Madden 12 for PS2 "Review" -- First Impressions

It's been nearly impossible to learn anything about Madden 12 on the PS2 other than it was going to be released and would cost $49.99. I mean, heck, ps2.ign.com had nothing on it, no preview, nothing. Most 'coverage' you did find was links to current gen console stuff, and the Wii hasn't been getting much press either.

Copy of Madden 12 PS2 in hand, I believe I now know why.

I haven't played Madden on my PS2 since 2005, having switched to the PC until that platform's series ended in 2008. I flirted with the Wii version of Madden 2011 by renting from a now-closed Blockbuster when I couldn't find any reviews of it either. It stunk. It was clearly for young kids, and there was too much emphasis on your maintenance of the goofy cartoon city in franchise mode.

Well, Madden 12 for the PS2 is exactly like Madden 2005 for the PS2. The controls are the same. The plays are the same. The graphics, if the same, strike me as less impressive. If you told me Madden 12 is Madden 2005 with updated rosters, well, I couldn't find a good reason to argue, except that, in 12, there's more shaking. Yes, shaking. The camera shakes more on "big hits" and the controller does its best to rumble me into submission.

If you want to split hairs, some of the "hints via HUD" are different and, now that I think of it, there are no obvious Old Spice Red Zone style advertisements when you get into, well, the red zone. I recall NCAA (and I thought Madden) going full-on with sponsors, and, strangely, it made the game more interesting. There's nothing like that here.

Oh, and 2005 had online gameplay, didn't it? Madden 12 on PS2 doesn't. And 2005 still had an NCAA football game partnered with it that let you import "real" college draft classes. No luck in 12.

So you're not paying $40 for updated gameplay, online matchups, or new features and minigames. It must be for updated rosters, right? Unfortunately, no. I don't care when this "went gold". EA decided that rosters current at the start of the NFL labor lockout were good enough, and the result of that decision stinks. If your users aren't going to be able to update the roster, take your time and get them right.

Exhibit A:

I'm a Redskins fan. I know them inside and out. Madden 12 has Albert Haynesworth, Donovan McNabb, Carlos Rogers, and Ma'ake Kemoeatu on the roster. Kemo, McNabb, and Haynesworth were cut, traded, and traded, respectively, on or near July 28th. Rogers was a free agent, not a Redskins player, after the end of last year, and signed with San Francisco on August 3rd. Ryan Torrain starts at running back for the Skins in Madden 12. Tim Hightower starts for the Redskins today. Hightower was added July 31st. He's not on the Madden 12 Skins roster.

Worse, one of the biggest changes when Mike Shanahan become the Redskins coach in 2010 (so when he appears in Madden 2011) was that the team hired Jim Haslett as their defensive coordinator to swap from the team's 4-3 in 2009 to a 3-4 defensive scheme last season. Madden 11 for the Wii still had the Skins in a 4-3. I thought that was slack enough, what with all the coverage the swap got on ESPN and local media.

It's been over a year now, and The Washington Post won't stop talking about how, this year, Haslett and Shanahan finally have the right personnel to run the 3-4. The two biggest additions to the personnel? Brian Cofield from the Giants and Stephen Bowen from the Cowboys, neither of whom, I don't believe, is on the Madden 12 for PS2 Redskins roster. The default Redskins defensive playbook? Still 4-3. It's like virtual Greg Blache and Vinny Cerrato never left. (That's an inside joke, I'm afraid. Blache was the d-coordinator for the 4-3 until 2009, and Cerrato's the lunkhead manager that brought in Haynesworth.)

Enough of that Exhibit. You get the point. In Madden 12 for PS2, the two biggest off-season stories of 2011 for the Redskins, McNabb and Haynesworth finally being traded, have been ignored. The default defensive scheme of the team? Also ignored, now for over a year. Personnel moves after the end of the NFL's lockout? Yep. Ignored. You essentially get 2010 rosters with a few rookies sprinkled in.

