Rogue

During the week I got a hold of a new game which has got varying reviews. It's been said that out of the EA stable from which it was birthed it is the best.

Follow up:

It's Madden NFL 2006! *gasp*

"Sweet mother of god, he's gone mad!" I hear you scream. Nay, I tell you. If you want to call yourself a gamer you can't shut yourself off to entire genres. To have a really well educated opinion on the interactive entertainment world you need to sample as much of it for as long as you can. And that includes the often neglected yet strangely lucrutive sports genre.

I've played most of the Electronic Arts (then EA, then EA Sports) sports titles over the past decade or so, maybe skipping a yearly increment here or there, but the big names that got decent reviews and word of mouth eventually found a home on my HDD. Except for Madden.

Madden (for those not aware) is EA's NFL game (that's american football folks), much like Tiger Woods' PGA Tour is their golf game. Now when you go to play it, if you're like me and have limited exposure to the game/sport, then there are a couple of problems with the whole thing right off the bat.

Firstly there is the issue of usability. The game is obviously built to be played with a gamepad. The screen you use adjust your key mappings is buried deep down in the menus and won't even let you change half the keys for some inane reason and won't tell you why (I assumed they were reserved, it didn't actually give me a message). This wouldn't be too bad if the keys that it starts with wern't mapped by a lunatic who hadn't ever seen a PC before.

As an illustration; your average PC game makes an assumption that you will either be controling things with the arrowset (on the right side of your kb) or the WASD arrangement, which is neatly set against the far left side of the kb.

Now when you're playing Madden the keyset is orientated around DRFG. Don't think that's odd? T, E, and W also need to be hit regularly and then spacebar pauses the game (which drops you back to the menu, you cant remap that... its great). I could live with a slightly sqewed key arrangement if it wernt for the fact that due to the nature of the game what the keys do dramatically changes. So while one key might be 'switch player' at one point, it'll change to be 'sprint' suddenly. That's the kind of thing which drives you mental. And none of it is explained anywhere either; not in the manual, not in the game, not even online. You just have to figure it out as you go allong (whatever happened to tutorials?).

That was the first problem. The second was that I really had no working grasp of how the sport is actually played. When I first installed Madden all I knew was that it involved silly numbers of people wearing big armor and helmets playing what looks like rugby, yet on a much smaller field and they stop every 30 seconds to swap the entire team. It was alien, but I wanted to give it a go.

This is a problem because the game has one flaw that I think really prevents it from getting mass market appeal. It assumes you are an American. I don't blame the developers and publishers for this, it's a natural assumption to make. NFL is played in the USA and I think there is a haphazard league in Germany, but that's about it. It's hardly a global sport, so there really isn't a need to go nuts dealing with people who arn't American since they're not likely to be buying the game in droves.

When I say it assumes you're American I mean that at no point does it make any effort to explain any of the acronyms and rules in the game. And while that's not such a big deal with a game like basketball say, things like that are really very easy to pick up because there arn't anywhere near as many rules. NFL on the other hand has teams of 55 people. Each of those people has a role which they will play during a game - it may only be for 30 seconds, but they are there all the same. Each of the positions that those people fill has a name, each of those names are shortened to acronyms. They are never referred to by anything other than those acronyms. I still can't tell you exactly what a PK, MOLB, LT, and CE specifically do.

All that aside, and after mashing buttons for what felt like hours just trying to make the silly little men on the screen do something I think I've uncovered a really fun game.

That's right gamers, as strange as it may sound, playing another countries' bizarre national sport on my PC is a blast. Does that make me dirty?

The entire game revolves around set plays. You pick a 'play' - that being selected positioning and movement for all the players on your team. "That's obvious, all sports have that!" you cry once more. Nay! In the NFL it's taken to a whole new crazy level. Because in the NFL there are actually two offensive teams and two defensive teams plus a 'special' team made up of members of the two - that's not even counting the oppositions players! And each of these have a very specific set of plays that they are able to pull off. The precise execution of these plays will result in hopefully you moving the ball as far as possible. But as soon as the ball carrier is tackled - everyone stops, players are swapped on and off the field, new plays are selected, the two new teams line up again and it starts all over.

So unlike in something like basketball where you have a play that you want to pull off and if it doesn't work you switch to a different one (free flowing), in the NFL you run the play and either succeed or fail thus losing or gaining ground. Then you stop and start all over again with a new one.

And in game terms what this equates to, as best I can relate it, is like a fighting game. You pull this move and in order to counter it you opponent has to pull another (low block to stop low kick, or a quick punch to the skull to stop them winding up a special move). In Madden you pull off the same style of play where you anticpate what's going to happen, run it through, then try again.

And after a while googling and reading forums I picked up how to actually start a play and get things rolling so I could actually control the individual players, and that's where it got fun. The movement is extremely fluid, with the interaction between your blockers (the big guys stopping other big guys from stomping on your head) and their opponents being exceptional. Players will move to diferent directions, actions, orientations, and so on all while looking almost completely natural.

You never see a player spin or run on the spot, they step when they move and where they step is where their feet stay. Something that simple goes no end to making things look REAL. I can't gush enough about how well they transition between the different animations. A guy leaping through the air forwards to recieve the pass going over his head from behind him while being tackled by two angry blockers looks fantastic.

The game modes are nothing to write home about though. With the much touted SuperStar mode being just like Franchise mode (and franchise mode being pretty much the same in all the sports games) except in SuperStar mode you can't control the team strategy or player adjustments. You just play the games and run the practice sessions. Meh.

So I've finally turned and played Madden properly. It's a fun game to while away a weekend in the wilderness, although you may feel a little dirty enjoying it - with the vast majority of people online instantly bagging it before having even tried it - yet that doesnt stop the fun.