It's Madden Day.

The new John Madden football is out. Wow -- it has great graphics and incredible gameplay for the Nintendo Wii. More to come related to the new game, but in the meantime, here's a blast from the past with an old entry from 2005.

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August, 2005

Maddening

It’s that time of year again. Shut the shades, turn off the lights, and fire up the PS2 – Madden 2006 was released on Tuesday and of course, as usual, I was there.

I lost count sometime in the late 90’s, but I think this is the 13th or 14th straight year I have purchased the Madden title. And every year, I ache a little more for the past. Don’t get me wrong, I love the game. It really revs my engines (copyright Brian Fantana.) But it is starting to get a little…stale.

When did video games become such an obsession and when did it become okay for a 31-year-old man to be this excited about a toy? I don’t have the answer to either question, but I know I am not alone in saying that Madden has become a staple in the fall/winter downtime diet.

The newest version has all the old features. Franchise mode, owner mode, mini-games, and online play basically come standard now with Madden -- and all of this is fantastic. But somewhere over the last 3-4 years, the lines have been blurred and the “video game” aspect of Madden football has taken a turn and it has become a very close replica of the real-life version of the NFL.

Every time I get the latest version, I am always amazed at how far games like this have come. I remember playing Intellivision football when I was a kid and there was no rhyme or reason to the game. It wasn’t football at all - it was basically five red blocks against five blue blocks and you hoped you could run your blocks into your opponent’s blocks with enough force to move forward. But back then, it was the coolest thing we had ever seen and we couldn’t believe the technology was so advanced. If we had a chance to play that old school version of football now, it would look as basic to us as Pong did ten years ago.

My buddy Bert and I spent days, hell – we probably spent months -- playing Intellivision. And a few years later, Nintendo finally came out with RBI baseball and we didn’t leave my parents house during the summer months. The only time we went outside was to play real baseball on our traveling Babe Ruth team. We rarely left the cool, comfortable darkness of the basement, only going upstairs for bathroom breaks, Mountain Dew/Funyon runs, and every once in awhile, to watch Harry Carey and the Cubs on the big TV in the living room.

There was a hidden beauty to games like RBI baseball. Every player looked alike, every pitcher had the same motion, and every hitter had no chance of hitting the ball the other way. Once in awhile, the game would freeze up, you would hit the reset button, and you moved on with the fun. The point is - you knew you were playing a video game and life was good.

In today’s version of Madden, unlike the golden era of Nintendo, sometimes you can’t tell what real life is and what a video game is. You don’t even need to play the game to know this. If you have seen the commercials on TV, what you see is what you get and it isn’t too difficult, especially from across the room, to mistake the video game pictures for real-life football. The graphics are that true to life.

The football players actually look and move like real NFL stars. During games in cold weather stadiums, you can see the frosty breath of a player. On sunny days, the glare coming off the helmets is eerily real. The crowd reacts to a good play with cheers and even boos a coach’s decision to punt on 4th and inches from the opponent’s 40-yard-line. It’s as close to feeling like Denny Green as I ever want to get.

Madden doesn’t necessarily feel like a video game anymore – it’s more like an NFL simulator. But, there are some great aspects of game. The best part for dorks like me is that I no longer have to track statistics on my own – you can save up to 30 seasons for one franchise, which allows you to go back and compare seasons state. Plus, this allows you to have debates with yourself on whether the player you created had a Hall of Fame career. (Not that I ever do that or anything). This feature has saved me countless hours of frustration because I actually used to keep track of season to season stats in a notebook. But that was back when I was a kid. Okay, I wasn’t a kid - I was in high school. Let’s just move on.

All of these features are great. You can’t ask for a better looking football game. The problem I am starting to run into is that the game play is too complex. A new feature this year is something called vision/precision passing. I can’t for the life of me figure out how this helps improve game play. Even worse, I was once an offensive genius in the Madden world. I could rack up hundreds of yards passing with Chad Hutchinson at QB for Christ sake. I mean come on, I was unstoppable. Now I can’t complete a 10-yard curl or a screen-pass. Not good times, bad times.

The gist of the new feature is that some quarterbacks have better field vision than others. Peyton Manning, for instance, has a better awareness and feel for the game than someone like Joey Harrington. Let’s be honest, we all have better field awareness and feel for the game than Joey Harrington. But, in this game, Manning can see the entire field. Harrington can only see a small part of the field and locks onto the receiver he is throwing to, which makes him a complete liability. Hey, just like real-life!

And, I guess that’s the point, EA Sports has made a game that is almost too lifelike. You can’t just sit down and play this game. It takes a lot of time to figure out how to master the offensive controls. Some people love that and some people --like me -- want a game where you can sit down and throw for 400 yards and score 73 points per game. That’s just how I roll.

There are people who are going to love this game. I am afraid to even allow my buddy Wide into my house at this point. He will master the precision passing in about three minutes and our heated rivalry will turn into a lopsided ass-kicking the same way it did last year when his Eagles abused my beloved Vikings with the PlayMaker feature. I couldn’t figure that thing out either.

Long story short is, I will keep plugging away at this game and keep trying to get better at it. We don’t have a better option this year and in fact, we won’t have a better option for the next five years, since EA Sports signed an exclusive deal with the NFL for gaming rights.

Plus, the old-school Nintendo Entertainment System I bought on Ebay doesn’t really work very well and I can’t for the life of me find a working copy of RBI Baseball. So, until I do – it will have to be Madden.

When that’s your dilemma, things are working out okay, huh?