So after a quick look, it appears that the game hasn't noticeably changed from Madden 2005, except that it's lost a major feature in online play. The rosters, the only other obvious reason to buy, are essentially a year old. What are we paying $40 for again? In seven years, the game's gotten worse in several major areas. Unforgivable.

IGN's review of Madden 2005 started with the following: "Madden NFL 2005 is still Madden. That is to say, it's another superb game of football that continues Madden's long legacy as one of the best in the business." Wow, how things change. I know, if I really want to play Madden, I need to finally move to a current console where I'll find constantly updated rosters, online play, and graphics from this century. And the PS2 version is $20 less than those for the PS3 and Xbox 360. But even this knowledge doesn't excuse the cheap cash-grab Madden 12 for the PS2 seems to be.

I'll update once I get a new memory card and run through both the features and franchise mode for a while -- see if there's a poor man's Tony Bruno in there somewhere -- I'll crack out the old disc and compare to 2005, and come to better informed conclusions. But right now, I'm not optimistic.

EDIT: /sigh The disc got scratched in some game room roughhousing, so I haven't been able to update much. Why would you buy Madden 12? I think the bottom line is for the minigames, because it sure isn't the season mode. The fantasy draft into a fantasy league, Speedball style as you win your way from Newbie league up through four or five others, is neat, but a little too gamey. That is, after each win, you get points to add to your players' overall ranking, which quickly turns the game from anything approaching a simulation to, well, Speedball Deluxe. There are apparently completely made up teams with fake, super-hero like players in the later leagues.

It's worth a play or two. Without online or enough attention paid to the current season, though, Madden 12 on PS2 simply isn't what made Madden such a great game on the Genesis through, well, through the PS2. This particular bloodline is obviously headed for extinction. People who want what they've learned to expect as a game of Madden need to finally shell out for a new system.

Labels: madden, ps2

--ruffin at 21:49

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I've been posting about the ASUS XG station on here for a while. It's a [vaporware] device that allows you to hook your supra-1337-phat output port on your laptop to an externally enclosed video card so that you can, among other things, game with a video card limited laptop. I don't know why, but I've always thought giving your laptop unexpected power like this was awesome. I suppose it's because the video card is the item I most often want to upgrade on my tower, and I'd like to pour more of my money into upgrading my CPU by buying new laptops instead. I don't know.

Anyhow, remember when I said that since we have MacBooks with "Thunderbolt" -- Can I get my Asus XG Station now? It's happened.

The notebook itself only contains an Intel HD Graphics 3000 GPU, while the external dock contains an AMD Radeon HD 6650M with 1GB of Video RAM.

Still, my rational brain says you should just throw $700 at an Alienware m11x, game wherever the heck you want, and be done with it. Or, better yet, fork over $150 to upgrade the card in your tower and pocket the change.

Labels: video cards

--ruffin at 15:17

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Meet your individual seeking: DS Phat Shell Replacement Part 1

Note: I hate first-person, payoff-delayed, story-mode columns that appear on gaming sites that are so heavy on the autobiography that you'd think it was Mark Twain doing the writing. Tell me about the game, dang it! But then this is a first-person blog post, so it's okay. More of a first-person, overly extended blog rant. Okay? I don't have anyone around the house that appreciates this sort of thing, so you're stuck with it. Continue.

My initial impression of the Nintendo DS was a poor one, based completely on the irrational opinion that every Game Boy should be backwards compatible with original Game Boy games until the end of time, you know, like Nikon F-mount lenses are with Nikon cameras. The GBA plays everything and had gotten pretty cheap to make; why would the DS have to drop backwards compatibility? I won't stand for it, Mr. Iwata! I can't recall if it was playing Elite Beat Agents and Brain Age on Matt's DS or just hearing him drone on about how awesome the games were that changed my mind. I think it was the former. Either way, Matt's PR campaign worked. I wanted my own DS. The question was finding the best way to buy one.

