How John Madden Got It Right

From: Willy Pérez-Feria   404 days 17 hours 19 minutes ago

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I confess, I’m a NFL football fan. A scary one. I bought the Sega Genesis system to play EA Sports’ Madden NFL Football in 1992. Like a junkie, I was hooked. Later, I bought a Sony Playstation to play the new version of Madden on it every single day—ahh, my productive youth. Even later came the Sony PS2 and now a Sony PS3 system and still, hardly a day goes by that I don’t log online to completely shatter some 11-year-old kid’s hope of a winning record.

Every year, on the happy day that the new version of Madden is released, I join most of the estrogen-challenged population and call in sick. I play the "fresh from the oven" game for hours trying to acclimate myself to the new nuances and inadvertently end up with not too hard to explain blisters on my hands. In 20 years, I’ll still be playing this game. Even if by then, Madden himself will be so damn old his commentary over each play will be “Where am I?” and “I like soup.”

So why did Madden get it so right? It’s not a dumbed-down, kiddie game. It’s crazy complicated and hard. The Madden series is for fans of the sport, not toddlers. The video game does everything the real game does. It has one of the steepest learning curves this side of World of Warcraft and even though this year’s Madden 2009 takes steps to simplify the game play, it’s still one of the toughest video games to wrap your head around.

Aside from being hard, EA Sports also owns the exclusive rights to use NFL teams and players in video games until 2013 and no other video game manufacturer seems willing or able to out-bid them for those rights. If a gamer wants to play as his current team, there’s only one game that will let him, Madden 2009. Recent challengers such as All-Pro Football 2K8 (retired players such as John Elway are thrown together with other retirees from different eras) and NFL Blitz: The League (fictional football league where steroid use and dirty hits aren’t just allowed, they’re encouraged) just can’t give the sports gamers what they want—using their actual team to beat, then taunt, the other guy.

Madden 2009 ups the ante from previous versions with even more realistic and eye-popping graphics, finely tuned game-play, top-notch player animations, and extraordinarily detailed playbooks, which in my opinion are the key to their success and competitive online multiplayer capabilities. Also, features such as Madden IQ, Backtrack and Cris Collingsworth’s commentary have made Madden 2009 the most challenging version yet. For NFL football gamers, this global phenomenon 20 years in development stands alone. You can’t go wrong with it. Wanna play? I'll kick your ass—and your kid brother's.