Madden 13 is coming to your console with Legendary Players. If you are excited about this – more power to you.
On the other hand, you could pop in a game that is five years old tomorrow and use quite a few of the same players such as the great Reggie White.
This is a screen capture of Mr. White as a Philadelphia Eagle while it looks very nice, the only thing different is that it is a licensed NFL rendition on the Madden engine.
It isn’t really a question of whether or not Madden or 2K Football is better. It really is apples and oranges when you start comparing how the games play and other nuances that are too numerous to discuss in this article.
However, the real issue at hand is that EA Tiburon is putting this ‘feature’ in a game and almost acting like it is an original idea. 2K Sports (out of desperation) to please their hardcore football fans and with a feeble attempt to jump into the football gaming foray early on in this generation of consoles tried to grab a foothold with the inclusion of legends such as the aforementioned – Reggie White. As well, they had players you can see here on 2K’s website.
The Original ‘Legends Game’ can be had for cheap. You will be amazed with the gameplay and animations that might not even be in Madden this year… or ever.
The issue at hand also makes the controversial Connected Careers Mode a little more strange in that it allows these legendary players (Barry Sanders, Ronnie Lott, Troy Aikman, etc.) as well as Legendary Coaches! It is puzzling that they can’t allow people to do something like edit rosters, but they can allow legendary players onto their teams.
To compound the confusion there is also another vital question that needs to be asked –
Since when does the coach matter in Madden football?
Legendary Coaches is also a nice enough feature (and one that isn’t in APF2K8) but coaches have never mattered in Madden NFL. You could have gone to the Super Bowl with Romeo Crennel’s ‘I’m Thinkin’ Arbys Cleveland Browns All Stars’ and it wouldn’t matter a bit. Your coach means nothing in Madden and that has always been the case.
Madden 13 is on par to impress with their usual growth this year, but the inclusion of legends and marketing of their presence in Connected Careers (as well as Ultimate Team) is something that makes a lot of people look at EA with confusion and wonder if they will ever understand that gimmicks (especially those that have been done by another company) don’t sell games or make their game more enticing. They are cheapening the ‘experience’ and making it feel more and more like it should be Downloadable Content to mess around with like a toy from a Happy Meal and then forgotten forever in the annals of Epic Sports Gaming Fails.
If you want a great game with classic players that requires a more simulation approach than Madden, please follow our link to a bargain of a fantastic football game!
We are entering the time of year when a lot of the most anticipated titles are coming out. One thing that tends to make it tough on gamers is making the choice of which game you have to skip out on.
Amazon does a nice job of enticing people by offering this sweet deal that basically means if you pre-order four games, you get the 5th game for free! Take it upon yourself to jump on this when you can!
Keep in mind, if the price changes (gets cheaper) before release like NCAA 13 did, you will get that price and the $15 credit to your Amazon Account!
While there have been a lot of detractors (yours truly included) coming out against EA’s decision to keep roster editing out of Madden 13’s Connected Careers Mode, there are some things to consider before you decide to hate it entirely.
There is something behind not having control of every aspect of rosters once you start a franchise mode or dynasty. The biggest (most obvious) downfall is if the coding for progression and regression is bad (see Madden 09, 10, 11, etc.). However, if the coding and player development is good (see the possibilities for Madden 13’s new XP system) you might have one heck of a deep career mode that will allow you to truly develop players and teams as you feel they should.
If you edit Phil Dawson to have 99 Kick Power and Accuracy you should have to pay for it. In Madden 13 you have to earn it rather than change it.
In Madden 12, they opened up player editing during Franchise Mode and it was/is awesome. However, the downfall is that you have to really find a way to be honest about your edits and then make sure that you do the same thing for other players and teams across the board. If your player did well but didn’t progress as you feel he should have, you had the ability to make sure his ratings went up as they’should have’. The problem with this is that it can ruin the longevity of a Franchise Mode when you have a team that becomes too good either because you edited them that way or you are just great at using the fastest players in the game.
It is nice to develop a great team, but it is even nicer when you have to spend points and be honest with how you go about it. If you want to make Brandon Weeden have 99 SPD, you will have to spend a ton of points to do so. While this seems unrealistic, ask yourself how much more realistic it would be if you simply went in and edited him to be that way. It wouldn’t be realistic at all and you are now stuck looking at Madden 13’s lack of player editing from a more honest perspective.
The main problem with Madden’s Franchise Mode in-particular has never really been in progression/regression anyway. The issue that is the most obvious is the way players and draft picks are valued. A player might come in and do an amazing job out of the blue (Matt Cassel for Tom Brady in 2009 is one example). He then went on to get a big contract offer from the Chiefs where he has been average/above average at best. The moral of the story is that Madden hasn’t ever really taken this into account. The player’s value has always been based around his ratings (OVR mostly) and that isn’t how business is always done in the NFL (unless your name is Al Davis (RIP)).
For Connected Careers to work as it should, there needs to be a better value system for players that forces teams to have to make decisions on whether or not the player will work in their Franchise and system.
This is the next aspect that has never been in Madden…. Do players FIT THE SYSTEM?