Matt and I have joked about wanting to start a racket that involves us offering folks in line money for systems that they're about to trade in at Gamestop for us to later sell ourselves. There's such a blamed large gap between what Gamestop pays you and what they're going to charge the guy behind you in line who buys your old stuff that they should all but be labeled predatory lenders. Right now, you can pay $70 for a "refurbished" DS Phat, $80 for a "refurb" DS Lite OR for a "recharged refurbished" DS Phat, $90 for a "recharged refurbished" DS Lite, or $100 for a new DS Lite, pick you color. A DSi is $120 used (unrefurbished), and $150 new. I'm sure the folks who traded those in got at least $20-30.

So sure, thirty bucks off of the new price is nice, but if I'm only shelling out $20 less than new if I want a new battery or $10 less if I want a new battery and a system that's not older than the kid I'm buying the DS for, I'm not sure that's a deal. I don't recall the prices in 2005 or 2006 when I was buying, but they were similarly predatory. I'm a cheapskate and didn't feel like paying the Gamestop price. And there's nobody who goes to greater lengths to save a buck when it comes to electronics. Though it often leaves me penny-wise and pound-foolish, I was going to be creative, again.

In this case, being miserly had me hitting eBay, where I found that DSes with cracked hinges were pretty cheap, relatively speaking. I bought a heavily used DS with a cracked hinge and an awesome threaded "9" sticker on it, though I didn't find out about that last aesthetic benefit until after the system arrived. Nor did it have a stylus, which I borrowed from my Palm 3. The DS didn't even have a charger, but used USB DS chargers were about $5. The DS was still insanely expensive for what I was getting, but the hinge-cracked DS with Palm stylus and USB charger was by far the cheapest way in the door to playing DS games. It was fun. Matt lent us EBA and I picked up a few more games. The hinge, however, kept me worried.

Look, the DS Phat hinge system stinks. It's essentially a set of three quarter-inch wide plastic loops that hold the top screen and speakers to the rest of the unit. That sort of connection is fine if we're putting together a scale model Oldsmobile or B-25 bomber that'll sit on a shelf for 40 years. It's not so good if 12 year-olds are supposed to own it and take it with them in the car, in their backpack, and on the playground

Once a hinge goes, you're immediately pretty obviously in trouble. I could play DS games, but the screen would slide out a good half-inch or more if I wasn't careful, threatening to pull the screen off. Nor would it really hold the top up easily, and only really worked completely open. Games that required putting the DS on its side, like Brain Age, were right out. Put sidewise, the screen pulled itself down enough to make me really nervous. So "Number 9" didn't see much play for years. My family would add two DS Lites and my 9 would mostly sit in the drawer, used for an occasional game of EBA or Pac Pix. I'm guessing the folks that eBayed it were happy to get my kaishe.

This past Christmas, used DS Phats were down to some insanely low price, I vaguely recall (I can't seem to Google or Archive.org that price back up), assumedly to push old inventory and sell some new games. I nearly picked one up. I really wish I could convince someone interested in retail sales numbers to also track prices of used systems, but I just don't know who to ask. I'd swear they were below $60, maybe even $40 or less, but I don't recall. In any event, I didn't bite. I already had a DS, right?

Well, to make a long story longer, this month, I again performed my bimonthly "Nintendo hinge repair" search, and again ended up with The Nintendo Repair Shop, Inc., out of Raleigh, NC, as the best option for parts. It takes about three or four random searches landing on the same spot before I'll actually pull the trigger on anything this wacky, and I'd finally become familiar enough with this site to be brave. It's a good-looking site. Here, "good looking" means that it's content rich and recently updated. It's also domestic, which makes me feel a little better about getting what I order.

Full repair runs a steep $55 plus shipping to their office, but they claim to cover almost anything at that price. That's too expensive for me for a DS that technically works, but they also have replacement DS Phat shells for $9.87, which seems pretty fairly priced. More importantly, they have a 27-minute how-to YouTube video on the page showing how to fix hinges in slow, careful steps. They even make the video in one single take, pulling Martha Stewart's "here's one we already pulled out of the oven," trick just once. This isn't a video made to sell shells so that you'll tear your DS down and later have to send it in anyway. This is a video displaying a realistic repair.

