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Madden-ing Glitch Irks Gamers
theodp writes "A vexing glitch in Madden NFL 2005 has players complaining in online forums and even demanding a recall. Because repeated offensive shifts exhaust the defense before the ball is snapped, EA's forced online players to turn off the fatigue setting, which disables the exploit, but spoils the realism of the game. At least you've got an excuse for that first-round Madden Challenge loss."
--
Evan "I trust people across the table when they say they rolled a nat 20"
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Why not have give the offense players a "fatigue" setting that fatigues the entire offense when they repeatedly shift. That would even the stakes, right?
Yes it would, however that's not really the problem. That this error was never caught is the problem (maybe the playtesters mostly played single player mode.)
;)
Oh well, I guess you'll start seeing 140 to 150 point games with 1200 yards total offense. Yea, back to Madden 92 days!
0- Eamonman Proud member of DNRC
Jeez, that should have been about the first thing on their minds when designing the new formation shift feature. Can online players do anything to unfairly abuse it? Hmm, oh yeah, a formation shift affects the defensive team's fatigue level without the defensive player being able to do anything about it. Whoops! Maybe even more surprising is that apparently no playtesters even thought to try it. Aren't you supposed to be as evil as possible in kicking the crap out of every aspect of the game before it's released?
Use Ctrl-C instead of ESC in Vim!
The game is for XBox and PS2, right? While this doesn't work on the PS2, from what I understand EA could easily release a client-side patch for the xbox version to fix this. This is one of the benefits of having a hard drive in a console.
Of course I could be wrong, but it is my understanding that xbox games can and are patched.
The DT "exploit" (more like an AI hole) can be dealt with by having a back stay in on pass protection on that side, or better yet, call play-action passes (which show run block and don't try to hone in on stunting linemen) Shouldn't exist, no, but easily dealt with.
I pretty much worked out of the nickle and dime defensive packages the whole game. Right before the snap, you quickly adjust my defensive line close together and nudge them an inch forward then you pick on of the two in the center and have them take a step back. When the ball is snapped, their offensive linesmen will block yours, but the one that is suppose to block the one you control will block someone else. The double-teamed defensive tackle gets plowed out of the way leaving a nice hole for you to run through and sack the QB. There were a few run plays that could counter this, but the computer rarely called them. In season mode, my record for sacks by a single player is 136 by Bruce Smith. I don't know how many his teammates had, but it had to be similar.
Another one of my favorite SNES games with broken logic was NHL Stanley Cup.
#85 of the Oilers scored 473 goals in one season with only 917 shots on goal. (The counter rolled over somewhere around 250)
Most goals by a team in a game: Oilers 30 out of 51 shots on goal
Most goals in a game by a single player: #16 St. Louis - 17 out of 24 shots.
The trick was to get a break-away with a fast skater, come up along the boards and angle towards the net at the dots, then when you get to the dots - coast. This draws the goalie away from the net and towards you. When you see him advance, you skate around him to the front of an empty net. Some goalies are quick enough to recover, but you should still be able to sneak in a few goals a game against the best.
Another game, Super Tennis, the easy way to beat Don J. is to lob to one of the back corners then run to the middle of the baseline. Don J. always smashes back up the middle. You use his hard smash against him by returning it up the opposite side of the court.
I find it vaguely amusing that Madden is beset with glitches right after EA won the big contract with Microsoft to secure XBox Live! support. I find it much more amusing that ESPN NFL 2K5 is a superior football game for much less. At the game store I work at, we've sold a roughly equal number of the two games. But most of the Madden sales were on release night and in the two days following. I've not heard a single person say that they liked Madden over ESPN after having played both. Not one. That's pretty surprising when you consider how picky a lot of gamers are, especially with football games.
Of course, I enjoy seeing EA Sports suffer a bit, because they pushed out all other competitors, and had a near defacto monopoly on sports titles. It looks like ESPN's $20 gamble has worked, however.
Seems a bit extreme, buying a TV network.
Besides, Fox Sports are probably cheaper, and you'll get fair and balanced gameplay...