Stop wondering why the Browns seem so slow, even on the line. Granted, they are supposed to fit the system… although, they don’t seem to know what system it is. (Go Browns!)
More goes into how a player is chosen for a team other than ‘Is he qualified?’
The Patriots and Bill Belichick drafted a player out of Ohio State that played more rugby than football. They also picked up Danny Woodhead and made him into a valuable part of their team (and he is only 5’8″ 195lbs).
Woodhead is small, but he works for their system.
There are other examples such as different defensive schemes such as the 3-4 and 4-3 that require different styles, sizes and speeds for defensive linemen and linebackers. There are certain offensive schemes that don’t require a receiver to be fast as long as he can run good routes and catch the ball (West Coast).
Do you think someone like Tim Tebow would succeed outside of Denver if he had to take every snap from the center rather than playing college-style?
If you run a 3-4 offense and need fast, athletic linebackers the last person you want to look for is going to be an average speed 6’5″ 270 lbs… you will most likely want to look for a fast and lean 6’3″ 240 lb mean S.O.B. that doesn’t care about anything other than ripping faces off of QBs.
Every position is important, but in Madden that doesn’t seem to be the case. Again, say what you want about real-time physics and other improvements. Those are needed and extremely valuable, but when it comes down to longevity for their most vaunted mode and biggest overhaul in years EA needs to make sure that more than just ratings truly matter.
If you aren’t football savvy here is a quick example:
Two people are applying for a car sales job.
The first person is fresh out of college with a degree in marketing and experience working a retail sales job part-time. They have a good, confident attitude to eventually work at the corporate level and maybe someday head up a department or possibly their own company.
The second person graduated from high school and then spent two years at a community college. They have a strong personality and make you feel like you have known them forever. They are also from the region and have strong ties to the area.
Who gets the job? The second person gets the job. Why? Because they fit the system.
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?
New cover athlete, same game.
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.
Is this really what sports gaming is coming to?… The amount of detail being put into these players and their equipment is impressive. However, the amount of attention these things get from the ‘hardcore’ community is atrocious.
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.
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.
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?
If you consider the way Madden was going with their announcements of Connected Careers Mode and Real Time Physics it seemed as if the sky was the limit.
Now it feels like someone has come to your 4th of July party and taken all of your fireworks.
EA Tiburon has announced many new limitations for Madden 13 since the vaunted reveal of Connected Careers.
Darren McFadden should probably have an injured knee, back or right arm after this hit. However, thanks to EA and the NFL, this will most likely result in nothing more than a regular tackle and recovery… every single time.
– You can no longer play more than one game per week and it must be for only your team.
This is a big deal for people that like to play random games along the way of their season to expand their enjoyment of the league as teams evolve… or to throw games like the 1919 White Sox so their team can make the playoffs. Either way it goes, this limitation is silly and only hurts EA from the perspective of once again taking away any sort of further depth a gamer may want.
– Editing players is completely gone for Connected Careers.
Perhaps the biggest kick in the analog stick was the news that you can only edit players for Play Now games but not for your team before you start your Connected Careers Mode. So, not only can you not edit your players… but now you have to hope that you bought the game new and got the $10 Roster Update Code included with the retail release. Then you have to suffer the more unfortunate fate of having to depend on the Ratings Czar, Donny Moore.
– Madden still depends on the the ‘all-important’ Speed Rating
Please understand that this isn’t new or even an announcement. However, it is still a major issue that annoys us to no end. Football is the one game that is more than just fast guys running everything 80 yards for a TD. It is a game of strength, awareness, determination, size and motivation (of which only one is a ‘rating’, Strength). This leads us to our next limitation which is a continuation…
– Ratings still determine everything…and nothing.
Madden football has turned into a bastardized arcade version of simulation NFL Football. There are ratings (like Speed) that mean everything to a player. Then there are ratings (Awareness) that are some sort of mysterious presence that make a player’s Overall Rating but little else really comes out of it. One of the things that All Pro Football 2K8 got right was taking those number ratings away from your view and made you ask yourself…”Can this guy play football?”
That is the real question facing Madden and NCAA.
Are these games really football?
Something that has troubled many football fans lately is the constant focus on ‘safety’. If you want to be safe, play golf. Football is about blood, guts, glory, concussions, playing hurt and yes… violence. It is a game where every single play the goal is to destroy the player carrying the ball. The NFL is taking it away from the game as much as they can but EA is taking it away altogether.
There are no late hits in Madden NFL Football.
There are no real time injuries to go with real time physics.
There are no roster edits for your (or any other team) before you start a Career Mode.
Which really starts to beg the question. What exactly is in Madden outside of a couple of what now seem to be aesthetic changes to the game?
Are you angry with EA Tiburon’s approach to football games? Vent below…
You may read the title and think I am nuts, but continue reading and you will see the light.
