It's a shame, isn't it? The purveyors of rock solid sports gaming have chosen to take away a pc gamer's chance to enjoy the Madden franchise this season. And maybe all future seasons to boot.

Before I make my case for inclusion of Madden '10 on your pc, I'd like to point out that almost any significant leap in home computing capability took place because pc gamers told them to do it. No one would have bothered with accelerated 3D video cards, GPU's, surround sound, overclocking, or fast bus architecture unless the gaming industry had spoken loudly enough for hardware manufacturers to hear them. Games push the hardware and software limits further forward on a continuing, albeit unpredictable, basis. No one would be complaining about 486 processors if all we really used pc's for was word processing and email. Throw in performance hungry games like flight simulators, FPS's, and other 3D offerings and the race is on. In fact, recent studies show that the best bang for the buck is to upgrade your GPU, not your CPU, since most performance hogs send much of their work to the GPU anyway.

And now to my case.

It appears that the focus at EA/Tiburon this time around is to broaden the reach of Madden football to new players, not necessarily to enrich the experience of long-time players. There are two noteworthy elements to my assertion:

1. Madden IQ: Apparently, Madden players find the game either too easy to too hard to play. And in a rather blunt way, the development team must have decided that to reach a broader audience of would-be Madden customers, it needed to offer a way to ease them in. There are many young people who have not played Madden before, but with the broad offering of platforms this year (pc excluded), reeling in new players by giving them a "placement" score will probably result in more sales. They coined it "family play" last year for Wii Madden players. Simple controls, lots of assistance... Madden IQ takes care of everyone so that no one feels left out. Personally, I like the system because it adapts to your strengths and weaknesses as you play more and more.
2. Online Leagues: Madden used to be about having your buddy or buddies come over to play, eat lots of salty and sugary junk food, and generally have a good time. But when did we become so detached from this that we now require the interaction of faceless remote franchise owners? I understand the draw of person-to-person competition, but we were forced to interact live, with your friend sitting in the same room. Now, some dude can be in another time zone. Again, don't get me wrong. On an individual basis, this feature looks like a winner. But taken as a whole, these two features smell like sales dollar enhancements, not game improvements.

And it's the second point that bothers me the most. When compared to pc's, gaming consoles are still in their online infancy. If the big push was to make 32 team online leagues pop up like weeds across the world, then doesn't it make sense to use your pc for that? I know what you're saying, "different people have different performing computers, so it would be a mess...", but there are technological methods to smooth out the differences. Just look at the proliferation of MMORPG's. Those game designers figured out a way to keep things relatively calm! Why not EA?

And if the Madden IQ feature can be written for gaming consoles, wouldn't the software to track your skill progress and dynamically adjust the AI work on a more sophisticated platform?

Honestly, what feature from Xbox 360 or PS3 versions of Madden couldn't be ported over to pc's? Are consoles suddenly more capable machines than pc's?

Yes, it's a shame. A shame that a superior computing and game playing system, capable of stomping gaming consoles, that's in more homes than ever before, was ignored buy the developer of the most successful game franchise in video gaming history. A shame that a feature set perfectly matched to a pc's inherent properties, was overlooked. A shame that a development team that uses pc's to build the game, won't allow it to visit.

At least you get to use your pc to read this blog.

Bob-san