Tag Archives: video

I first played Mad­den in Decem­ber of 1993 on my new Sega Gen­e­sis, just days after hav­ing my wis­dom teeth removed. My sis­ter and I would play as I recov­ered, me half-stoned on per­co­cets. She beat me fre­quent­ly. Her strat­e­gy? Just hit the “C” but­ton. If she chose the 49’ers as she usu­al­ly did it meant the fol­low­ing with each click:

1. Choose “Shot­gun” formation
2. Choose “Hail Mary Pass”
3. Hike the ball
4. Steve Young throws a per­fect ball out to light­ning-fast Jer­ry Rice

The result: touch­down. Almost with­out fail.

Since those days I’ve become quite a fan of the fran­chise, switch­ing briefly to 2K when they were able to pro­duce a com­pa­ra­ble, maybe even supe­ri­or, prod­uct before EA squeezed them out of the mar­ket. I usu­al­ly buy a copy ever few years to use updat­ed ros­ters and try out new fea­tures. It’s always inter­est­ing to see what will be dif­fer­ent: will it be eas­i­er to pass or run; will there be more inter­cep­tions or fum­bles; how noi­some will the com­men­tary be this season.

Last year was some­thing of a mis­step in the series in my opin­ion. With Mad­den all but out of the game, you find your­self sub­ject­ed to inane in-game com­men­tary that sim­u­lates a friend­ly radio broad­cast. Worse, NFL Net­work gets in the mix as Mar­shall Faulk ticks off all the post-game non­sense. It’s a fine exam­ple of con­tent deals suf­fo­cat­ing the prod­uct. To say I was mere­ly dis­ap­point­ed in the game would under­state how much it pained me to play a game I’ve enjoyed for so long.

So when I heard that EA was com­plete­ly over­haul­ing the game for 2009, I got excit­ed. They got that some­thing was amiss. Like I said, I nev­er buy Mad­den two years in a row. After play­ing the demo, I’m pret­ty sure I’ll be run­ning out to buy it next week. It’s smarter and more inter­est­ing than ever and with the promise of EA offer­ing sub­scrip­tions, I have faint hope that it may be the last phys­i­cal copy of the game I’ll ever buy. If you were waver­ing on this one, be sure to down­load the demo from Xbox Live and give it a try. You may be surprised.