XBox Football
I always liked football simulations. The best one from
my youth was an old game on the Apple II that was text only where you picked
plays and the computer simulated the result. And, who can forget the hand held
white Coleco games with the red
dots.
Well, football games have come a
long way.
For my xbox, I started out buying a cheap copy of
Madden 2003. It was nice and cheap. Unfortunately, it was used, though the
confusing labelling did not make this clear. And, it would crash my xbox at
random.
Rather than do the rational thing
and give up, or just picking up Madden 2003 new, I ended up buying *both* Madden
2004 and the ESPN NFL game. These games are pretty similar in most ways, but
also very different.
So, after having
played both for a few hours, here are my
thoughts:
Madden
2004:
This is apparently the King of football games.
Compared to
ESPN, The gameplay feels a bit sluggish, and the player models and animation are
not as good. Mechanics are realistic: it's harder to turn while sprinting,
fullbacks are slower than smaller runners. Passing is a mixed bag. Sometimes it
feels like the receiver can't catch anything, and then other times he makes a
one handed catch in triple coverage.
I don't understand kicking at all.
It's a pain
to call audibles, but it's important to be able to do it. That sort of
sucks.
No
major complaints. It's easy to customize the presentation to not be soul
suckingly annoying.
ESPN NFL
Football:
Better graphics and player models. Kicking
sucks even more. The running mechanics feel more fluid but less realistic.
Kicking is even worse. I think overall the gameplay is better in most ways, but
the rest of the game interface is crippled by small oversights that would seem
to be simple to fix, and are really annoying in
practice.
For example, the interface for play calling
and audibles are much better than Madden. It's easier to make adjustments on the
fly, and so on. But, while in Madden it's really easy to set up a custom
playbook for an existing team and use it over and over again, it's very unclear
how you do this in the ESPN game. It took me 5min in Madden to make a sticky
setting so that I could always use 4-3 defenses with the Steelers, even though
the default was 3-4. I tried for an hour to do this same thing in ESPN and still
haven't worked it out. And, as you'll see, using the menu system for an hour is
no fun.
Both
games have overly complicated control interfaces, utilizing every button and
trigger on the xbox controller in 5 ways (wakka wakka wakka fruit). The ESPN one
is a bit better, maybe.
So, while ESPN has some clear advantages, it
has the following fatal flaws
1. Annoying ESPN theme music that you cannot
turn off when in the menu system. In the more complex game modes, you spend a
lot of time in the menus. This music makes you want to kill.
2. The cut
scenes with the zombie cheerleaders from hell with bouncy tits.
3.
Customization and save/load interfaces are designed morons with a gift for
non-linear thinking.
4. The ref whistles make you want to tear out
your own eardrums.
If it weren't for #2
and #4, ESPN would be the clear winner for quick games where all you care about
is the better game play.
As it is, I think Madden wins, even though the
gameplay is not as smooth, just because it has no fatal annoyances while pretty
much matching ESPN in all other ways.
Update:
After
playing the games a rather more, I think my comments about the relative gameplay
are actually not right. ESPN does
look better,
but I don't think it plays better. It just takes longer to figure out running in
Madden.
Posted: Sat
- February 28, 2004 at 04:25 PM