Madden NFL 09

Aug 12, 2008

There's something magical in the air. It's time for dreaming of fourth quarter comebacks, last second touchdowns and endzone celebrations. It's time for cheerleaders and tailgate parties, for fantasy leagues and cheering on the home team. It's time for the 2008 NFL season, and naturally, it's also time for the latest Madden football game from EA Sports.

With the signing of Brett Favre as the cover athlete on this 20th anniversary edition of the storied John Madden Football franchise, this was supposed to be the year where the infamous Madden Curse was finally broken. Instead, Favre came out of retirement, was embroiled in an awkward media battle with Green Bay management, and was subsequently traded to none other than the New York Jets. Now you have Madden NFL 09, where the cover athlete is in the wrong uniform and playing for the wrong team. The curse has struck again, and this time it's apparently going after EA instead of an athlete's knees.

While the rosters are incredibly out of date even this early into the preseason, we'll give EA Sports the benefit of the doubt and assume that an update is coming soon. A printable cover with Favre in his Jets jersey will also be made available on the EA Sports site. Who prints out cover art, though? Seems like a poor way to cover up an embarrassing situation.

Before we delve into the new features that have been added to the game this year, it's important to note that this is very much an expansion of last year's Madden game, with a few tweaks added in here and there. This isn't a revolutionary step forward for the series by any stretch of the imagination.

The tag line this year is that Madden NFL 09 is the first sports game that adapts to you. This process begins with the Madden test. Immediately upon starting the game, Virtual John Madden will test you in rushing, passing, and their counterpart pass and run defenses. You'll then be assigned a Madden IQ score, a numerical assessment of your skill level. This Madden IQ will rise and fall with each game you play, and the AI will adapt to your play level, game after game. Your difficulty level is now far more customized than just Rookie or All-Madden. Now the weakest aspects of your game are easier, while your strengths will be challenged. It's a good system, and it seems to work very well.

This is easily the best that Madden's ever looked. The stadiums are incredibly well detailed, with lively, good looking crowds and a cornucopia of detail that make it so you can feel like you're at the game. The animation is much improved as well, with improved gang tackling, impressive suplex takedowns and ball carrier moves to break away from tackles.

Getting a big hit on a ball carrier with the hit stick will actually shake the screen for greater impact. If you manage to break a long run to the endzone, the camera will drop down and over the shoulder, adding more drama to the big moment. There are also numerous end zone celebrations, including a few that make use of the goal post or interacting with the walls in stadiums like Lambeau Field or the Georgia Dome.

The weather effects look phenomenal; you'll marvel at the footsteps in the snow and the muddy tracks left behind on a rain-drenched field. The filthy player uniforms in the 4th quarter of a hard fought battle in the trenches never gets old.

The running game is solid, and lots of fun to control, with intuitive highlight stick trucking, juke moves, and so on. The passing game doesn't fare quite so well, at least as far as realism. It feels far too easy to dominate the better secondaries. Mid-tier QBs, both player and CPU-controlled, complete far too many passes and are seemingly impossible to rattle. They make their reads very quickly, and have an uncanny ability to anticipate an incoming sack and still make a perfect pass. QBs rarely overthrow or underthrow their receivers, though getting a hand in their face can sometimes force this.

A really annoying AI flaw has crept into nearly every game we've played thus far, so it bears mentioning. When the CPU makes a grab, and sees nothing but daylight to the endzone, they'll often run towards the sideline and out of bounds. Even when they only have a few steps of momentum taking them to the sideline, they'll still walk out when they could have easily turned it upfield for an easy ten yards or a score. Receivers will also attempt sideline catches when they're clearly out of bounds, or a few yards away from the sidelines.

Other bugs we've encountered during our play testing include an inability to call timeout in pressure situations, and issues with connectivity when playing online. We've been disconnected from several games, but your mileage may vary.

That being said, online play is a very enticing part of what Madden brings to the table this year. There are 32 player online leagues you can join in addition to your ranked and unranked matches. There are also numerous ancillary online features, like the Gamecast, where you can see other games in progress, and streaming content like an EA Fantasy podcast and NFL sports news feed. Then there's the EA Fantasy Football feature, where you can draft a fantasy league with your friends on the website, and then import that fantasy team into Madden, so you can play them in the game.

One of the stranger features that made it into the game this year is EA Rewind. After any given play, you can press a button to take things back to the snap and try again. Call it whatever you want, a do-over, a mulligan, the B.S. button, you'll probably want to set the number of rewinds to 0 when playing with friends. Against the CPU it's not quite so heinous, but why rob yourself of the challenge of playing the game? The best use of this feature is likely as a handicap between players of different skill levels.

Tom Hammond and Cris Collinsworth provide the play-by-play and color commentary this year, and they do a passable job overall. The best aspects of the commentary are the EA Backtrack segments. Collinsworth will break down what went wrong on a particular play, highlighting open receivers or pointing out where coverage broke down. When combined with the Rewind feature, they make for a perfect tandem for learning how to make the best of any play in the book. It's not just a do-over, it's a hands-on instructional video. These segments actually enhance the gameplay experience, overshadowing the often overdone delivery by Collinsworth and the robotic Hammond.

You can pick up a standalone copy of Madden NFL 09, or a special collector's edition version that includes a copy of NFL Head Coach and a full version of the retro classic, Madden 93. With the high cost of being a football fan, once you add up NFL Sunday Ticket and entry fees in fantasy football money leagues, it's going to have to be your call as to whether or not it's worth ninety dollars for you to splurge on Madden NFL 09. The core game is a lot of fun, though, warts and all.