| This
review originally appeared at www.gamespot.com:
 Just
in time for the NFL preseason is the latest edition of EA
Sports' football juggernaut, Madden NFL 06. With last year's
Madden NFL 2005 focusing heavily on improving the defensive
game and overall presentation of the series, while not
necessarily adding any grand, new game modes to the package,
06 shifts the other way, going out of its way to specifically
work on the offensive side of the ball by debuting all-new
passing controls. On paper, all the additions and changes
sound like fine improvements, but the end result isn't nearly
as impressive as it seems like it ought to have been. In fact,
Madden 06 comes off as a somewhat unfocused and unpolished
piece of work, which is sort of a shocking revelation for a
brand that's ridden high on its level of quality for so many
years. Ultimately, Madden NFL 06 is a highly playable game of
football, but in comparison with the leaps forward the
franchise has made in previous years, 06 feels like a false
start.
For years now, the one aspect of
Madden's gameplay that's barely
seen an ounce of alteration is the passing game. That can be
said for just about any football game of the last decade or
so, too. Even with the additions of things like hot routes and
formation shifts, the basic act still entailed snapping the
ball, looking for an open receiver, and then pressing the
button that corresponded to said receiver. Bing, bang, boom.
But this year, the developer has completely changed the ebb
and flow of how you pass the ball in a football game. Now,
each and every quarterback is given a field of vision,
represented by a cone of light on the field that highlights
exactly what your QB can see. Quarterbacks with higher ratings
(especially ratings higher in the "awareness"
category) will get bigger fields to work with--like Tom Brady,
Brett Favre, or Peyton Manning--whereas less-aware
quarterbacks get a decidedly smaller field to work with, and
sometimes can't see beyond a single receiver. When you first
snap the ball, you'll be locked on to a primary receiver. But
by moving the right control stick around, you can move your
view to another receiver, should you need to. And trust us
when we say you will.
Just like in the real-life NFL,
reading a quarterback's eyes is a big part of playing defense.
As such, the defenders in Madden 06 have the innate ability to
see where your QB has his focus fixed, and they will
predictably try to get a jump on the ball. To combat this,
you'll need to look off defenders, either by moving to another
receiver entirely or just by quickly flicking the stick back
and forth to momentarily confuse them. You can opt to have the
vision automatically snap to a specific receiver, rather than
fumbling with trying to manually aim the stick, by holding
down the right trigger button and then pressing the button
assigned to that receiver. But then you have to let up on the
trigger and press the receiver's button again. And you must do
all this very quickly, for while the scope of things you have
to do to get a ball into a receiver's hand this year has
gotten more methodical in nature, the speed of the game has
not.
And therein lies the folly of
quarterback vision. While there's no arguing that the feature
itself is realistic and adds complexity to the passing game as
a whole, it doesn't exactly make it more fun, necessarily. The
whole song and dance you have to go through to get the cone to
switch to a receiver post-snap lends itself to you taking a
whole lot more sacks than you might be used to, and even just
trying to move the stick around manually is a clunky affair in
the early goings. It's pretty much a necessity to keep the
receiver you're throwing to in your line of sight, because if
you don't, you'll throw the lamest of lame ducks, the likes of
which you probably can't even fathom until you've seen it. So
really, there's no room for error. It's also worth mentioning
that the vision cone pretty much requires a good dual analog
controller to be useful to PC players, and even then, we
noticed some weird stiffness in the movement of the cone with
multiple peripheral controllers. By no means is the passing
game unplayable now. Quite the contrary. There will just
likely be quite a bit of practice time needed for the average
football game fan to get accustomed to this newfangled cone,
and some may even grow to enjoy it for its inherent
complexity. Though conversely, others will have little more
than utter disdain for it. So perhaps for this reason, the
game has an option to turn off the passing cone
altogether...though doing so will leave you with a game that
feels practically identical to Madden NFL 2005 in every
conceivable way.
To be fair, there are some other
additions to the gameplay, most of which are relatively small,
but almost all of which fare better than the QB vision. The
other big quarterback-related addition is precision passing.
Basically, by pressing the left control stick on your
peripheral controller left, right, up, or down while passing,
you can lead your pass ahead, behind, just above, or just
below your targeted receiver's chest. This lets you lead your
passes where the defenders can't get them. While it might seem
a little odd at first, it's actually a pretty simple mechanic,
and it works wonders when done correctly. Another neat
addition is the smart route system. Here, by pressing a couple
of buttons before the snap, you can tell a receiver to run
past the first-down marker before breaking off into his
assigned route. This is great for situations where you've got
a perfect play picked out, but the ideal receiver is set to
run a route that doesn't go past the marker. Though some
routes seemingly can't be altered, most key ones can, and,
again, this works great. For ball carriers, the big new change
this year is the truck stick. It's like the hit stick on
defense, but instead of tackling, you press the right control
stick forward to try to bowl over a defender. Like the hit
stick, it requires some good timing to be effective, and
frankly, there are times when it seems like the stick isn't
really doing anything at all. But then there are other times
when you can see your running back knock a guy back flat on
his ass. And that's damn satisfying--assuming you can make it
work right. Like the passing cone, the truck stick sometimes
felt quite unresponsive, no matter what controller we used.
