by Joe Gandolfo- jgand@pcfootball.net
09-05-02

Okay, before I get started this week I would like to address a few points that have been coming up. You all know about my banishment from MaddenMania and the furor that has resulted. I will not resort to name calling or start throwing around “pcfootball rules and MaddenMania sucks” smack. I feel that I am better then that. 

But I do have to address certain allegations made about me by David Branda himself. I will try to be as quick as I can so we can get down to business. 

Yeah, I know. I would rather be talking about the bugs in the roster editor in Madden 2003 too. But there are some things that take precedence. 

1. The idea that I tried to play off one site against the other is ridiculous. What I tried to do was contact the members of the Instigators who were at MM and not here at PCF.

2. I was not asked “nicely” to keep the team there. I was told the team would remain there under his control.

3. His assertion that he started the Instigators along with Bret is a lie. Bret created the team on his own and David fought him on it every step of the way. It wasn’t until Bret pulled out of it and turned over control of the team to me that David let it alone.

4. I had his blessing to run the team? Phfft. Bite me.

5. I was not trying to drive traffic here. If people wanted to come here, then fine, that’s their right. If they wanted to say “I’d rather stay at MM and become part of the Maniacs” that’s fine too. I just needed to know where we stood with certain members of the squad. Since one of our top WR’s (badger) expressed an interest in signing up with the Maniacs for the coming season I thought it only prudent to get clarification.

6. The assertion that the Instigator name is the property of MM is totally false. I checked with the U.S. Copyright Office and the U.S. Patent and Trademark office. Copyrights only apply to literary, artistic, and musical works. Trademarks are brand names and/or designs, which are applied to products or used in connection with services. In other words, the Instigator name can only be copyrighted or trademarked thus implying ownership if you plan on using the name, logo and colors in order to make a profit off of them. So unless you have a bunch of t-shirts printed up that you intend on selling at Patriot games or on ebay you are out of luck. Besides I don’t think that a fictional computer football team qualifies as an artistic work, unless you are EA Sports.

7. To call what I did grandstanding is bogus. We both know that if I had talked about this in private I would have eventually been banned without being able to tell my side of the story to the posters at MM. This way everyone there knows my side of it, not just what you tell everyone. Now they can make up their own minds, as is their right.

8. www.tminstigators.com is a site that is set up like many of the sites you see for NFL teams. It was, and is, a place for people who are on the team to come to see how their character is doing in the context of the ongoing season. It was never a front for Bret’s site. How is that possible? The Instigator site went live on April 22^nd; PCFootball.net went live on May15th! Before you make an accusation like that again, do your research first before you embarrass yourself.

9. Yes there is a link to PCFootball on the front page of the Instigator web site. There are also links to EA Sports, MM, Madden Planet, all-madden, and football-gaming.com as well as offline franchise sites like Jervey’s and JagFan’s. To single out the link to this site is a further example of the personal hatred that you have for Bret, and that you will do anything to anyone to screw him over for your own personal gratification. 

As far as I am concerned this was never a site vs. site issue. We could have co-existed peacefully without running smack on one another. But your past actions have made it impossible to do so, and as long as you are involved with MM there are no prospects of that changing. But this has become a far more serious problem. This is now an issue that goes beyond a duel between us or between you and Bret. 

This is now becoming an issue of what is best for the MaddenMania site itself and right now that solution might entail you removing yourself from the administrative duties that you currently hold. The course of actions that you have taken the past couple of weeks have only served to make you the bad guy in the eyes of many people on the internet and the eyes of those involved with computer gaming in general. Up until now MaddenMania has had a reputation for being a quality site people could go to for help with the Madden series. Now it is getting a reputation for being a clique, where the popular (powerful) crowd decides who is in and who is out. 

I am wondering how long it is going to be before other websites like ign or publications like PCGamer start to comment on this situation? I wonder how long it is going to be before Jeremy Strauser or Steve Chiang gets tired of having EA Sports connected with a site that is getting a bad reputation for treating its posters with such disdain that they decide to sever EA’s ties with your site? 

Is that what you want to have happen David? If it is, then keep going because you are well on your way to making that happen. Unless you want to change the way you have been treating people over there then you will soon watch what was once a very powerful site die a slow and painful death. 

And for that, you will have no one to blame but yourself. 

Ok, so much for the old business. On with the new business… 

I am very happy so far with the look and performance of Madden 2003. There are many things that I like about it, and obviously there are things that bother me. First, the things I like: 

• I like the fact that we can now choose uniforms for home and away teams when we play games. I also like the fact that throwback uniforms were included for more teams and that there are more options available for each team.

• I like all the new equipment options included in the game for players. Also the selection of faces for players has been expanded which is a really good thing for those of us who want to put ourselves on our favorite team, or create our own.

