thousand times with a thousand other success to failure stories. To me, as a sports enthusiast, it helps me respect all the hundreds of other players who KNOW right from wrong. Will Vick play in the NFL again? Probably. It just seems a shame to be talking about all of this now, when his career was so promising from the outset.