I eagerly made the trip out to the game store after work yesterday to pick up my copy of Madden 11. After I got home it was almost 30 minutes before I was able to actually play the game. It’s getting sort of ridiculous, I had to enter 2 different 12 character codes before I could even get started, the preorder bonus, and EA’s online pass. On top of that, there is the typical day 1 patch to install. Anyway, this isn’t really a gripe about Madden itself since this short of thing happens for almost every game at this point, but I seriously miss the days of the most time complicated part of playing a game the first time was getting into the packaging.

Anyway, when you get to the main menu, you are punched in the face with ads… Ads as menu items themselves, in fact the default menu items when the game finishes loading are ads. There is also an ad ticker at the bottom of the screen talking about EA DLC for other games (EA’s MMA in this case). I find it disheartening that a game that sells millions of copies annually, feels the need to bolster their revenue by this degree of advertising. I fully understand some product placement, particularly the in game stat stuff that does make things a little closer to the broadcasts, but there is just so much invasive advertising in this game it makes me a little angry.

Take it to the field! I played a few games with the GameFlow turned on, fully understanding that it’s more or less the Ask Madden system with a few out of game functions to give it some customization. This is not as big an innovation as people are making it out to be, in my limited experience thus far, it does seem like it would work well for the people who aren’t well versed in football strategy, or are playing as an unfamiliar playbook. However, when I say go for it on 4th and goal on the 2, I don’t want to see the wildcat formation, ever, worst part is in that scenario you can’t even audible out of the play because you don’t have the right personal on the field. And as an Eagles fan (a team that makes no qualms about being a very pass heavy team), I could tell that the default settings for my team were wrong. GameFlow had me running primarily, and 20 or so plays out of the wildcat, for the course of both games.

I think that leads well into my biggest complaint about the game, it lacks polish. Sure, there are lots of production values, and things going on in the course of the game that are good, when I think of polish, I’m talking about the extra effort that goes into the game to make each and every one of those things works flawlessly, that doesn’t exist here. There are obvious problems with the audio stitching in all areas of the game (ingame, pregame, postgame), which is understandable to a degree because of the volume dialog that exists but the frequency of it is nearly unacceptable. Also, hearing Cris Colinsworth goin on about the importance the first preseason game, and the experience of the 2 quarterbacks despite the fact that one of them is going into his first season as a starter and simply doesn’t have the experience he’s talking about. I don’t think this was nearly as bad in seasons past.

Also, the game crashed twice on me last night requiring a hard restart of the playstation. It happened once trying to load a Madden Moment (returning from last year, basically some game scenarios from last season that you try to recreate, or overturn, in the time remaining), they are decent if you don’t have time to play a whole game. And once while I was playing in the ‘be a superstar’ mode, which you basically play as a rookie and try run the plays that are called and win games. Because your player isn’t on the field at all times, you have the ability to simulate the game until the next time your player is on the field, that’s when the game crashed on me. It’s disappointing too because I was into my second game, and I forgot to save between them, so I may have to start over entirely, can I get an auto-save system please? Playing this mode was really fun though, I even liked running routes as a receiver, and even blocking on sweeps is fun.

I really think all of these could be resolved with the polish I mentioned above, I truly believe that this game is a victim of an annual, ridged release schedule, and will never ever be the perfect game it has had the potential to be as they continue to add features or outright change functionally. Because once you get into the games, most of those complaints are nullified by an excellent game of football. I’ve been loving the offense in this year’s offering. The line-aware receivers is incredible, I’ve yet to see a receiver take it out of bounds (I’m sure it will happen occasionally though), and the running game without the turbo button is great, i’m really liking the light tilts on the analog while the blocks set up, it really does feel like a burst when you push it down all the way to change direction, or hit the hole… this is easily the most fun I’ve had with the madden running game.  Defense feels the same as always, but they added a defense assist, while, holding ‘X’ your player will execute the play like he should until you let go, I find it handy when I’m playing off the line, so the player stays on him man when he makes cuts in man-to-man or gets to his zone in zone coverage, hopefully it’ll have me controlling something other than a lineman or a blitzer every play.

They changed the pre-snap controls, so it’s taking a while to adjust to the new system, but it appears to work, however it feels like there is less time to use it before the snap than in previous years.

It’s sort of annoying though when they say, we’re trying to make it a faster experience and have the games take less time, but there is all these “broadcast-like” things before during and after the game, that take more time than anything else. Anyway, its’ still fun, and I’ll be playing the hell out of it, and you shouldn’t let all these gripes effect your decision, since the football part of the football game really is excellent.

If you’ve been keeping up, you’ll remember that I had some concerns about the holiday season line up this year. Since then, both The Last Guardian (at no surprise to me), and Crysis 2 have been pushed back to 2011. So to recap (loosely) what is still coming that I’m at least moderately interested in.