• I was dubious about the Mini-Camp feature at first, but I have gradually warmed up to it. It is very useful in getting your playing skills up to par so that you don’t get killed by the CPU or by your online opponent.

• The accelerated clock is back! Thank you for that. I was getting tired of playing 10 minute quarters to try to get realistic stats for my games.

• There are now more in-game options for D-line shifts. There are now LB shifts! What’s this?!? THE 46 DEFENSE!!! Heaven, I’m in heaven!

• This game is the closest I have ever played where the results produced emulate an actual NFL Game. True, there are some slider adjustments to be made, and we are all experimenting to find the right combination. But all in all it plays very well out of the box with the sliders set on default.

• A pre-season game when you start up a franchise is a welcome addition, and one that hasn’t been seen since FBPro’99. I like the fact that the CPU will auto-sub your opponent so that your 3^rd stringers aren’t playing against the CPU’s 1^st stringers.

• Passing seems to be a lot better this year, as the WR’s are not dropping balls if the FS breathes on them.

• There seems to be a lot more injuries last year. In previous versions injury would rarely happen, but now they are happening with much more frequency. It seems to be on par with how often they happen in a real NFL game.

• The ability to challenge calls is a welcome addition. Even the CPU will challenge calls if the call is skewed enough. I played a Rams v Titans game where Marshall apparently scored. The CPU Jeff Fisher challenged the ruling and the play was (deservedly so) overturned. It didn’t matter since Marshall ran into the endzone so that there was no doubt about it the second time.

• Grass in the facemask – nice touch. Next thing you know we will have players with “rug burn” and “turf toe”.

• The ability to show the play diagram on defense, and to “Ask Madden” for a defensive and offensive play as opposed to being able to just ask for an Offensive play.

Okay, now for the things that bother me: 

• Everyone’s favorite pet peeve – editing players and rosters. It is very difficult to create a team from scratch in 2003 as opposed to 2002. In 2002 it was easy to fill the roster of a newly created team. All you had to do was click onto a button and the CPU would fill your team with fictional players that you could then edit to your heart’s content. Not so in 2003, in 2003 you have to base your created team on the roster of an actual NFL team. Then you have to create your fictional team one player at a time, while releasing the real NFL players one at a time. There are limits to this too as the free agents list has a ceiling of how many players can be in there at once. So when you do your offense, you have to export your team, overwrite your rosters, import your team and then pick up where you left off. It is too much work for something that a year ago was so simple.

• The numbering issue – could all of the numbers please be available like they were in 2000? There are several inaccuracies in the classic rosters that we old school fans would like to correct. Like QB #14 (James Harris) on the ’75 Rams was supposed to have the #12. The C for the All-Raiders (Jim Otto) is supposed to have the #00. Any chance that we can put that in there or do we have to wait for a third party editor?

• Saving franchises – where do I start with this one? Say you are playing a franchise game, and you have to interrupt it for some reason. You want to save the game in progress so that you can go back to it later. In order to do this you have to save the game, but when the CPU asks if you want to save the franchise, you have to say no. If you do save the franchise, it will wipe out the game you had been playing and you have to start all over again. I can see the potential for misusing this little quirk. Say you are getting killed in a game that you desperately want to win. All you have to do to start the game over again is quit the game and save it, then save the franchise when prompted. It might be a good thing that online franchise isn’t available if this quirk is in the game. Imagine the uproar that would occur if enough league owners were quitting games and saving franchises if they didn’t want to lose a league game.

• No classic stadiums in this version. I know that they have problems creating the stadiums, not to mention getting the rights to them. But this is a feature that I, along with a lot of other old school fans really liked.

• The option to save a roster of star sheet to a *.csv file via the “report” button is now gone. A lot of us found that option to be invaluable. Particularly if you had an offline franchise web site and you wanted to post your stats there. Looks like I will be taking a lot of screenshots for the Instigators site this season.

• Kicking game is harder, especially with that short, stubby little arrow they’ve got this year. Can we please go back to that big, long, looping arrow we had last year? It made it so much easier to aim our kicks, even if we couldn’t get the meter to stop inside that yellow zone.

• There seems to be a lot more injuries in this year’s game then there were in last year’s. I hope this doesn’t lead to half the roster getting dinged up and you have to sign more players and put you in danger of going over the cap as a result.

• The CPU still doesn’t call enough running plays. In 2002 you could edit the team profile so that your opponent could call more running plays during the game. Now we don’t even have that and the CPU throws 40-50 times a game and will only run 10-20 between all of their running backs. In the NFL teams run the ball equal to the number of times that they pass it. 

There is supposed to be a patch coming out from EA soon. Here’s hoping that many, if not all of the above concerns are addressed in this patch. And if not this one, then patches in the future. 

Now, where did I leave those Instigator bobbleheads? 

Until next time…