Madden 2010 First Impressions

I played through the Madden 2010 demo tonight.

Wow.

There is a LOT to comment on.

Not all of it is good or bad, but overall I was pretty disappointed by the demo. I think of myself as the kind of person that tries to see the good side of movies I watch and games I play, so I don't make that comment absentmindedly.

I'll start with the good. One of the things that I always wished the series did a little bit better was tackling animations. If I've got a running back almost to the 1st down marker and its third down. I expect the running back to get his head down and fight for that yard. While you could always hit the button to dive, truck stick, or do some other trick, more often than not these animations would misbehave when a defender was present. When you didn't use the buttons, oftentimes you would get grabbed in a way that no player with his head in the game would allow himself to be tackled. The animations in this game are much more realistic, although I think the ball carrier does tend to roll a bit much.

The pacing of the game is also dramatically improved. I thought that Madden '09 was a little bit fast and loose, but this game feels much more under control and paced.

Another well-done aspect of the demo is that for the first half of the demo, notes roll up the bottom of the screen informing you about all the new features in the game.

But for all the good, I found a lot more not to like about the demo. For one, the game is littered with ads. I guarantee that you will see about 4 or 5 Snickers ads before the end of the first half. You'll also see Sprint, which I actually didn't mind as much because their ads are all over regular NFL broadcasts. Finally, there's in-game weather sponsored by the Weather Channel, which was really just unnecessary.

Then you have the length of the demo, which clocks in at 4 minutes for the whole game (there's only one mode, which is fine). While I don't see anything wrong with limiting the amount of time players spend playing the game, and thus encouraging them to buy the full version, the pacing of the game was so out of whack for me that it ruined my play experience. There were only three drives in the whole game; and my game went to overtime.

How is that possible, you ask? Well, on the opening kickoff I picked kickoff middle and proceeded to kick it to the end of the field. After kicking off, I let the game go on autopilot like I usually do, only stepping in to make a tackle. The problem: no tackle. The AI goes up 7-0. The remainder of the first half takes 2 minutes, entirely consumed by a six play drive that ends up out of field goal range because I didn't realize the quarters were so short.

In the second half, I returned the kick 20 yards and proceeded to grind out an 8 play drive that put me into the end zone with :00 remaining. I even had to take two timeouts. Since the score was 7-7, the game went to overtime. I received the kickoff, and couldn't get into the end zone with the ~55 seconds left in overtime.

Now, any criticism levied against me for not being able to get points out of two of my three drives is fair game, but I still thought that the whole situation could have been improved.

The most peculiar thing about the demo, however, is that neither team in the demo made it to the Superbowl last year. While the Cowboys and Giants (your only two options) are two really popular teams, I think Tiburon could have, you know, let demoers experience the Polamalu/Fitzgerald rivalry from the game's cover. I think it would have made sense. Maybe.

Maybe there's nothing wrong with the demo, and maybe I'm just a disgruntled Chargers fan who wishes his GM/coach had taken Polamalu when they had the chance. Idiots.

-Jon

Schizoid Impressions

Well the weekend is here, and seeing as I am finally getting a chance to stay in the city this weekend, I can try out some new games. However, my cousin, who doesn't play games not named Magic: the Gathering, is also in town, which may dampen my efforts somewhat. Not that that's all a bad thing.

I did talk him into playing the Schizoid XBLA demo with me though. Schizoid is billed as a simple coop game in which a team of two ships, orange and blue, team together to fight hordes of alien monsters. The twist is that unlike other monster slaughtering games, there are no weapons. Ships can merely ram into one another. The orange ship pwns all the orange monsters, but gets pwned by the blue monsters, while the blue ship pwns the blue monsters, but rolls to the orange monsters. Pretty simple stuff.

Anyways, the game has something like 136 levels. We had a pretty good time playing the XBLA demo, but not good enough to make me want to slap down the money for the full game. Schizoid is overall a pretty intense experience, if the last few levels of the demo were any indication. There are tons of mobs all over the place, and it will take some pretty coordinated teamwork, but the game feels a little simpler than it could have been. The power-ups that I played around with were definitely fun, and I wish I could have seen some more. However, I wanted Schizoid to prove to me, beyond a reasonable doubt, that it a great, arcadey, coop experience, and it didn't quite get there.

If I had another dedicated player who wanted to really give this game their all with me, I would probably get it, but given that I don't have anyone living with me that would be willing to make the sacrifice, I suppose Left 4 Dead will have to do for now.

-Jon