On the defensive side, apart from a
few obscure artificial intelligence
tweaks here and there, nothing's really changed at all. All
the customization aspects that debuted in Madden 2005 are back
again, and they all work fundamentally the same. While it's
clear that the focus of development in 06 was the offense, it
might have been nice to have made just a change or two to the
defensive system. But hey, at least the defense is still fun.
Unfortunately, Madden NFL 06 also has
a few gameplay bugs and glitches on both sides of the ball
that dampen the experience somewhat. Most of these are pretty
minor things, like draw plays where--every single time--your
quarterback's vision will be focused straight ahead, as
opposed to focusing in the direction of a particular receiver.
This makes it blatantly obvious what you're doing, giving your
opponents a great opportunity to come thundering after you.
Finally, there are still some AI glitches here and there where
running backs will get stuck behind offensive linemen, linemen
will get stuck trying to block defenders, and so on. Perhaps
the biggest bug in the game is one that players discovered not
long after the console versions were released. Effectively,
anytime you select a two-running back set, the game will
assign different button icons to your fullback and halfback
depending on whether you choose a passing or a running play.
What this does is let the person playing defense zoom out to
discover if you're running a pass or run play. It doesn't give
out routes or otherwise, but this is still a pretty ugly
issue. While no specific one of these bugs completely wrecks
the game or anything, the combination of multiple issues like
these makes Madden 06 seem sloppier than in recent years.
So, Madden still plays great, despite
its rough edges. It just isn't much of a leap forward from the
last game. Unfortunately, the same can easily be said of the
play mode front as well. All the usual suspects--the franchise
mode, minigames, quick play, online, create-a-fan--are back.
And they're all the same. There are no new minigames
whatsoever, and the franchise mode looks like it could easily
have just been lifted right out of 2005 and plunked down into
06. Even the Tony Bruno radio dialogue that plays through much
of the franchise mode seems largely lifted from 2005, and the
parts that are clearly new don't come across any differently
or any more interesting than the old stuff. Owner mode's been
completely untouched, the free agency period still comes after
the draft, for some reason, and you still can't sign more
players past the maximum of 54, even if you put half your
roster on injured reserve. In short, if it was in Madden
2005's franchise mode--even if it was buggy or broken--it's in
this version too. Of course, we loved Madden 2005's franchise
mode, and it's still great fun to play with here. But the fact
that hardly a single iota of it was even tweaked or marginally
fixed up is disappointing.
The online play comes across
similarly unmolested. Apart from an
egregious sign-up process that forces you to make the best of
a no-win situation by making you choose to either pay $2 via
credit card or agree to get spammed by ESPN mailings to
register your account, the online works just as it did last
year. You can access leagues and clubs, play online ranked
versions of the minicamp drills, and gamble EA Sports points
on games you play against people. The online games we played
seemed mostly smooth, though we did run into some problems
with lag here and there. The one addition made this year to
the mode in the console versions was the EA sports locker.
It's a sort of hub area where your friends can access files
you leave for them, and likewise, you can do the same in their
lockers. That seems to be absent on the PC version, though
considering how generally superfluous the mode felt on
consoles, that's not really a big deal.
With all that said, there's one big
game mode debut in Madden NFL 06 in the form of the superstar
mode. The premise here is actually a fairly ingenious one. In
franchise mode, you can manage the day-to-day tasks of an NFL
team to your heart's content. In the create-a-player mode, you
can model a player after your own likeness or any likeness you
prefer. Why not smash them together into one thing? The
superstar mode is a way for you to take your created player
and send him off into the gauntlet that is the NFL, free to
develop your career however you choose. You can be a stand-up
guy with a "go team" attitude, or you can be the
me-first-minded egomaniac who's constantly complaining about
coaches and guaranteeing Super Bowl wins. Hell, who wouldn't
love to live the fabulous lifestyle of an NFL superstar?
That's what makes the mode such a brilliant idea in
concept...and such a colossal failure in execution.
