Maddening 2009

Madden NFL 2009. I bought it. For the first time in my life I gave EA cash for a football game. Why? How did this happen to me? And how do I feel about it now, one week into ownership?

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.

Segue.

In other news, I still don't own a PS3. Or an X-Box 360.
I recently came upon a modest windfall of cash that was earmarked for a console purchase...but I can't decide which way to go.

X-Box 360: Great, full library of games; brilliant on-line interface; cheaper hardware; more used games available cheap due to the amount of time it's been on the market (a big plus for me); backwards compatibility to X-Box games. Downsides of course are the notorious and still very real Red Ring of Death and Microsoft's sad customer service response, and a lack of support for a viable high-definition DVD medium.

PS3: Blu-ray support and a whole lot of potential which has yet to be tapped. Downsides are the very limited library of games, the higher cost of...everything, and the fact that so many of the games thus far are bad ports of the PS3 versions.

I have loved - and burned out - one each of the original PS and the PS2, and while I have an X-Box I've spent more time with the Sony product(s). As great as the X-Box 360 is - and it really is great (or...would be if not for the RRoD) - it's much closer to the end of its lifecycle, and the full capabilities of the PS3 have barely been scraped.

My pragmatic side says to get the 360 and a stack of second-hand games.

My remaining techie/gamer genes say to find a good deal on a PS3 (as though they go on sale).

What to do...

Music Games and Their Anemic Libraries

Here's the problem with Singstar (and Rock Band, for that matter): Their music libraries are too small. Music games need variety or they die on the vine.

Where is our iTunes-sized library for Singstar? Rock Band? Open the flood gates already.

Gran Turismo 5 Prologue Alive!

I've logged a few hours on GT5P and here are some initial thoughts.

This new Gran Turismo is everything you'd expect and not much more. You've played this game before, only now it looks prettier. On one hand, there is a certain comfort in the familiar. On the other, you can't help but want for something fresh.

The online play is technically functional but not very fun because in on-line gaming, as in real life, idiots abound, and while you're driving your perfect lap, passing others in a legitimate, skillful way, some ass-hat will inevitably hit you from behind and send you careening into last place. Frustration at its finest.

GTTV is in its infancy, but internet video is not. YouTube, Vimeo and several other companies have been streaming video for years, but GTTV forces you to download each video in its entirety, and on my 1.5kbps DSL connection that translated to over an hour of download time to watch an 11 minute piece. Not good. GTTV is a promising idea and I hope it evolves to include some of the rudimentary features we've come to expect from modern video delivery systems.

Graphics. Yes the game looks great, but not as great as I had hoped. There are problems with anti-aliasing here and there, especially with shadows falling across your car, and strange blurry zones can be seen around vehicles in certain camera angles. The major success graphically in GT5P is the in-car dashboard camera. It's the best of its kind that I've ever seen, going all the way back to the first Test Drive on the c64. I only wish I had a way to pan smoothly around the interior during a race.

The track selection is lackluster at best. Eiger Nordwand was lifted straight from the earlier (and free) Gran Turismo HD demo. All of the other tracks are old standards, except for one: The London course. Each of these tracks look great and offer different challenges, but for $40 I was hoping to see something new.

Speaking of that $40, the pricing feels a little high for what amounts to a well-developed demo. The downloadable, especially, should be $29.99 maximum. It just isn't full-featured enough to warrant a price-tag on par with, say, Warhawk.

End result: Buy it knowing you'll be playing Gran Turismo 4 in HD. There is nothing new here.

Blu-Ray Gets Blew Away

Here's some shocking news - if my partner-in-blog hadn't recently left this Earth (R.I.P., homecheese) I'm sure he would have had something to say about it.

Sony announced on Monday that they'd be releasing a new PS3 in August. It's not the fabled U.S. release of the ceramic white console, and it's not the rumored 120 GB model...it's a Blu-Ray free model that they'll be selling for $150.

$150.

That's friggin' brilliant - seriously. That's just over half the price of the current low-cost leader, the Wii and will undoubtedly open up a new market for Sony: poor people with great internet access. I kid! I'm poor too. No PS3 under my tree...

Understand that this means the new console has no optical drive to speak of...yeah, it took me a minute too. PS3 games come on Blu-Ray discs. How do you get software? The miracle of the interwebs, brother: you download...everything. Sony sells you games with the bulky video clips excised, and you have the option to either download the video components later, or simply stream them if you've got a fast enough internet connection. In Sony's press release, they cite "Gran Turismo 5: Prologue" as an example: 6 GB on Blu-Ray disc...2 GB download. That's a hefty download, but Sony is claiming 1 MB/sec. (DSL-ish - more likely) to 30 MB/sec. (FIOS-ish - less likely) download speeds; even at the low end of that range, you'd be able to pull down "Gran Turismo 5: Prologue" in around 35 minutes. Not insignificant, but that's less time than it would take you to go to the store and buy it - and you do it all from the comfort of your own home.

Perhaps best of all, the console is allegedly (per Sony) the same in every other way: 80 GB hard drive, the usual compliment of card readers and ports.

Granted, to a degree this will be a niche product; not everyone in the country even has DSL as an option yet, let alone anything faster...but for folks in metropolitan areas who do have reliable, high-speed internet access, this is a no-brainer.

The funny prologue to this story will write itself over the next few months as the August 12 release date edges closer: how will Microsoft fumble their response? Sony claims they'll be keeping records of everything you buy so that if something happens to your console, your content can be easily restored. As we've mentioned, an informal poll of Xbox 360 users over at cheapassgamer.com showed that over 1/3 of users have seen their console fail - and Microsoft as of yet has absolutely no idea how to restore your purchased, downloaded content if your console is replaced. A proper riposte on their part means not only the hardware but also doing some serious retooling of Xbox LIVE (and their notoriously ineffective customer service team) so that they can A) log your purchases and B) restore said purchases when your 360 (inevitably?) fails. Not only that - they're using a standard dual-layer DVD -drive...they backed HD-DVD, but that was only available via an add-on peripheral. What can they possibly eliminate, hardware-wise, to be competitive with Sony, and how can they do it without alienating their installed user base? You can't eliminate a DVD-drive that probably costs them on the order of $30 and then drop the price of your "low-end" console (Xbox 360 Arcade: $279.99) by $130 to make it competitive with the new PS3...everyone who shelled out for the $279.99 version will say, "How in the hell can you justify charging me so much more for so very little?" - then they will slash your tires.