I get mixed feelings every time I play Madden, when you turn it on for the first time you'll be greeted by players, fans or cheerleaders stating that "EA Sports is in the game". Then you'll be presented with a lame picture of McNabb and some boring music will start playing on the background, 10 seconds later you are finally given control and click to pass to the next screen. Then comes the interface... First of all it's pretty obvious the interface is strictly for consoles, I can't believe they (still)won't let me use the keyboard to navigate through the menus. I'm sure the mass market is on consoles and PC is just a port to squeeze a few more dollars but when you make a port you can make navigation easier using the advantages of the PC.
The first thing you'll notice is a new mode called superstar. It sounds quite cool, you have already made your glorious franchise in Madden 05, now try becoming a superstar in Madden 06. The idea is quite alluring: You get to choose a set of parents, each one will give you some abilities to develop in the game. If your father is a HOF QB you are very suited for this, if your mother is a nuclear scientist you are quite smart, easy as that. Then you'll get to the preseason and the frustration will slowly start to mount. You have to choose your schedule to navigate through the days, the only thing you can do for now is go to the draft where you will be taken by some team (they ask you in an interview which team would you like, but that's perfectly irrelevant) and then you begin training camp. I understand now why T.O. is maknig so much fuss of training camp, it's utterly boring! You have to choose a play, execute and repeat... For about 10 times... Daily. This is so repetitive and so incredibly boring that you'll end up jumping training camp to go directly to the season and you'll find you have to train, to train you have to choose a play, execute it and repeat, but there's another twist, this time around you also have to prepare for the game, you can do that by executing a play the computer chose. I guess somebody in EA Sports didn't understand that computers allowed men NOT to repeat tedious chores and they wanted to test how far will our patience hold.
The game is quite good. If you want to know exactly how it plays, go read some Madden 05 review and then come back and read "besides, there's a vision cone for the QB you'll end up turning off because it's incredibly hard to handle on the PC".
After finishing a game you'll get to train and plan some more. Then you'll plan and train. Finally you'll be able to play another game. By this time you've trained so much that you finally got the hang of it and you will obliterate the computer by 30 points and your superstar will be player of the game and you will be quite proud. Until the game ends and you realize you never come back to the interface. That's because you can't play two straight games without the game freezing. I don't know if it's just my computer (I seriously doubt it: AMD64 3200+, Radeon 9500 256Mb, 1Gb DDR400 RAM) but every two games the computer just freezes.
The game's not bad, and since there's no other way to play NFL football now that EA has bought the licence you are pretty much screwed if you want real rosters. My advice: Don't buy Madden 06 unless you really need the rosters, if you want to play superstar mode install Madden 05, and before playing a game open notepad and write 100 times "Drop back, send pass to receiver. Catch, run left."
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