Unfortunately, they are replacing a DS whose bottom two woefully inadequate hinge loops are broken, not the top's like mine, but the video is exceptionally well done. I'm in. They jab me by adding a triwing (triforce?) screwdriver for $5.76 (?!!), but it's a very reasonable $3.24 for shipping, and we're up to $18.87 total. If I pretend I'll successfully fix the danged thing and that my time is free (apparently it is; I'm compulsively writing TWO blog posts about this), that's not a bad deal at all.

My fine Ninetudo DS [sic] shell came in last week, bright red so that I can't misplace the thing nearly so easily as I tend to do in silver. It was my plan (hello, foreshadowing) just to replace the top half of the shell with the broken hinge and then reattach to the silver original bottom. I really don't care how it looks, just that it works. I've been brave enough to upgrade an old iBook G4's hard drive, build a few Windows towers from scratch, and even make pretty serious repairs to my Jeep. A DS shell should be child's play, right?


To be honest, it was the FAQ at the Nintendo Repair Shop that finally goaded me into purchasing with its claim that, "And finally, be patient! We had one careful young mom do a DS Lite hinge repair in a little over an hour." Oh, it's ON NOW. It's time to meet my individual seeking (see #3, above).

(My DS is done, btw. I mean, that's almost obvious, right? Any serious ordeal demands blog-ige. I'll update with whether it's "done for" or "done fixed" in a second rambling, painful blog post later, penciled in for sometime in 2014.)

Labels: ds, gamestop, gba, hardware, repair, used

--ruffin at 13:43

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From Apple's propaganda page about "Thunderbolt":

Performance and expansion never seen on a notebook before.
With 10 Gbps of throughput in both directions, Thunderbolt I/O technology lets you move data to and from peripherals up to 20 times faster than with USB 2.0 and more than 12 times faster than with FireWire 800. Two 10-Gbps channels on the same connector mean you can daisy-chain multiple high-speed devices and a display, without using a hub — and without reducing performance.

So, I can finally stop waiting on the Asus XG Station now? If this isn't enough throughput, I don't know when we're going to get it.

Ah, forget it. I should just shaddup and get an Alienware m11x already.

--ruffin at 09:14

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Merry Xmas to me: How I learned to hate Steam

When Steam come out for the Mac and brought with it Team Fortress 2, I was excited. Getting Portal (and some TF2 earbuds) for free made for a nice bonus. Figuring out that I've got a gaming store in my office (along the lines of the music store Apple put in my pocket) has me more worried.

It really is a heroin situation. The first hit (Portal) sure enough was free. The micropayments for games on sale drives me crazy. That I came out of a game of MLB 2k10 and saw a bulletin board filling the middle of my monitor full of games I'd like to buy for 50% off (see above picture), all only a few clicks away, is unsettlingly effective. It's a continual vortex. Play game you bought for $2, enjoy, quit, see six more games that you're only a micropayment away from, and buy two more. Wash, rinse, repeat. It's Herculean labor.


Perhaps a better parallel would be World of Warcraft's quests with their perfectly timely partial reinforcement. (Which reminds me, I need to go click my cow.) It's not that I've spent hundreds, but I've purchased more PC (Win and Mac) games in the last year than probably the two previous combined. Again, not that much cash. Significant, and some was unavoidable, like Civ IV, but the lack of barriers to entry into the games marketplace scares me.

I'm also a little concerned about the shift in my gaming dollars away from the local Play N Trade, which has used games from the 2600 [sic] on up, to Steam, which ain't hurting, I don't think. And I think some of these games must be played online -- AC2 said as much in the description, requiring a "permanent" internet connection.

Here, I'll come clean. You can see that I need to stop the Xmas bleeding before it becomes significant. The first three games I wanted. The next three, not so much. AC2 was on the "to get" list, but not this quickly.

