Football Perfected

Author's Rating:

Pros: Excellent gameplay, graphics, tons of extras.

Cons: Sound.

Author's Review
If any game genre has benefited from the advancements in technology the new consoles offer, it's the sports genre. No other title demonstrates
this fact more clearly than EA's initial 128-bit offering, Madden 2001.

Where sports games in the 16, 32 and even 64-bit world failed was in physics modeling. Tackles in those games had nothing to do with getting
someone off balance, grabbing a leg, etc, but rather a "hit" system. Run your guy into the other guy enough, and he falls. Enter the 128-bit
football, game. Enter Madden. Everything, and I mean every single action rendered in this game was done through a physics engine. This may sound kind of dry and boring, but what this means is that EA has the most realistic and playable football game on the market.

Never being a big sports fan myself, I found myself doubly amazed at how impressive and addictive this game is. Now that technology has caught up
with the demands of a great sports game I could actually get into it. Tackles made sense to me. Passing made sense. The attention to detail that EA put into this game translates to a super-intuitive gaming experience that fools passers-by into believing they are watching a broadcast game.

Gameplay:
The great thing about sports games is that it doesn't take a total game freak to know what's right or wrong with it. If you're at all familiar with the sport, you can quickly tell if they got it right. Madden never leaves you wondering why a play went bad or amazed that a play mysteriously went in your favor. The game just "feels" right. Outside of the esoteric, gameplay in Madden is generally slower paced than most of its competitors.

To put it bluntly, Madden is the thinking man's football game. Whether or not this is a good thing to you depends on the style of football you like to play, but at the end of the day, this is the football game that gets the game right.

Football is football and any decent game is going to have a handful of features that everyone else has, Madden is no exception: season, exhibition, quick game, and practice modes are all included. To set itself apart, Madden does have nice extras that really enhance gameplay experience. The game includes a vast save option. Rather than force you to use up ungodly amounts of memory card space, many options are separately saveable.

Season, setup options, rosters, and user profiles are all separate files. Moreover, you can have multiple player profiles for the social gamer.

Unfortunately the save screen is a little cumbersome and disorienting, but experience will get you through it.

In-game polish is abundant. During game setup not only can you set stadium and weather effects, but you can preview them before game start. It gives you a good opportunity to run around an empty field FPS-style as well as make sure you have the game set-up correctly (because the game features some lengthy load times, you'll want to use this option if stadium and weather settings are important to you). During setup, the game also allows you to tie a User Profile to each controller so that player stats are all assigned correctly as well as user's controller settings and playbooks- nice!

Speaking of plays, the plays are still illustrated as small, playbook diagrams surrounding a cool, close-up huddle cam. After countless hours of NFL2K1 I admit I was spoiled by the on-the-field play selection Sega offers. To be fair, though, picking plays is still easy, the huddle scene is impressive, and Madden offers a "Goto Guy" method of picking plays where you select a play based on the strengths of one of your star players- something you won't find in other games. To make up for the playbook style presentation, in the single player game your play, complete with routes can be shown on the field before the snap. While this doesn't help you pick a play, it'll leave you with no question as to what you should see after the snap.

In the put-a-new-spin-on-the-same-old-game category is the Madden Challenge. Think Madden "Adventure Mode". During a game several Madden Challenges are presented to the player. The challenges are along the lines of making a 40 yard field goal, running a kick-off for a touchdown, etc.

As you meet the Madden Challenges you receive tokens, which, in turn you can redeem for cards (I'm still looking for the Pikachu one). Now you can totally ignore this aspect of the game, which I'm all for. There's nothing worse than a game that includes mini-games which HAVE to be played to fully enjoy the main game. Even cooler, though, is that the Madden Challenge is damn fun. Just think, you make a 40+ yard field goal kick in the last 10 seconds- not only do you get to rub that in your best friend's face, but you even get recognition and tokens for it!

Although not a truly exclusive feature, the create a player option in Madden is the most comprehensive one I've ever encountered. Creating a player spans 3 screen-fulls of information and stats. While this may be tedious to some, creating a player isn't something you do at every session, so getting it right and tweaking everything you can and should be able to is key. Due to the realistic physics engine in the game, many physical attributes of a player are configurable. Specifically, height, weight, build, musculature and girth are all configurable, but not disjoint. IE, changing one affects how much another can change. After you physically create a player stats can be set. Instead of being offered an attribute pool to distribute among different skills, Madden figures out how good the player can be in any of these skills based on how you created the player physically. This means a much more realistic player can be created. If you max out all of his skills, you create a more expensive player and may not be able to use him in season mode. Besides setting all the gory details there are a ton of skins and other player mods you can do. Beware, though: I managed to find a bug in the game. After a player is created, exit the rosters menu. The game will ask you if you want to save the roster. Once you enter the save menu the rosters file will already show up as SAVED- it isn't. Resave it anyway or risk losing your player.

