Madden NFL 09

August 18,2008 - As the pres-season begins, NFL fans know that the latest Madden is not far behind. This year, it seems like the guys at Tiburon are finally pushing the series to reach its potential on the next-gen systems with Madden NFL 09. With some key additions and improvements, this year’s game feels and looks good enough to be worthy of the hype, but that’s not to say it isn’t without its faults.

The biggest new additions to Madden this year is the My Skills feature, which gives players the chance to play a few quick tests of your skills to set the difficulty sliders to give you the most competitive games, as possible. The main issue is that the offensive parts of the test are simple and easy while the defensive are a bit tougher, so the initial results won’t be quite as accurate as they could be. Luckily, each game you play with the My Skills difficulty settings, they’ll adjust to any abnormalities and give you some tough opponents at times. The main results are tough games that keep you constantly challenged against the good players, especially if you have the rivalry setting turned on that makes your rivals and playoff opponents play above their limits just for you. If you’re not up for a challenge, you can stick to the standard difficulties that you’ve seen for years now.

The gameplay this year has been improved by a good margin this year, as the game just plays much better than Madden games have played in a few years. Last year’s game introduced a less-scripted experience, with the addition of animation-breaking moves and the weapons system giving the better players a leg up on the less-skilled players. This year, it definitely feels like you can break tackles more easily or at least the game gives you the feeling that running into a defender isn’t a guaranteed end to the play. That can certainly make for a more frustrating experience when the good running backs make a three-and-out a real achievement, but it’s certainly to be expected with the My Skills feature. Like NCAA Football 09’s bid for looser, mode open gameplay, Madden 09’s gotten a similar upgrade, though it still feels and plays like you’d expect Madden to play.

The other big addition to this year’s Madden is the better-late-than-never online leagues, though for whatever reason, EA chose to not go the simple route for how leagues work. You can have up to 32 teams in a league, with multiples of a team or not, but instead of following the real or randomly-generated NFL schedules, they chose to institute the rule that you must play every team in the league at least once. That means you could be looking at a 31 game season for a full league, which is fairly long for what your expectations might be for a simple league. Not having that option once again puts the onus on the players to do all the work themselves if they want to recreate own NFL season online, which is a large misstep for the dedicated online Madden players.

Outside of those two main features, there’s not much else that is new and exciting in the world of Madden. The franchise and superstar modes are still pretty much the same as they were last year. There is a nice new trainer mode to help the non-experts get a good grasp on how the game plays to improve their own skills. Madden’s borrowed the video highlights feature that NCAA Football’s had for the past two years, though your videos aren’t played on the big screen in the menu’s background and it’s not as easy to use as it is in NCAA, so it seems like an afterthought addition. The menus need to be completely reworked, as they’re clunky and the fact that they can disappear at a moment’s notice when you exit the settings menu and the franchise just makes navigating the menus a more frustrating experience than it has to be.

Madden’s definitely quite a looker on the visual side, though it’s more than just pure polygons here. The little touches have been added with some visuals color tweaks to give the snow games a colder look while the camera shakes on big hits, really give you the feeling that you just knocked somebody’s clock off. Putting control hints under players you control helps give those that ignore tutorials a little help with learning the controls. The team still needs to work on other key details, such as touchdown celebrations with the crowd featuring clipping through the wall and the lack of the dedicated fans, like the Dawg Pound in Cleveland, making it feel a little half-assed right now. Either way, the game looks great, but there are still some key improvements that can be made for next year’s game.

The biggest new addition, or maybe a key returning feature, to Madden this year is the new team of announcers that get rid of the rather bland radio announcer for two guys that you’d expect to hear from a football game. Tom Hammond is bad at what he does and Chris Collinsworth provides some good lines, but they still pale in comparison to the depth and quality announcing that Sony’s MLB 08 features. The game’s sound effects are nicely done, but that’s rather par for the course for Madden these past few years. This year’s soundtrack is roughly the same as in year’s past, but Xbox 360 owners can still use their own music.

While Madden 09’s the best Madden game of this generation and the best Madden since Madden 2004, it still has some issues here and there that keep it from being the best it could be. Madden 09 has far more successes than failures, enough that any pro football fan that’s been hesitant to actually pick-up the game for the past few should definitely give this game a shot. The team behind this year’s Madden certainly has the right ideas for where this franchise should be heading, as Madden 09 clearly shows. As long as they offer up the leagues its fans wanted and match NCAA 09’s online dynasties for next year, Madden 2010 should be off to a good start.

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