23-Dec	Assassin's Creed II	14.99 USD
21-Dec	Prince of Persia: Sands of Time	2.49 USD
21-Dec	Lara Croft GOL	5.10 USD
1-Nov	MLB 2k10	1.99 USD
3-Sep	Braid	9.99 USD
4-Jul	Sid Meier's Civilization IV: The Complete Edition	9.99 USD
27-May	The Orange Box	20.99 USD

Note also that Mass Effect 1 and 2 are on sale now, one minute after I bought Assassin's Creed 2, for 50% off. See what I mean? Collect X of Y and then see me for more XP and faction rewards.

It's like the iTunes Music Store, but even more WoW questy. And I don't see Genius recommendations taking up my entire field of view after using my iPod. Steam encourages you to "rent" games. It makes me wonder how much serving these bytes is costing them.

And none of this would be a big deal if I didn't already have...

• D
  
• Driver
  
• Doom 3
  
• GTA: SA (two missions away)
  
• GTA IV
  
• GTA 3 (one mission, but I can't finish it for the life of, well, Tony)
• Metal Gear Solid 3
  
• The Temple of Elemental Evil
  
• Railroad Tycoon 2
  
• BloodRayne (finished 2 on PS2, but not 1 on Mac)
  
• Halo
  
• Tomb Raider Chronicles
  
• Sin
  
• Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy
  
• The Fallen: DS9

... and plenty of others I can't recall off of the top of my head sitting around waiting for me to finish them.

You feel my pain.

Labels: adverts, online distribution, steam

--ruffin at 13:07

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Two knock-down, drag-out FreeCiv replay maps

Ah, there was never anything quite as rewarding as watching a Civ reply map after you'd won. Just ran into these two, the second from The Huffington Post.



There used to be a YouTube video here:
http://www.youtube.com/v/DrZvn1qckIs?fs=1&hl=en_US
But it looks like it's become another example of overzealous copyright protection. The vid is, indeed, down.

Here's a link to the video on their site.

And here's a very hastily constructed picture to tide you over....

Labels: Civilization

--ruffin at 15:32

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From Jonathan Blow's blog for his next project, The Witness:

For all three days of PAX 2010, The Witness was publicly playable by anyone who came by the booth. However, it was unmarked and unattended, so it was easy to miss (as many people did).
...
I had several reasons for wanting to show the game this way. Firstly: At a show full of companies trying to capture your attention and sell you things, I wanted to do something that is subtle, and a surprise — if you notice it, and decide to investigate, you find something unexpected.

This weekend, I played and finished Braid, Blow's exceptionally impressive platformer of a few years back. It was the first game that forced me to finish it since, well, ignoring something in the Civ series, since, if I remember correctly, Metal Gear Solid. That it only took about seven hours to finish didn't hurt...



What I find myself wondering, though, after reading of a "stunt" like the one he describes, above, (stunt if only in its being unconventional, though combining it with a blog post questions the unconventionality a bit), is if gaming is so large now that there's simply a market for thoughtfully designed games. That is, is Blow creating the new, I don't know, "free-range video game," with all the cachet that implies?

I think Braid hit the nail squarely on the head. It was thoughtful, buoyed by an engaging, if not particularly deep plot (at least in a conventional sense of narrative; more poetic than having great narrative depth), and, dang it, the puzzles were just challenging enough to be fun without being anything close to impossible. I also wonder what sort of mind is needed to make the puzzles as easy as they were -- excepting. admittedly, the stars; I only had the vaguest notion of their existence on two of the levels that contained them. That is, would your typical 12 year-old SMB player have done as well as I did? Better? Or does the ability to play with time qua logic in these puzzles work in part b/c of Blow's [and my] programmatic mind, training, and skills? That is, I worked as a database admin for years and still program on the side while I'm teaching a 400-level course on games. Why wouldn't I like Blow's games? Something similar must go for those who review games. Blow's made a game that appeals to the finer sensibilities found within that/my subset of gamers.