This is already a lengthy review, and, to be honest, I could go on even longer about gameplay. It's just that good. Madden features everything you need in a football game with the extras to set it apart from the rest, and the polish to make it a superior, outstanding title.

Graphics:
Madden boasts some of the most impressive visuals available on the PS2. The game starts off with the standard, dramatic NFL films footage, which runs at near-DVD quality. Within the game, players are crisp and clean, but not artificially sterling as is NFL2K1. They look real, with all the appropriate textures mapped onto them, down to the mesh in the jerseys. If you step into the create a player option, you'll be able to see all the detail in the players close up. Besides simple skins, body type adds a whole different set of polys to players as you muscle them up, the game just doesn't simply expand existing polys. My only complaint is that fatter players don't look as good as their skinnier counterparts, but the body types of most players did come out well. Besides looks, players are animated superbly. Every motion is fluid and meaningful- for instance injured players grab a knee or elbow depending on where they were injured. To top it all off, there's very little clipping- impressive considering all the polys interacting.

Take a look around the stadium and you'll note that they are all accurately modeled, of course, but even further, the engine takes the stadium's polys into account, too. The arch roof supports in opened, domed stadiums cast shadows on the field during day play. Working Jumbotrons redisplay the camera's view, too. Texture-mapping carries over to superbly detailed fields. Turf looks like turf, and grass looks like grass. Officials are even gorgeous and also actual 3D "players". Refs toss the ball back and forth to each other and react in as life-like a manner as any player on the field. A nice extra is that all the characters on the sideline are even actual 3D characters. You can run into them, as well- no flat, 2D character images. There's even more attention to detail. You don't see it in sports games every day, but in Madden alpha-blending is abundant.

Stadium lights and gorgeous sunsets blend together and even highlight players on replays. This is all even more impressive when you realize the game never chops up.

Challenge:
Not being a football expert myself, I have to dumb down the AI. You have a fairly well-sized playbook, but Madden is simply unforgiving when it comes to a poorly picked play. Where other football games may reward players with nano-second reflexes, no amount of video game prowess will rescue you from your own ineptness as a football strategist. Luckily, the game has multiple modes of CPU difficulty ranging from Rookie to All-Madden.

Selecting among these difficulties greatly changes the CPU's skill level and allows players of all skill levels to enjoy the game. Strangely, there is also an AI option. You can tweak the CPU's skill at specific points, like offense, passing, defense, etc. I played with these options, but saw little or no change. If you really want to improve your skills, though, hit the Practice Mode. You'll be in a half-length football field where you can keep running offensive and defensive drills without worrying about load times or losing a game. It's a great way to familiarize yourself with the plays and the game itself.

Sound:
Most definitely, this is the worst part of the game. It starts out with a horribly lame rap song about football. It's slow passed badly recorded and cheesy. The intro song should get you pumped up for some football, but this one just about puts you to sleep. Amazingly this was produced by Dr. Dre.

Aside from music, the commentary sound quality is super-compressed and poor. This is probably due to the limited amount of space on the CD format (use DVD's!). Recorded voices come out sounding like they just escaped from a tin can.

The commentary content itself is good, though, but gets repetitive fairly quickly. Personally, I don't care for Sommeral's style, but Madden himself more than makes up for it. There's a female announcer that chimes in from time to time with slightly silly observations or anecdotes and distracts more than she entertains.

Not all is lost, though. Game sound effects are very good. Bone-crunching tackles and screams are particularly entertaining and serve to convince you even more that you're watching an actual football game.

Control:
Despite the default settings the game comes with, control is very good. Initially the game is setup so that the sprint ation changes assignment based on the type of player being controlled. Perhaps this was done to make sure the control layout doesn't "copy" other games out there, but there are control schemes (Scheme C) which remedy this.

Remember the full analog control the PS2 controller offers? Well, EA did, too. The game takes advantage of pressure sensitive buttons allowing you to juke depending on how hard you tap the button. As a runner, EA also offers up every single button on the controller so that you can accurately move your player. Directional jukes, directional stiff-arms, spins, hurdles, dives, and sprints- all are available to a player and deliver the most responsive and accurate running game out there. While Madden doesn't give its running game away, you can't complain that the game didn't let you do what you wanted to do. Simply put, Madden offers up some of the most satisfying control of any football game out there.

Make no mistake about it: Madden is the football game to own for PS2 owners and a must-have for even casual football fans. It is the ultimate, most realistic version of video game football created to date.