The first and most obvious sign that this year is a bad one for developers is the fact that we have Call of Duty Black Ops 2 (from Treyarch, aka – The Bad COD Developer) competing against (and already defeating) EA’s Medal of Honor: Warfighter. Why do these two high profile games make a case for this being the worst year in gaming? The answer goes a bit deeper but we will start with the fact that you have already seen these titles before. Black Ops 2 is going to be based in the ‘future’ and Warfighter lets you fight in a war against terrorism with different groups of fighters from around the world. Terrorism, future bad guys, leaderboards, prestige ranks, overpowered weapons, whining teenagers and ‘reload’. You now have the end of 2012 being a fine example for what 2012 was for many gamers – the worst year in gaming.
Exhibit 1 – Mass Effect 3
It is one thing to have games like Call of Duty bringing whining people out of the woodwork, but when it is an RPG and you bring the nerds out of the woodwork – you better be ready to see the gates of Mordor open up and Sauron to have his eye upon you.
Mass Effect 3 was disappointing for multiple reasons, outside of the lame ending (which caused many Mass Effect fanboys to demand and get their money back from Amazon) there was also the somewhat forced multiplayer component. The problem with multiplayer in story-based RPGs is that it makes it feel more like a buddy movie than an epic saga. Say what you want, but Mass Effect 3 was a bad omen for gaming in 2012.
Exhibit 2 – No New Console Updates
You would think that with the gaming community all but beating on the doors for a new console from Sony and Microsoft that there would be some talk about a new console or at least some sort of new processing power that they are working with. You have gotten nothing but rumors and even those are only coming from the XBox… where are the Playstation rumors?
Exhibit 3 – Sports Titles Are Garbage
Somehow there is a way to screw up games that are based around stuff we enjoy on an everyday basis. While there is one shining beacon of hope coming from Sony’s MLB The Show baseball series – it seems that every mainstreamAmerican sports game (soccer and hockey somehow avoid this distinction) is a sad excuse for software development.
Be honest, Madden and NCAA Football have been essentially the same game for 3+ years. While they have made some tweaks in Madden for Real Time Physics and Tuners (which werenever once used) they have avoided any real sense of innovation since they bought the exclusive rights to make NFL games and knocked 2K Sports out of the running.
This left 2K to throw their weight behind two sports – Basketball and Baseball.
2K’s basketball is perhaps only rivaled by MLB The Show in quality and overall awesomeness. It is incredibly deep and very well developed. The game is smooth and the AI/CPU is intelligent during the game. The depth of Association Mode and My Player being this game to the forefront of sports gaming. Unfortunately, 2K also makes baseball games.
2K baseball has been a disaster ever sense MLB 2K8 was released, between the glitches and frame-rate issues there is little reason to talk about, let alone consider this game as anything more than the XBox owner’s only option for baseball gaming. That is the saddest part of all.
Sports gamers often have no choice.
There are many other reasons we could sulk over a bad year in gaming, but what about the perks and the great things that have happened in gaming? Don’t worry – we will have a lot of time to cover those as NoobTubeTV is going into overhaul to bring you the best in gaming.
A lot of people have extra time to play video games in the summer. Whether you or your kids are on summer vacation or if it is just a rainy day, you should look at each opportunity to game as a chance to get better at your past-time.
There are a few things you can do to increase your skills without making it too much of a chore –
Track The Amount of Time You Spend On Each Game – One thing people tend to forget is they play the games they enjoy and once you can determine your 3 to 5 most played games it will be much easier to prioritize your skill building through this practice.
Use Different Techniques and Strategies – You have to make sure that you don’t depend on any one technique, strategy or tactic when playing any game (especially online multiplayer). In Modern Warfare 3 you should make it your mission to master at least four to six different primary weapons. If at some point you run out of ammunition and you pick up a new weapon like the MK14 it would be a good idea to learn how to handle it.
Exercise – Get outside and move your body, sweat and listen to your favorite music. One of the things people don’t realize is that the more you sit in front of your TV the lazier your body and mind become. It is vital for everyone to get themselves into decent shape anyway, but if you work out you will notice a marked improvement in your gaming, decision making and reflexes.
What are some of the things you like to do to build your skills in gaming? Hit us up in the comments below!
While it hasn’t been officially ruled out for Madden 13, it has been stated that much of editing players outside of the XP System we mentioned a few days ago isn’t going to be an option when Madden 13 is released. So, it remains to be seen if it is a certainty that it will be removed this year… however, in regards to what this means for the gaming community it is three-fold.
EA Sports has once again ‘removed’ something that was in past iterations of Madden NFL. Which baffles almost everyone that pays the slightest amount of attention to the game. The reason this is so baffling is because EA Tiburon is constantly reinventing Madden. When will they decide that this game is powered by their dedicated community and the edits they make to everything from ratings to playbooks (also not editable this year).
Relying on Donny Moore for roster updates and his subjective ratings changes that vary depending on who had a good game from week to week. The Ratings Czar is going to be on the spot this year if they don’t allow roster and ratings edits. Not to mention the fact that this once again keeps offline gamers out of the loop entirely.
A promising amount of hype is being overshadowed by what is looking more and more like regression on the part of EA and their dedication to allowing the end-user any sort of autonomy with their game.
Madden is still looking like a game to put on your ‘must have’ list in late August, but this latest news is troubling on many levels and it doesn’t bode well for this game from the perspective of roster-editing.
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