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Electronic Arts Reveals Next-Gen Madden
Tim Grube writes "Electronic Arts has released the very first image of Madden NFL running on the next-generation consoles. This Saturday, on April 23rd, the NFL Draft begins on TV and EA has already scored a promotional commercial to unveil Madden Next-Gen. It will air on ESPN."
Of all the nextgen things to reveal, did it have to be football? Show me a shooter, show me a platformer, show me a flight sim, show me anything but sports.
notice that EA isn't actually stating that the screenshot is of gameplay, and gamespot is only implying it yet never clearly states either.
It will feature fully real-world physics of John Madden's humongous beer gut jiggling!
Now we can see his giant nostrills with infinite detail. Thank you EA.
Eh.
This image, and a similar image of a car, have been floating around for weeks. I'd hardly call that 'unveiling'.
The Braying and Neighing of Barnyard Animals Follows.
1) You hate sports and/or sports games (a *shocker* on slashdot). Joking aside, this is entirely reasonable. I personally don't much care for RPGs or MMORPGs myself, so I don't get excited when I see those screenshots or 9.7/10 ratings.
2) You simply don't think sports are a good benchmark for system performance.
If it is #2, then I (politely) believe you are entirely mistaken. Put it this way... let's take a beautiful game from this generation: Doom3. The gameplay might have been subpar or perhaps it was too dark or overall not worth the 10 year wait, but it was still pretty. As nice-looking as it was, who the hell knows what a demon from hell looks like? Who knows what a Space Station/whatever is "supposed" to look like?
Sports games, and football in particular, are becoming more-and-more television like. Back in SNES/Genesis days (perhaps before), we first had players looking distinct (real-life black players were black in the game, huge linebackers resembled their true self). In PS1/N64 we started to see realistic looking players. By this generation, Eli Manning really looked like Eli Manning. Players faces were scanned and looked very realistic (I think this might have been done in the PS1/N64 days too).
But... as gorgeous as it still is, the "Holy Grail" (in some people's opinion) is for video game football to eventually look something like controlling actual live-NFL TV type games. I dunno about you, but I could see the wrinkles and individual freckles in that screenshot player's nose. Looks amazing. Perhaps we'll see individual blades of grass on the field, and eventually, crowds with 4,000 uniquely-rendered fans.
Then again, I still find my favorite football game to be Tecmo Bowl on NES and Joe Montana 1 on Genesis. Go figure...
EA Teaser Commercials
No eyes... so true.
.....im not very impressed. Doesn't look THAT good. Looks like more like something just above what we can do presently with our current generation of consoles. Or even what our higher end PCs can do.
Im very dissapointed.
His nose is ugly.
wonderful benchmark for what? something that doesn't mean *jack*? freckles in faces making you feel better that you're in control of the team? I guess not. anyways, there's a bunch of things that make sportsgames engines different from other engines(or rather, allow them to be different - you can take some freedoms on how you decide what's going to be shown for example.. and have a lot less models loaded up at given time..). basically you only know that the system is good for rendering a football field if you see it render a football field.
did anyone else notice.. that it's not even halfway 2005 and already they're buffing madden 2006? and they're buffing it with the same thing they've buffed ea sports games since 1995.. "EXTRA EXTRA! FASTER MACHINES ALLOW BETTER GRAPHICS!! EXTRA EXTRA!!!!". gigantic bleh.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I simply said that eventually, a lot of players want to have their football video games look exactly like they do on the TV, only they control it. So, while you may be able to have fun playing Atari's "Xs and Os" football, in order to have that "like I'm watching and controlling real-live football" - then YES, Brent Alexander of the NY Giants DOES have to resemble his real-life self, with a thin little mustache facial hair deal.
It's a pity they can't use all that processing power to make the commentary decent. If I have to hear "It's like there's a bee in his helmet!" one more time, I'm going to kill someone.
Oh and making the players look nice is all well and good, but I hope to hell that they did something about the crowd. Low-res sprites just look awful. Oh and the cheerleaders need a ton of work too. The ones in Madden 2005... yeesh.
Why is everyone making such a fuss over the graphics? I wouldn't mind if they put in the crowd from the original genesis version if the game played right. Madden 2005 had so many major gameplay flaws like the Offensive linemen not being able to block, and several rules where not implemented. You could have a receiver go out of bounds and then run back in to catch the pass with no flag. EA should focus on these things before they even start revamping the graphics. And hey, how about a decent PC version with all the features from the consoles?
For ten bucks I don't mind buying EA games (I wouldn't mind restrictive copy protection schemes or other crap, either). Unfortuinately EA isn't offering a whole lot for ten bucks.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Now now. be fair. There are some gameplay changes. I don't personally play the game, but my friends who play the seriese hardcore agree that there are substantial gameplay changes to the series every year. You just have to take it to a certain depth in order to see it, which in of itself (depth) is a crucial indicator of a good game.
But you do bring up a good point. The industry is jumping through so many hoops for a features that do not affect the core element of games: gameplay. Yes, there are some games that have benefited, and even innovated because of the emergence of better graphics (GTA series). But only developers who are innovating are going to benefit from such advances are the developers who were already innovating in the first place (again, GTA series).
So, it's not only a matter of graphics do not equal gameplay. The question is where the industry (the developers) wants to go. Only the Madden fans will be able to judge the trueness of this statment as it applies to EA Sports once Madden 2K6 is released. But simply saying that graphics do not equal gameplay is a shallow and unintelligent statement.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.