Satisfying EA Purists Like Me: Madden 2005

There are things and people that certain people love to hate. Some people hate the Yankees (like yours truly). Some people hate the infamous genre of music known as emo (again, like me). And when you delve into videogames, the massive company known as Electronic Arts (better known as EA), is getting more and more haters.
And yet, I’m not one of them. Me, I still love EA’s sports titles and a few of their adventure and shooter games. Yes, they’ve virtually eliminated the competition in the NFL market by buying the license, but as long as they make good use of it, I don’t really care.
But I’m talking about a game that was made BEFORE they bought that license: Madden 2005. And I still play it. And I still like it.

Gameplay: Off the Field
As you might have guessed, this is a football game. Football is the great American game where the object is to score more points than the other guy by running the ball into the end zone or kicking it between the goalposts. But if you’re reading this review, you probably already knew that.

This game has your standard set of modes: Play Now to play now, Franchise to run a team, Online, which I don’t have, and several others. But Franchise is the meat of it.

Basically, you pick a team (real or created, more on that later) and you decide either to play Owner Mode or not. If not, you have the option to create a coach, although it doesn’t do much for the game. If you do, you have to try to make a profit along with the task of getting the Super Bowl. You do that by controlling the prices of tickets, food, merchandise, parking, advertising, all that stuff. If you need a big boost, you can hold a Fan Appreciation Day once per season and give away stuff, attracting larger crowds. Of course, the chief seller is victories. If your team is good for 11 wins and a playoff berth about every year, the dollars will flow in steadily. Start losing, though, and you’ll be in serious financial trouble. If it gets too bad, you could be forced to move or rename your team, although this hasn’t happened to me yet. It did happen to my friend, though, after he won the Super Bowl. Odd.

Whatever mode you pick, you have to perform the typical duties of the businessmen in sports. There is a Free Agents pool (whose member’s contracts can easily be manipulated into cheapness), an annual draft (so far, decent at producing talent in the first round, but few other players are even getting PT for me), and trades, of course. But the trades can get pretty annoying. There’s a meter onscreen that tells you how interested the other team is in the trade. See, if you start demanding too much for too little, the team will lose interest. That would be fine if it wasn’t virtually impossible to win on a trade. You almost always have to lose something to get a quality player, even if the other team badly needs, say, a running back, and you’re offering one only slightly lower-rated than the player you want. Draft picks, on the other hand, are easy pickings: ask for a 1st-rounder for a 90 -rated player, and bingo, you got it. Teams are much stricter in reality with these things. Look at how little the Bills got for trading Travis Henry, an excellent back. Oh well, you can get around it with enough tries.

Now, you have to also keep your players happy by giving them the right contract and playing time. MVP candidates always want a lot of money and PT, while third stringers usually want a ton less. However, if your 99-rated QB gets benched for too long, as it happened to me, he’ll get unhappier and unhappier, eventually till he gets to the point where he promises to leave. (Good riddance to Matt Hasselbeck. He was really starting to reek.) On the other side, you have the option of naming a deserving player team captain, but I don’t think it adds much to the game.

Also new this year was the Storyline Central feature. This contained three things: Email, Newspaper, and Tony Bruno’s radio show. The first one is kinda handy on how your team is running, especially during progression weeks (the weeks where players’ stats can improve or decline). The second is pretty fun, but lame and repetitive at times. And the third is utterly pointless. Tony just does nothing except interview certain players and ask trivia questions amidst clips from the game’s soundtrack. Trust me; just leave the music on and Tony off. You’ll thank me later.

Other than that, there are several other parts of Franchise: you can hold Practices, review your gameplan and the other team’s, and you can check stats and rankings, like how many Pro Bowl votes your super running back has. Now the other modes….

There are several “Create-A…” modes. There’s my personal favorite, Create-A-Team, where you make everything from the name to the jersey to the stadium. And you can kick out another team to use the created team in Franchise mode. (Finally, Dallas gets theirs!) There’s Create-A-Player, which is also very detailed, but the only way to use them in Franchise is to create them before the Franchise starts, put him on Free Agents, and draft him in a Fantasy Draft (or sign him if Fantasy Draft is off). It shouldn’t be that hard, especially since I spend about 80% of my time on that game in my Franchise. Create-A-Fan is a feature I haven’t yet explored, but I’ve heard it’s pretty pointless. Create-A-Playbook is fun, however. You can have a maximum of 81 plays: created, borrowed from the playbooks from the game, or a mix of both. I like how complex it goes in some points (like receiver routes and blocking schemes), but there are several flaws: no play-actions, halfback passes, or reverses allowed. Pity. Finally, there’s the aforementioned Create-A-Coach, but that’s nullified if you want Owner Mode on, which I recommend.

