Madden 09 Preview (Read 53 times)

[M3 Commish]

EA's Madden juggernaut is once again out to dominate the sports game market, this time with a few innovations made to its tried-and-true formula. This year, the big changes come in the form of the new Adaptive Difficulty Engine, as well as a host of other features designed around making Madden a more accessible, and ultimately more fun experience.

The Adaptive Difficulty Engine is Madden NFL 09's attempt at presenting an AI difficulty setting that is custom-tailored to each player's individual strengths and weaknesses. Before you take your first snap, you'll be prompted by good old John Madden himself to take the Madden Test. Here you'll be challenged in four of the key realms of play: the rushing offense, the passing offense, rush defense, and pass defense. Special teams aren't covered in the preview build we've been playing, but the intangibles like effort and hustle generally determine performance here. Well, that and having Devin Hester returning kicks.

The Madden Test will have you rushing for touchdowns against a certain number of defenders, completing passes, or defending against the same situations. Do well on the lower difficulties and you'll meet stiffer competition in the next round. Once you hit a wall, your appropriate difficulty setting is ascertained. So, instead of playing All-Pro or All-Madden difficulty and having an across-the-board setting to play against, each of those four aspects of the AI play is determined by your results on the Madden Test.



In our first test, we scored All-Madden in rushing offense, All-Pro in passing offense and pass defense, but scored a lowly rookie rating in rushing defense, something we knew was a weak aspect of our play since the earliest days of Madden play. Our custom difficulty setting thus put us up against good run-stuffers and corners, but gave us a pretty easy time of catching opposing halfbacks. It's an interesting idea, and one that we're sure many players will appreciate.

Other gameplay changes we've seen include a new set of context-sensitive button commands intended to guide the player towards making the right play in any given situation. If you have Jared Allen coming off the line, the game will prompt you to hit the left button to perform a finesse move, hurdling over a lineman or spinning around him to get to the quarterback. Halfbacks will be told when to sprint, but when a defender comes in, you'll be told whether to try for a trucking move with the hit stick or to press a different button in order to spin or juke your way to daylight. It's a nice way to show players what moves work best in certain situations, but it may also feel like it's too much hand-holding for Madden veterans.

Celebrations are a touch more interactive, as you can move into special hot zones in the end zone after a score to celebrate your six. Moving to the hot zone near the goal post, for example, will prompt you to hit the Y button, which has your player leap up to slam dunk the ball through the uprights (and land you a nifty achievement to boot). Interestingly enough, defenders can attempt to keep you from these celebrations as well, which should make for fun banter (or trash talk) during a play session.

One of the more exciting aspects of Madden NFL 09 will be of particular interest to the millions of fantasy football players out there. This year Madden will be introducing a feature-rich Fantasy Football management application that allows league commissioners to manage their live draft through EA's website. As a draft commences, the Live Draft Tracker will upload completed draft picks and then send those results out to those players signed in through their copy of Madden. According to EA, the days of the paper draft board are over.



The idea is that players will be able to use the picture-in-picture functionality of their television sets to get live stat updates for their fantasy football matchups in progress. Anyone who's played fantasy football is familiar with the mad rush to the computer after every big play, and refreshing their league website in order to get up-to-the-minute scoring information. Madden NFL 09 will utilize your league's scoring system and compare those to their stat feed in order to give you an instant heads-up as to how many fantasy points your players are scoring.

If every player in the league owns a copy of Madden NFL 09, your league will be able to do more with your fantasy league than ever before. Players can import their drafted fantasy teams and compete with other fantasy players across the country in online unranked matches. Players can also take their fantasy teams, along with all those players they'll quickly become intimately familiar with, and use them in the game's Play Now and Franchise Modes. As if fantasy players needed another reason to obsess over their pretend teams!

We're going to be playing a lot more Madden NFL 09 in the coming weeks, so check back soon for more details about everything the game has to offer.

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