You begin the mode by picking your
family in something of a parental draft lottery. You're
presented with a randomly generated mother and father, each
with specific occupations, IQs, and hobbies. You could end up
with a nuclear physicist with a penchant for macramé and a
professional butcher who loves mountain biking. It's all very,
very random. Some parents will obviously be more conducive to
producing a top-tier NFL player (like a former NFL player, for
example, or at least someone athletic). These highly conducive
parents only come up every once in a great while, however, and
if you happen to skip past them once, you won't see them
again, most likely. Once you have a proper pair of parents
lined up, you're on to the fun stuff--relatively speaking. You
first meet up with former Broncos running back and current NFL
Network mainstay Terrell Davis. He acts as your pseudomentor
throughout the process. Initially, he just gives you a quick
overview of what you'll be doing before you get drafted. One
of those things is picking an agent. You've got several to
choose from initially, each with strengths in the categories
of negotiation, influence, and interview. If you don't like
your agent after a while, you can always hire a new one. Next
is an IQ test that's loosely based on the kinds of questions
you'd find on the real-life Wonderlic test (the big exam that
all prospective NFL rookies take before draft day). After
that, it's a quick interview, where you answer utterly inane
questions about what you like to eat and slightly more
relevant questions like what team you'd ultimately like to be
drafted to. Of course, no rookie gets to choose where he goes
in the draft, so you'll be drafted by any of the 32 teams that
has a need at your position. In most cases, we went between
the late second and late third rounds. The only time we were
picked later was when we created a kicker. Go figure.
Once you've got your team, it's off
to training camp, the season,
and, if you're lucky, the postseason. In between, you'll
periodically get interview opportunities, and your agent will
get you sponsorships with wacky companies, as well as offers
for random movie roles. Like the interviews, movies are
basically conversational minigames, though you're actually
graded on these. You're given three lines to memorize and then
four variances of that line when the camera's actually
rolling. Only one is correct, but they all look nearly
identical, so you actually do have to do some solid
memorization to succeed. If movies aren't your thing, you can
travel around town to visit your agent's office to talk about
your opponents, complain about your coaches, or even announce
your retirement. You can also hit up the local barber shop
and/or tattoo parlor to gussy up your player, and you can get
to the performance institute to play some of the minicamp
games to give your player a stat boost for the coming week.
OK, so there's a lot you can do in
the superstar mode. But where does it all lead? The answer,
unfortunately, is nowhere of consequence. Because the
superstar mode is laid out in a similar way to the franchise
mode, every little thing is handled with text menus,
conversational minigames, and play modes--like the minicamp
games, for instance--that exist elsewhere in the game. While
this works all well and good for a management simulation like
the franchise mode, managing the life of a superstar seems
like it ought to be a flashier affair. And even within the
confines of what the mode offers, it still comes across as
hackneyed and not realistic in the slightest. Part of the
problem is that there seems to be a gigantic disconnect
between what your player does and how it actually affects him.
Your player has statistics in things like visibility,
popularity, and marketability, but what exactly makes any of
these things rise or fall is terribly opaque. Obviously,
guaranteeing a win and then following through with a victory
seems like it ought to give you a good visibility and
popularity boost, but even that often seems like it doesn't do
as much as it ought to. And then later, your ratings will just
take a sudden nosedive for no explicable reason. There's no
decisive feedback either. You'll get voicemails and text
messages from Terrell Davis, your agent, as well as from other
random people throughout the mode. However, they never ever
tell you anything of substance. If anything, they just repeat
exactly what you already know, and that's assuming they even
say the right thing, which isn't a guarantee. Sometimes
they'll write to you about things like movie roles that never
surface, and other times the game will tell you you've got new
mail when, in fact, you've got no new messages at all.
That's not the only off-kilter aspect
of the mode, either. For one, the game does an awful job of
letting you know when new opportunities arise. You'd think
that while you're simming through, say, the preseason, you
might get some kind of notification if a movie role comes your
way. Nope. Unless you sim day by day, you'll end up missing
opportunities for interviews, movie roles, and the like. The
game just skips right past them. Another problem is that the
interviews you give and people you talk to never seem to have
a clue as to what's actually going on. Let's say you're
offered a role in a film about the American Revolution. Once
the film comes out at the end of the season, you'll be
interviewed about it. The interviewer will then ask you what
the film was about. Your answers range from "I have no
idea" to "evil alien creatures sent to destroy
earth." This level of disconnect between scripting and
the actual story is prevalent all over the place, and it
completely takes you out of the experience. That is, assuming
you even have much of an experience. To say that the superstar
mode is geared toward very specific positions is an
understatement. Unless you're an absolute knockout in terms of
ability, the only positions that seem to offer you especially
interesting careers are those of the quarterback, wide
receiver, running back, and the occasional starting defensive
player. Want to play a kicker? Prepare for the most boring
experience of your life. Yeah, you'll still get to do things
here and there, but the actual act of trying to play as your
player and then building him up becomes tedious to the point
of frustration. Maybe this is realistic, since, really, who
ever pays attention to a safety, an offensive lineman, or,
again, a kicker? But in this case, realism limits how much fun
you can really have.
