July 2012 – Page 4

NCAA Football 13 – The Reviews Aren’t Promising

Football is the most popular sport in the United States. The people that love the game know it and the hardcore fans of football video games know it too. So, why does it seem like EA Sports doesn’t really give a damn?

If you consider the fact that the only option you have for a legitimate football title (pro or college) is limited to EA Sports, that should tell you enough. Then you get to live the annual nightmare of playing the same game with different glitches and problems.

The saddest part about NCAA Football is that for a few years it actually stepped up its game enough to be preferred over Madden. Now we are seeing it fall back into the grand old EA trap of “If it works, let’s break it!” and “If it is broken, let’s put something in slow-motion or ignore it altogether.”

NCAA Football 13 relies heavily on Dynasty Mode for the bulk of its players. One thing that had been part of NCAA Football for over a decade was being able to export your draft classes to Madden after each year of college football. While this transition often translated to poorly rated NFL Draft Counter-Parts and other problems (every black player having dreadlocks back in Madden 08, for example) – it was still one heck of a cool feature to have.

Now it is gone.

You have a ‘new’ scouting system and some new ways to sell recruits, but what it all really boils down to is – nothing has really changed. It has either been tweaked or taken away.

You will (supposedly) notice players have to ‘see’ the ball to make a play on it, but that won’t last long as EA has never had anything like this in a football title and likely will find a way to screw this up like they did with ‘Rocket Catching’ and Linebackers that compensate for bad AI with the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound.

You might look at this as a harsh criticism, but what it really boils down to is the fact that EA Sports’ football titles are like settling for White Castle’s Sliders. You may like it at first, but you will pay the price later.

Check out Metacritic to get more reviews.

NCAA Football 13 – $44.99 on Amazon

If you are desperate to make the dive into EA’s pockets for NCAA Football, ordering from Amazon could save you a cool $20.

Luckily for you, we are awesome enough to post a link for this wonderful deal.

NCAA Football 13

Breaking The Trends – What’s Next For Shooter Games?

It seems that the entertainment industry has fallen into a rut over the past decade or so.

Whether it is gaming or movies – when something finds success the typical response isn’t “What will they do next?”… it is “When is the sequel coming out?!”

A recent article that features an interview with DICE suggests that the next movement is going away from Modern Conflicts and towards ‘Near Future’. This brings a few things to mind and really presses for an honest answer that will only be given in sales numbers.

COD — Are you getting tired of fighting the same war with different names?

What Is So Different Between Current Day and Near Future?

If you have paid any attention to the ‘new’ direction for Call of Duty Black Ops 2 you will see that it is now based in the Near Future. The worst part about this concept is that it involves very little true innovation other than simply stating that it is based in a time period that has more flying robots and drones, etc. Modern Warfare 3 already saw places like New York City in ruins, now we get to go into new ‘future’ places and see them destroyed by war?… Yeah, really refreshing.

Does Time Period Need To Be Stated?

Outside of historical reference, does it really matter ‘when’ a game is taking place? If you have read any sort of fiction you will notice what happens in books that directly refer to technology or entertainment of the time. It ages the story and often makes it difficult for future generations to relate to the ‘power’ of whatever is being referenced. Try reading Jurassic Park or American Psycho without laughing about their references to CD-ROMs and Walkmans, or better yet – Huey Lewis and the News.

It isn’t as if time period should be cut out completely, but it should be merely hinted at in the presentation. Bioshock did a great job of this when you see the character flying in an airplane that allowed smoking (even if it did make direct reference to the year “1960 – Mid-Atlantic”). There is even the amazing presentation of NBA 2K12 that allows you to play with retro teams with a TV presentation style of the time period.

Where Is The F**CKING ORIGINAL STORY?!

There is something to be said for what Activision is doing with Call of Duty and that something is called ‘milking a concept until the game dies’. Look at what they did with Guitar Hero and you will see what will eventually happen to Call of Duty.

If you take a look at the direction of Microsoft, they aren’t too dissimilar when it comes to milking games and game series such as Gears of War and Halo. Speaking of which, new rumours have started creeping up about Halo 2 Anniversary Edition. Not that anyone should be surprised… it is just upsetting for gamers that want to play something new… something fresh.

What type of time period or setting do you want to have a shooter game based in? Leave comments below!

