A Review of Madden 11

From the illustrious video game critic, Yahoo!, here's this.

Madden NFL 11, however, has decided to hurl a Hail Mary by tweaking the way plays are called, a feature that has remained fairly consistent for roughly two decades’ worth of gridiron greatness.

I know of four ways in which plays can be called in video game football:

1) The Madden way. You scroll through your packages, augmenting the formations; then you scroll through plays within the formation, three at a time. This really has been the way it's worked since the beginning, and I imagine Madden has some kind of copyright on it, otherwise we'd have seen it elsewhere.

2) The play-type way. Instead of a formation, you select what kind of play you want (run, pass, deep pass, PA, etc.), then you select a play out of there. This was what Nintendo games used before Madden, and it's actually available as a feature of easy play in Madden. NFL Street and Blitz use it. I hate it.

3) The 2K way. In NFL 2K3, play calling involved looking at about six different formation names at once, all of them more or less within the same package. To switch packages, you scrolled to the next screen. Once you picked a formation, you assigned your linemen to a specific pattern, then you picked your play. This was kind of cool, and actually pretty close to how teams call plays in real life (the coach sends in the personnel, the center or MLB give the linemen their assignments, and the QB or MLB tells everyone else the play). It required the user to know formations by nickname, as opposed to modifying a package's shape until reaching the desired formation, and that kind of sucked. But on the whole, it was a decent alternative to Madden.

4) The Ask Madden way. Sometimes you can just press a button and the game will select a play for you. Don't do this. This isn't how video games work.

Anyway. Back to the review.

IGN jumps right in and gets its hands dirty with Madden 11's biggest new feature: Gameflow, a one-button playcalling system that automatically chooses the best play for your given situation, turning marathon Madden games into much quicker experiences.

Well that misses the point of why we play video games. We play video games to play them, not to get them over with faster.

Maybe this is just the difference between people like me who look to Madden for quality simulation, and people who are online gamers, playing for arcade value. I don't know, I suppose Madden has become its own sport, separate from football. But what a silly sport indeed, if it's doing away with the creativity of play calling.

"If you're someone who's new to Madden or if the complexities of figuring out formation types was too much for you in the past, you're going to enjoy the bulk of what GameFlow does for you," says reviewer Nate Ahearn, though he points out that the artificial intelligence "makes some bone-headed play calls that...will likely be lamented by hardcore veterans of the series." Still, the game's got enough oomph to warrant a solid 8/10.

If you're someone who's new to Madden, why not just set it to easy mode or Ask Madden? Why dumb down the default?

Maybe I'm making too big of an assumption that there aren't awesome playcalling complexities available somewhere in the game. Perhaps there are. I sure hope so, because that's where this franchise should be going. These games are bulky enough to handle various modes of playcalling, I imagine, and that's what they should do. I should be able to log into my game on a Belichick level, and be presented not only with a complex playbook, but the need to gameplan and modify my playbook accordingly. There are some of us who want to waste our time pretending to be Dick LeBeau, not Ike Taylor.

That's my review of a game I've never played.

Yahoo! thinks you should buy it. I agree, because that still doesn't cost me anything, and someday, I'll be back in Pittsburgh to play it for you.

Buy Madden 11!