We’ve got the hardware battle to think about, the girlfriend has been sold on Kinect, and specifically Dance Central, so that’ll be around, but to be honest, I may not be able to play that game due to pride constraints. I think move is interesting, I could play some of that, however… I have no interest in the launch titles at this point, on top of that, like all new tech, it’s going to take a while (I’d say almost a year), for developers to be able to deal with the hardware, while Move has an advantage here because one could assume that Wii developers have some experience here and would be able to get a head start on the learning curve, the disheartening part is that most of the good games on the Wii were made by Nintendo, I think the only exception is going to be Red Steel, a game I felt was limited only by the technical short comings of the Wii hardware. When this team makes a game for the Move I’ll pay attention, and perhaps some credit to Team Ninja for the upcoming work with “The Other M”.

Consoles

We’ve got the EA sports 11 line up, Football and Hockey are going to be bought for certain, that’s great because the franchise modes there can be a huge time sink if I can get into them. A few no brainers, Gran Turismo 5, Fallout: New Vegas, RockBand 3 (I still play RockBand or Guitar Hero a couple times a week). Vanquish won me over with the media bust about a month ago, and while I assumed I was going to pass on the upcoming Call of Duty offering, I don’t think I’ll be able to resist when the time comes. The upcoming Spiderman game has some potential, but I’ve got major concerns, that I’ll share in a focused post in the near future. Little Big Planet 2 will make an appearance. Maybe Max Payne 3 if it does actually make it out this year (I assume this one will be the next to be pushed into next year).

A couple Wii games worth thinking about, but it’s hard for me to get excited for a Wii game at this point, Metroid: The Other M, and Kirby Epic Yarn are on that list.

PC

Civ 5 should be a good time, and I’ll try Final Fantasy XIV when it comes out. Truthfully I’ll probably end up with fallout for PC in the end.

It sounds like a lot of games to play, but when I think of last year’s holiday season, there were games every week starting in September that were must buys, and then a couple more in the months that were compelling enough to consider buying. This is going to be a slow holiday for the hobbyist gamer like me. The kind of gamer who really gets into the single player of an experience and then moves on.

Limbo

It would appear that I pulled the ‘chute a little too early the other day before I put my last post up, since I was literally 3 puzzles away from the end of the game when I quit, and fell just short of finishing it in one sitting. So my opinion won’t have changed that much from that post.

I’m a firm believer that if you have any interest in this game at all, that you should completely avoid any and all of the major media outlets… ESPECIALLY any with videos… it is a shame when any of the experience is spoiled by such things. For instance I caught an episode of “Reviews on the Run” yesterday and in the video clips they showed with their review they showed solutions for several of the puzzles. From my personal experience only 1 puzzle was spoiled before hand and I felt genuine disappoint when I got that point. That may be the first time something like that has happened to me, which should speak volumes about the level of enjoyment I had with every minute of this game, and the quality of the experience.

LIMBO is a platform puzzler, it contains no dialog, no color, and very very few characters. But that is not to say the game isn’t beautiful, and the story isn’t compelling, in fact that couldn’t be further from the truth. The game starts with a boy waking up in the middle of the woods, no preface, or pretext of any kind. Years of video game training has taught me the only thing to do in these sorts of side scrolling situations… go right young man… The media says somewhere I should have known that I was playing the part of a boy looking for his sister… I don’t know where they got that from… and i don’t care… I likened the experience to having woken up with amnesia, which helped me to related to whats going on a little better maybe.

There are 4 or 5 different types of areas that blend together seamlessly as you play, and although they were all fairly charming my favorite moments in the game were early on when the puzzles seemed to be more closely tied to the people and things found in the environment that were clearly carefully set up, but somehow felt naturally there. It made me feel like I just stumbled upon these things and that I’m coming up with my own solution even though I know thats not the case. As the game moves on I found the puzzles to look and feel more like puzzles when I approached them, and instead of using the things found in the environment to solve then, there are switches that do different things, blades, and gravity, to deal with. The puzzles are still fun and clever, but not nearly as satisfying as it was early on. Failing to solve these puzzles often ends in some gruesome greyscale murder scenes that quite literally made me cringe. That is a testament to how engrossed you get in the boy and his adventure. As a weathered gamer I’ve seen all sorts of video game murder… in all sorts of colors and context, very few if any get this sort of reaction out of me, it really was a joy to be a part of this world while I was playing.

The controls are awesome, the physics, and the weight of your character as he’s running, climbing, jumping and sliding, all feel consistent, and (for lack of a better word) ‘right’. Any time I didn’t clear a gap it felt like my fault for poor timing, not the controls.

A lot has been made of the game being short, I found it was a good length, considering the 1p in modern warfare 2 only took me 7 hours (I’m primarily a single player gamer), the fact that this game was in the 6 hour ball park, all of which was very enjoyable, and a fraction of the price. I think this game is an incredible value and completely deserves to be talked about as one of the best gaming experiences I’ve had this year. In fact I believe if the game had of carried on for another hour or 2  it would have began to feel a little stale, and the fact that their is no story based motivation for you to keep pressing on, I think it very well could have lost some people. Like most parts of this game, I found the time perfect for the genre. As it stands it left me wanting more, and that’s a good thing.

xbox 360 owners have no excuse in my eyes for not owning this game. It’s cheap, it’s fun, it’s immersive, it’s rewarding. Anyone who doesn’t have a 360 should be hassling PlayDead, begging them to get this to the platform most convenient. It’s not worth buying a console for, but this is something that no gamer should miss, and certainly not because of console exclusivity.