I first encountered the Madden series on the Sega Genesis way back in the day. I never had to buy into the series back then because my sister's boyfriend did, sparing me the expense. The PS1 and PS2 eras were all about modding (one of the reasons, I contend, that those systems achieved their popularity, defeating Nintendo). There were very few games that I did purchase and Madden wasn't among them. Nowadays, consoles seem much more difficult to crack and I'm too lazy to bother anyway.
I'm also impulsive, and when I saw a copy of Madden '09 for a slightly reduced price at Costco, I grabbed it, tossed it in my shopping cart, and hated myself almost instantly for doing so. I hated myself for buying into the EA Sports treadmill, which amounts to a $60/year subscription to games that never evolve. Every year, EA adds features and removes features. They fix one problem and create a new one to take its place.
I've since dumped a few hours into Madden '09 and I think I'm hating myself a little less for buying it. Here's a list of impressions: The graphics are too crisp. The environments feel artificial. The crowd is still a bunch of 2D-looking sprites painted onto a slope, gyrating in simple animation cycles. There are displeasing stutters in player animations during cut-scenes, though the game's frame rate seems solid during actual play. The audio commentary is average fare. The menu music is awful. Load times are frustratingly long. Gameplay is largely unchanged from the beginning of the series, except that this time around I find it incredibly difficult to establish a decent running game.
Hmm. That sounds like a big ol' mess of negativity. So why do I hate myself a little less? Despite rubbing me wrong in many ways, Madden '09 somehow adds up to an entertaining game. I have fun playing it to some degree. The online play seems to work pretty well. I didn't experience any major lag, at any rate. There are some interesting online features. You can manage a fantasy football team from within the game (though your initial fantasy draft must take place via the web). You can receive sports news in both text and video formats (the latter worked well until day one of the regular season, when all of the video content seemed to have disappeared except for one clip that crashed my PS3 when I tried to play it). I have settled into playing Superstar mode almost exclusively, which allows me to play a quarterback I created and to sim my way through moments when he isn't on the field. This is good because playing defense is still a terribly boring exercise.
End result: If you like football, this is a decent iteration in the annually revised but never evolving Madden series. You might hate yourself a little for buying it, but I doubt you'll immediately send it to the used bin. If you aren't much of a football fan but still have a passing interest in checking out the latest release, definitely go the rental route here. EA has failed to offer anything out of the ordinary that deserves to pick up new fans.