As far as connecting to other games, you can import draft classes from EA’s college football title, the name of which has slipped my mind. And I said, I don’t have online play. There is also Collector’s Edition of the game, which I also don’t have. Overall, the game is solid in off-the-field gameplay, with only minor flaws.

Gameplay: On the Field
No matter how good the modes are, what really matters is the game itself. Personally, I think Madden is stronger here than the other department. Here’s the breakdown:

On offense, the Playmaker Control introduced in Madden 04 has been expanded. What the control does is allow you to control receiver’s routes and tell your blockers to block somewhere else to open a hole. While I’m usually too busy hitting other buttons to use the latter, I constantly use the former, before and during the play. Yes, during. That completely changes the passing game. This hasn’t happened to me, but just picture it: You’ve got TO running a screen and the other team is blitzing the house. You snap the ball and you see yards of open field in front of TO, but like a good boy, he’s running his route. Flick the right stick, chuck it to Terrell, and watch the yardage roll. Yeah. Awesome. Also, if you want to change the receiver’s route before the play without revealing it to your friend, just flick the right analog stick and there you have it.

Other than that, though, there’s not much new on offense. The passing system is just the basic “each receiver has a button over his head, press that button, hit that receiver” system that still gets me plenty of picks due to my annoying focus on my primary receiver. (I wonder how bad I’d do in Madden 06 with the QB Vision…) Running also isn’t too new; just the standard mix of sprints, stiff arms, and jukes and the spin, the use of which I still haven’t found. It works, though.

Now, defense…that’s a whole new ballgame. The Playmaker Control was available for last year’s game, but now it’s more complex. Finally, you can change individual player’s duties without changing the whole play. You can double-team players with just a few presses. Need an extra guy in coverage? Get your blitzing linebacker to play a QB spy, or just the opposite, depending on your situations. You can even change the direction of blitzes to go to the outside or inside, or left or right. Awesome. My nitpicks: you can’t get two cornerbacks to double-team, only safeties. And you also can’t linebackers to play deep…well, that makes sense, but still, you can’t even get them to play their version of deep zones. Still, it’s very clever and adds more depth to the game. But when you get to the higher difficulties (All-Pro and All-Madden, but I’m currently still in the former; the other two modes are Rookie and Pro), you better be right, or someone’s going to be making reservations for six at the house at the corner of End and Zone. (Man, that’s fun to say!).

However, the game’s most famous addition was the Hit Stick. Basically, this allows you to hit substantially harder with a quick right stick tap (and I mean quick; I have a theory that the longer you hold it, the weaker the hit). Supposedly, that’s supposed to increase fumble forcing, but it hasn’t for me. It’s still fun to use, though. Very fun. Especially on quarterbacks.

Graphics
Visually, this game is pretty solid. The player details are colorful, crisp, and accurate and they move fluidly. I love the little details the game gets right: if you’re playing from, say, 4:00 to 7:00, the game will shift into dusk at a certain point; kudos to EA for that. What isn’t worthy of kudos is how penalties are called. You get a facemask penalty, but the replay shows you never hit him. In the same game, the other team can obviously grab the mask and there’ll be no call. Very annoying.

One feature definitely worth noting: let’s say you’re down by one and you’re on the other team’s twenty with only a few seconds left. You send in the kicker to get the field goal. But when you kick him, you don’t have the game’s standard camera. You’re looking up from the turf, like a ground camera. The kicker’s heartbeat rumbles in your controller. And it becomes harder to kick (or is that just me…never mind). When you finally get it off, the football goes in s l o w m o t i o n until it finally goes between the uprights or off to the side. That was a brilliant move by EA and I hope it’s in 06.

Sound
The game’s music is all licensed, but it isn’t as strong as the previous year’s. This year is a mix of punk, hardcore, and rap, like 04, but that game had better rap and punk tunes. This version’s punk and rap tunes are mostly horrific. In punk, there’s the utterly atrocious Green Day hit “American Idiot”, and every rap song is average or below. And putting The Hives in was an awful idea. But still, the hard rock tunes are great, particularly Strata’s “Piece by Piece” and Chevelle’s “The Clincher”. All told, the music still beats Tony Bruno’s pointless radio show.

On the field, the sound effects are well-done and sound realistic enough, although sometimes you’ll be hit with an excessive barrage of shouts from the defense for no reason whatsoever. And the commentary gets old really fast. As my friend put it, John Madden may be a great announcer, but he’s awful in the game. And his counterpart Al Michaels is no better, especially when they call the ball spot wrong. But I keep it on, just for realism and habit’s sake.

All told, I found Madden 2005 to be a great game that you get addicted to quickly, especially when all the controls become familiar. While there are flaws present, there is enough to make this a solid game. Definitely a worthy buy, especially with 06 coming out, so it’ll probably be cheaper and more accessible.

Final Rating: 89% (B+)