The last, and perhaps biggest
problem, is simply that you never ever
really feel like an NFL superstar while you're playing this
mode. Maybe it's because in reality, NFL players rarely take
on movie roles until after they've retired (deodorant
commercials seem to be about the extent of their
non-football-related filmed appearances). Maybe it's because
no matter how much money you make and no matter how many
endorsements you get, nothing tangible ever comes of it, save
for a different hub level to look at (you go from a lousy
apartment to a loft to a mansion, but you never get to do
anything with any of them). Maybe it's because you spend
practically all your time participating in dull practices that
only have a minute degree of impact on your playing ability,
while you don't spend nearly enough time doing anything flashy
or cool or superstar-like. Ultimately, your career feels more
like a silly scenario to give your created player some modicum
of context rather than a marginally interesting or accurate
depiction of the life of a real NFL player. Football fans
should certainly at least try the superstar mode, just to see
what it's like. It's worth a single play-through just to
experience it. But considering how scattershot and screwy the
whole thing is, it's unlikely anyone will ever want to mess
with it a second time.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Madden NFL
06's presentational elements really haven't changed much this
year. The graphics have remained especially the same, from the
player models to the arenas to the animations. In fact,
there's barely anything new on the animation front, save for a
couple of new tackles and the ability to knock the helmet off
a ball carrier (which actually happens a lot more often than
it should). The game still looks great as a whole, but it's
just not terribly different from 2005. The PC version is
obviously crisper-looking than the console versions of Madden,
but all that really seems to highlight is how archaic the
player models are starting to look. Also, there are a lot of
goofy texture and player model pop-in issues in the PC version
that we never saw on consoles, ultimately making the PC
iteration the least impressive, visually.
Al Michaels and John Madden return to
provide commentary yet again, and in fact, this might be the
last year we get this particular pairing, what with John
Madden headed to NBC and Al Michaels on his way to ESPN.
Sadly, the always reliable Michaels will likely be the one
lost amid the shuffle, so we'll be getting more of Madden's
consistently droll and painfully obvious color work. This
year's game is no different, with Madden continuing to offer
up remarkably noninsightful comments throughout every game.
There does seem to be a bit more in the way of player-specific
commentary featured this year, but it's rarely all that
interesting. Additional voice work is provided by Terrell
Davis and his NFL Network cohort Rich Eisen, but Eisen only
shows up once in a great while to deliver a hysterically
overwrought line or two, and Davis literally phones it in,
only showing up on voicemails left to your superstar and
providing dialogue that actually sounds like it was recorded
over a phone.
The rest of the audio is mostly the
same as last year's game. THX
surround sound is available in this year's version, and
although the sound effects are practically identical to the
previous entry in the series, they sound really good coming
out of surround speakers, if you've got the setup. The
soundtrack is made up of yet another mishmash of
artists-of-the-month, like Funeral For a Friend, the All
American Rejects, Memphis Bleek, Disturbed, Finch, Stat Quo,
and Hot Hot Heat. However, the soundtrack also contains a
number of remixed musical tracks taken directly from the NFL
Films library. While names would likely be unrecognizable to
you, you'd certainly recognize the music if you've ever
watched any NFL Films highlights. The remixes--unlike the
smattering of pop music--actually make contextual sense in the
game, and they aren't half bad to listen to while you're
playing.
For as good as Madden NFL 06 is
overall, you can't help but be at least somewhat disappointed
by the game as a whole, if only because of how frequently
superb the franchise has been in recent years. Many of the
things that make Madden consistently enjoyable are front and
center yet again, but the justification for buying this newest
Madden--if you already own last year's game--is tough to find.
The new passing cone can be enjoyable, though it's definitely
the kind of thing that will certainly be better and more
refined in the years to come. It's a bit of a pain as it is
now. And the superstar mode, while excellent in concept,
simply fails to deliver an engaging experience. And in the
absence of these two things, what you effectively have is
Madden NFL 2005, with a few very subtle changes and some
problems that weren't originally there. The Madden diehards
will undoubtedly enjoy Madden 06, just as they have most every
other installment of the franchise, and anyone that simply
wants a new and thoroughly playable football game with updated
rosters will get exactly that from Madden 06. Anyone looking
for more, however, may find the 2005-2006 season to be the one
they went through without buying a new football game.
By Alex
Navarro, GameSpot
POSTED: 08/19/05 05:40 PM |
