Madden 14 Cover – NoobTubeTV

Madden – Preparing For The Super Bowl Hype Machine

The majority of traffic to NoobTubeTV over the past year has been for information on all things ‘Madden’. This year will be interesting if you consider the release of the XBox 720 (or whatever they will call it) to be on the top of your anticipation list. Regardless of what you are looking forward to in football gaming this year, Madden is most likely on the top of your list.

Madden 13 is a game that came out of the gates strong with some new direction to Franchise Mode with the new Connected Careers Mode. Some gamers hated this move and the direction of earning XP for players through on field production. Other gamers enjoyed this new move for realism in player growth during CCM. Either way you fall on this argument you will notice that it was always part of the hype machine after the Madden 12 cycle finished with the Super Bowl.

With the Super Bowl (and the new Madden Release Date announcement) only a few weeks away you should be fully prepared for the onslaught of Madden hype from EA Sports.

Some of the hopes for improvement in Madden 14 are –

More customization of playbooks and depth charts/players – CCM cut off a lot of user creativity as it all but removed player editing and roster editing from the mode.
Better OLine and DLine Interaction – This is something that is called for and demanded by the Madden community every year. EA supposedly made this better by using the strength ratings in Madden 13, but given the constant issues with defensive linemen not getting proper sack numbers and the strange ‘Pancake Block’ stat for OLinemen, it is questionable as to whether or not EA knows anything about linemen at all.
Smarter AI Decisions and Gameplanning – Why do CPU QBs get away with clear intentional grounding? Why does the CPU call a HB Draw while down 5 points and 55 yards from the endzone with 17 seconds left? Why does the CPU call a Timeout with 1:01 left in the 4th quarter?
More Realistic Injuries – We have been calling for this for years. The bottom line is that real time physics means nothing if injuries are random.

Why RG3’s Injury Points A Finger At Madden For More Realism

Robert Griffin III essentially ripped his knee in half during the Redskins’ loss to the Seahawks. He is now out for at least 6-8 months and outside of the discussion about whether he should have been playing in real life we are asking if it is ‘In The Game’.

Madden Football has continuously disappointed in the realm of realistic injuries ever since Roger Goodell became the Commissioner. While they may have some limitations because of their exclusive ~~monopoly~~ license with the league it is still a major issue that is rearing it’s head as one of the most popular players is possibly facing a career ending/altering injury.

In Madden, James Harrison would have been the one getting hurt on this play.

Hit detection in Madden has always been spotty at best. Almost everything in the game is pre-determined by animations that are being triggered. There is a specific animation for face mask penalties, fumbles and interceptions. All the while they are marketing Madden’s ‘new’ physics engine as groundbreaking and amazing. EA pushed for consumers to see that “No tackle will ever be the same”… play the game for a couple days and you will see this is false. Physics have improved immensely between Madden 12 and Madden 13, but the biggest part of football has been missing or random at best.

Injuries occur in Madden 13 if you turn up the injury slider. However, the biggest problem with this is that every injury in Madden is random and is certainly not determined by physics or tackles on players. Take a look at some of the sacks that occur in Madden 13 and witness your own defender getting hurt during a sack and the QB never getting hurt. Is this a sign that under the hood EA has added injury prevention to QBs?

After seeing RG3 get hurt and then tear his LCL and ACL on a play where he didn’t get touched, it makes Madden fans wonder where the injury realism is in the game… and if it will ever be ‘In The Game’.

College Football’s Negative Impact On EA’s NCAA Football Franchise

Over the past few years I have been a staunch supporter of NCAA Football over Madden NFL. EA Sports has truly dropped the ball on both games in multiple ways over this entire generation of consoles (PS3 and 360). Many can blame the glitches and problems on the apparent dependency that developers have on releasing software updates and patches through online interactions. While these kind of ‘hot fixes’ are vital to software (including games) it seems to have left the door open to sloppy development over the course of a year. This isn’t even the biggest problem facing EA’s NCAA Football at this point – it is the college football landscape itself.

Bye Bye BCS… Hello new broken game development.

In case you haven’t paid any attention to college sports over the last few years, there have been teams moving from conference to conference more than Bobby Petrino switches teams (and women). On top of conference changes and re-alignments, the NCAA has recently approved the move to a new playoff system (finally). This is welcome news to the people that still pay attention to the NFL’s minor league affiliate, but for gaming fans it is a dreaded issue that is too far into the future to allow them any sort of desire to want to invest in more broken games without any sort of tournament or playoff system for college football gaming. Why waste time and money on a game that changes faces so often?

College football is a joke in many ways but when it comes to the hypocritical billion dollar deals for the services of ‘amateur’ athletes with coaches that make millions of dollars a year over networks like ESPN – why is it that the gaming end of things is so strangely broken as well? College football is a farce and NCAA Football is a digital farce that continues the NCAA’s views that making money off of college football is paramount. The broken BCS system is just as broken in the video game as it is in real life but now there are gamers clamoring for something worse than fixing issues that plague a game… they want options.

Gamers want to edit players, names, conferences, polls, ranking calculations, awards, coaches, CPU intelligence and many other facets of their game. This is all simply because that whenever EA Sports slaps together their annual sports titles they are constantly closing off customization more than opening it to users for a better experience. Maybe they should take a look at how much games like Counter-Strike can become huge in the PC market – all because of modders and an active user base.

NCAA Football 13 went from $60 to $45 rather quickly this year. It was as if it was a hyped up movie that hit theaters for a week before going to DVD and your local Big Lots bargain bin. EA Sports has proven over this generation of consoles that there is no level too low for them to stoop in terms of laziness and development to keep your money coming in with their effort consistently falling. This isn’t to say that Madden NFL doesn’t have issues mind you (we will hit that later) – but with the NCAA season coming to a close and many college football fans looking to next year we must wonder – what is EA going to do in NCAA 14 that will keep gamers from thinking “I’ll just wait until next year – if at all.”?

Let the 2K College Football rumors begin.