Personally, I can NOT wait until EA's deal with the NFL Players Association runs out so that we may at least have one year of NFL2K on the Wii... NFL2K games were superior in every single way when put up side by side to Madden. Franchise modes went deeper and unlockables were cooler. They even got clever and tried new things like First Person football, which while being incredibly difficult, was awesome because you knew the developer was trying to give you a new experience along side the old fail-safe style football.
I have boycotted Madden games since 2000, after I played Sega's NFL2K on Dreamcast simply because that game proved quite blatantly that Madden games are half-arsed and incomplete in every which way. I did break my boycott for Madden 08, because I can't get my fix for a football game anywhere else, and I regretted every second of it... you couldn't even make your own team! They took sooo much out of the Wii version of Madden 08 that they may as well have released an old copy of Madden '96... I called EA and complained, demanding a refund, and they gave me one with sincere apologies. That is the only thing good I have to say about EA, their customer service was polite and very willing to work with me to make me happy... and it made me very happy to be able to return that game for a full refund.
Competition in sports games is very important people! Since 2K Sports has gotten the license to MLB, that franchise has gone down the toilet, and since EA got the license to the NFL, that franchise has gone down the toilet... we need to boycott these games and get some competition going between developers so we can get some good games back out there! Look at the hockey and soccer games, no one owns the sole rights to the player and team names, so there is competition and the end result is gems like Pro Evolution Soccer!
But I guess I should get to the point: What can EA do to improve Madden for 09? A LOT...
1) the controls are always incredibly slow to respond... speed this up, when I move left make my character cut left, not take a big slow curve in that direction... lets get some fast paced action going here, it's football for Pete's sake!
2) update your graphics to something that doesn't look like a throwback to N64, us Wii owners deserve better.
3) Allow a control scheme for people who don't want to use the jiggle and shaking of the WiiMote, this might have been an option in 08, I'm not sure... I hated it too much to explore the control options.
4) Don't cut out features like player creation, and team creation.
5) Don't dumb down the franchise mode... when I do good playing a guy over the course of a year his statistics should increase. Players should hold out of training camp (which needs to be brought back so we can do it to improve players if we like) if I haven't updated their contract after a few years of franchise mode.
6) There should be NOTHING that Madden can do on another console that can't be done on the Wii... there's no excuse for this, just pure laziness.. which seems to be EA's trademark unless Spielberg works on the title (Boomblox is gonna rock).
7) Make the menus more intuitive, they were a huge pain in Madden 08... I could barely find anything I wanted to get to without having to go through every option possible in that maze you called a menu.
But really... what it comes down to... unless they copy NFL2k5 or NFL2k6, and then add some features, they won't make near as good a game as we should be getting in this day and age when it comes down to American Football games.
I apologize for the novel of a post, I just get passionate about this topic for some reason... with all that said, this does look like they may have fixed the lack of responsive controls.... and the idea of being able to draw a route for your receiver at the line seems awesome. I'll have to rent it with high hopes, but will most probably not buy this because EA just doesn't have the motivation to make a game better than Sega's 2K series.
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