Beware of Slider Nazis – Madden 13

We are only a few days from the release of NCAA 13 and just over a month from Madden 13. That being said, you can almost smell the football in the air. Unfortunately, you can also smell the elitist sports gamers over the internet. Readying their little fingers to type angry messages in response to your excited ~~Franchise Mode~~ Connected Career performance updates that may or may not include winning a Super Bowl with the Cleveland Browns in 2013.

Usually your success with a ‘weaker’ team is going to be attributed to your Slider Settings. These wonderful additions to sports games have been around for awhile. They are meant to act as a way for you (the end user) to tune the gameplay in order for you to either make the game play like your opinion of simulation (or Arcade – which Madden is usually a fine example of every year). It then becomes a war of words and Slider Settings in the messageboards and sports gaming communities.

Your typical interaction with a slider nazi could sound (read) like this.

———

You – I just won the Super Bowl with the Browns! It was amazing! We managed to sweep the AFC North behind the amazing play of Trent Richardson (led the league in rushing and TDs) and our under-rated defense! We beat the Cowboys 24-10 as Brandon Weeden connected with Josh Cribbs on a screen pass that ended up sealing the deal late in the game!

Responding (Hater) Slider Nazi – You obviously have to change your sliders! There is no way the Browns will EVER win a Super Bowl, let alone this year. You need to make sure your run blocking is tuned down if Trent Richardson is leading the league as a rookie. Not to mention the fact that the Browns are terrible… wow. big props to you on beating the weak CPU to a pulp. Did you have the difficulty set to Rookie?

———

There are two ways to look at this conversation and neither of them is necessarily wrong.

1 – If you enjoy your game, no one should be able to tell you how to enjoy it otherwise. If you truly have a good time winning the Super Bowl with ANY team, let alone a team like the Browns, Cavaliers, Kansas City Royals, Western Michigan or Columbus Blue Jackets… more power to you.

2 – There is something to be said for a game giving you a challenge. While the reactions of many sports gamers (such as the example above) are blown out of proportion, you should often consider if your sliders are providing you with the best challenge while still being fair to both sides. I have played 18 Collective Seasons in Madden 12’s Franchise Mode with teams such as the Browns, Bears and Jaguars. I won a few Super Bowls with the Browns and decided I wanted a new challenge so I switched teams and tweaked my sliders. It was three seasons before I won a Super Bowl with the Bears and the Jaguars team I inherited after leaving the Bears is going to be rough to work with.

Madden 13 – Selling Armsleeves?

Enough is enough, while there are numerous pet peeves among gamers (and sports gamers in-particular) you would think it would hinge on something that made gameplay more of the focus.

It seems that the new generation of gamers and the apparent generation of developers had decided to focus on the material aspect of the NFL and the players.

You would think that there would be more of a focus on things like Pass Interference or maybe even the terrible o-line/d-line interactions. Then again, there are other numerous problems that the hardcore fans tend to forget when they see things like… armsleeves.

Battlefield Premium and Call of Duty Elite – DLCrap

All you need to know is that by the time you purchase Call of Duty and Battlefield with their ‘Premium’ services you will be spending $220 on content that may or may not be worth the money to begin with.

Don’t Buy These Add-Ons If –

1 – You play either or both games sparingly to pass some time shooting things

2 – You only play basic maps with friends that don’t and/or won’t have the desire to buy anything extra

3 – You don’t care about leaderboards

4 – You aren’t obsessed with every facet of the game

Do Buy These Add-Ons If –

1 – You know you will buy them as they come out, every time (this will save you $10 for a couple Hot and Ready Little Caeser’s Pizzas)

2 – You worship the ground these titles walk on and would start a religion in their honor

3 – You are bored with the regular maps and modes and need something to breath freshness into your game

4 – You want to have some sort of bling to look like the digital hip hop version of yourself

5 – You want a couple weeks to know the maps before other people will on the regular release day (because you should always be able to buy shortcuts and then make the game uneven in favor of people that want to sweep the leg like Cobra Kai)

Mass Effect 3 – The Extended Cut? (B.S.)

BioWare finally released some new DLC (Downloadable Content) to finish the story for people that played through Mass Effect 3 and were left thinking “WTF?!”. Fun fact… The DLC is Free… it had better be if they have any desire to draw fans back for Mass Effect 4: The Prequel.