Take, for instance, the number of people who say not to use online FAQs and cheats when playing Braid. If anything, Braid is not tougher than your average game. It's much, much easier. It's played by those who normally DO depend on walk-throughs and hints. As a friend of mine said in high school after cheating on a chemistry test, "I didn't cheat on the whole test. I took it first, and only cheated on the ones I missed." I wonder if that's usually enough for most gamers; we only cheat on those puzzles we can't quickly solve. Braid was special because we could solve it (in part because we, as a community, parroting Blow on his site, told each other we could), we knew we were watching something thoughtful and different [and like us?] as we did so, and we ultimately didn't want to ruin its relatively quaint intentions. A wine to savor rather than two liters of Coke to blast through. [Or, less appropriately, a keg to keg stand and funnel through.]



Ultimately, I'm not sure if Blow has created the equivalent of video gaming literature that stands out of the pulp, or if his "movement" with Braid and now The Witness is something that captures our shared moment better than the sea of alternatives. In fact, I'm still tempted to give Rockstar's and Hideo Kojima's games the leg up as true masterpieces of the medium. Blow seems to have done a better job building the sorts of games Ian Bogost would like to believe he's been building, ones that force a few of us to take a new look at our decisions and society, but, even with the attention Braid's gotten, I still wonder if its press isn't because it's, perhaps unwittingly, still doing no more than shooting for a very specialized sub-market.

Another, "I'm thinking while I type" post, brought to you by...

Labels: adverts, Braid, conversations, design, developers, ethics, indie, injustice

--ruffin at 16:00

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THQ: Buying Used Games Is "Cheating":

THQ's Cory Ledesma has delivered a blunt message to consumers buying used copies of his company's games: they're cheating the publisher out of money.

When THQ (and EA, etc) make an end run around first sale doctrine, disallowing their customers to sell used games feature-complete, THQ is cheating the customer out of value.

It would probably be worth rereading "Jeff Bezos' open letter on used book sales" from 2002, where he responds to the Authors' Guild suit against Amazon's practice of selling used books on the same page as the new ones.

And let's also add that the folks who published the used games and books are the same companies that published the originals. Publishers are competing against themselves. If they don't want to compete against used games, make fewer prints of the original. And make games good enough over a long period of time that gamers don't want to sell them!

Now admittedly, there are all sorts of ways that the game/printed book analogy is already well past its prime, as I've written about a bit under the trope of the virtual rare book room. Steam, the Wii store, and (ironically) even the Kindle have all killed the concept of game/book-as-encapsulated-commodity, and all shift power and value from consumer to producer just as THQ is doing here.

As Matt's pointed out about the Wii virtual store, "If our Wii dies, I'll have to buy it all over again or hassle customer support to move our games over in some way." Steam's not as bad in a sense, and I can always lend my Kindle library to someone else just by loaning them my Kindle (in some ways more useful than loaning a single book), but the point is clear. Commodities have changed in ways that the producer has designed to increase their hold on copyright.

Embarrassingly, I've purchased at least twice from each of those three outlets. At least Matt has started voting with dollars. "Until there is some sort of portability for these purchases -- at least to the same hardware or new Nintendo systems -- we're not buying anything else in Nintendo's virtual storefront." I'm still trading my rights for convenience. Well, starting now, I'll never buy another THQ wrestling game new! I wish the other compromises were as easily avoided.

Labels: copyright, drm, online distribution, used, virtual console, wii

--ruffin at 10:00

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No Wii Madden 11 Reviews?

Why can't I find a review of Madden 11 for the Wii? And, on the other hand, why can I find a review for HoopWorld, whatever that is, with nearly top billing when I check out Wii at IGN?

(Nothing at their PS2 site on Madden either. What gives?)

Labels: madden, wii

--ruffin at 12:52

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Sweet Game Propaganda Calendar

Get one here. Seen on GameSetWatch.

--jvm at 19:54

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