The only thing that really bothers me is that this was needed as extra content months after release. The fact that this game was sold and marketed as an ‘epic’ trilogy where every decision matters was killed as soon as people started seeing that every ending was bleak.

I think this is primarily because people have been spoiled by movies and books where the good guys win and the bad guys lose. People don’t want to believe that war (especially planetary war) will end up destroying almost everything… even hope.

I have yet to play a single second of Mass Effect 3 simply because I had no desire to pay money for a game that leaves me wondering if there will be DLC to finish the story. This seems like reading a book and buying it on a per-page basis.

It would be one thing if this was Call of Duty where the story’s made up and the plots don’t matter. But this was an amazing action RPG that pretty much seduced you into years of promise and ended up leaving you to write fan fiction in order to finish the story they decided to leave open to loose interpretations.

*As for the reference to Mass Effect 4… Zip your pants back up for now. They are only rumors… but then again, it wouldn’t be the internet without angry fans looking for hope and rumors of a new game in the series.

Just remember how “great” the Star Wars prequels were and ask yourself if you wish you had even watched them after the original trilogy. To answer this I will leave it to Darth Vader –

Medal of Honor Warfighter Trailer – Ummm… Really?

You can see that recently we posted a video showing some of the great aspects of Battlefield 3 and what it has to offer gamers that enjoy FPS titles that require a bit more of a cerebral touch. On October 23 EA is releasing Medal of Honor: Warfighter.

After checking out their new multiplayer trailer it seems as if EA is trying (yet again) to grab the Call of Duty audience rather than make an effort to simply make their own original title. From Miniature Assault Vehicles to rocket launchers and computer guided missile strikes – it looks like they want you to look at the same played out game that they tried to fool you into buying a few years ago.

What’s new?… you get to play as the special forces from your choice of nations such as Russia, Poland, England and of course the United States among others. What is wrong with developers these days? Bad Company 2 had the Vietnam Add-On and it was amazing. Say what you want about being able to shoot down Hueys with a pistol – it was fun!

Take a look at the trailer… does it really excite you to the point of making you think it is worth $60 or even a spot on your Christmas list?

Does Madden Matter Anymore?

Over the past two decades it has been a fixture in sports gaming. On occasion it has even been hailed as one of the best games of the year in that genre. However, the Madden Franchise has fallen on hard times as of late and it looks more like Tiki Barber trying to make a comeback rather than Brett Favre making a Super Bowl run after his 2nd retirement. Either way it goes and however you view the analogy – Madden is getting worse every year. Only a few weeks ago we were looking at Madden 13 as the rebirth of a franchise after a long drought. Now it seems as if it has lost its luster and even its marketing steam.

The NFL season is set to start in just over two months and Madden is slated to come out in the middle of Pre-Season games. How on earth can it be that this game doesn’t have a single commercial in wide circulation or even some sort of hypemobile rolling through forums drumming up blind support?

While it isn’t terribly surprising to see a sports title come out and grab the core audience, it is rather shocking to see the publisher pretty much throw in the marketing towel this early/ late in the game’s development cycle. With high profile titles such as Halo 4 and Call of Duty coming out within a few months of Madden, it is going to be interesting to see how EA’s sales for their football games perform without any real concerted effort at this point.

Madden has its core of fanboys out there that live up to the stereotypes of sports gamers with false bravado and a sharp case of ego-stroking football knowledge that should place them at the sidelines of any local youth football game screaming at children as they try to live out dreams they never should have had in the first place. These gamers tend to ruin the online experience as they exploit the poor animation and AI system in order to rank up the leaderboards or win some sort of digital league.

ricoredux — The typical Madden Online/Tournament gamer.

The rest of the Madden fans out there don’t even play online. They want a game that focuses on Franchise Mode/Connected Careers and some sort of longevity to keep them coming back. Sadly, it looked like a promising year for this group of fans until EA dropped bombshell after bombshell crushing the dreams of franchise fanantics (yours truly, included). It seems that the time has come to call EA on their bluff. They have been bluffing for almost seven years now and there are still people out there folding under the pressure to buy this game on release day.

Are you buying Madden this year? Are you avoiding it like the plague?… Or, are you simply going to wait it out a little while and see what the reviews look like?