Backbreaker an arcade game?

I guess at this point any information is good information. The death of backbreaker hasn’t been announced rather that the football game with true dynamic physics is being shown to a few people in the press.

Here’s a piece of information that shouldn’t be overlooked. Backbreaker is going for the arcade crowd. I don’t know quite what to make of it. Yes the author makes the ridiculous statement that Madden has the simulation crown.

The altered control style isn't the only way that Backbreaker plans to separate itself from the pack. Rather than gunning for the simulation crown that Madden currently holds, NaturalMotion is going for arcade gameplay that has the most realistic motion ever seen in a videogame. You'll see things like defenders taking off from three yards away to lay the smack down on an unsuspecting quarterback and airborne receivers getting flipped end over end when trying to make a catch. It's nowhere near as ridiculous as Midway's Blitz but it does cash in on the same freedoms that come with the lack of the NFL license.

IGN: Backbreaker Preview.

Typical Konami

If EA Sports is the evil empire, then Konami is the incompetent puppet state.

There are some nice impressions coming from the Leipzig Gaming Convention about PES 2009.

But in typical Konami fashion the game they are showing is a older version that doesn’t show off how much improved the game will be.

For all your WE impressions you should bookmark Winning Eleven Blog. Or

Head Coach after a week

I guess it’s about time to do a run down of HC 09. I don’t do reviews but here’s a list of things that I think I think.

1. HC really makes Madden’s franchise mode look poor. If HC is innovation then Madden’s franchise mode is stagnation.

1a. I really can’t play Madden’s franchise mode because of HC.

2. Do not use the play creator with your franchise unless you want to kill off your franchise. You can create plays from the main screen but if you do it in your career, you will turn off injuries. Players won’t get hurt and hurt players won’t heal. This needs a patch.

3. The feeling of immersion should be considered one of the most innovative features in the last five years of sports games. Excluding text-based games, sports games were nothing more than a collection of exibition games over a season. There was no flavor, no team styles, no storylines. HC has all of those things. The draft stories and college information given to you by Adam Shefter brings together an NFL that is living outside of your team.

4. Head Coach is a good game but not great. It has a few serious bugs (injury/play creator) and a few niggling issues.

4a. No matter how bad a QB plays, the CPU will never replace him in a season. In a test season, the Ravens found a QB on the free agent list that was rated higher than Boller and Troy Smith. He started all 16 games — threw 13 touchdowns with 39 ints. The Ravens finished the year 3-13. This hurts you career because some teams are unable to adjust during the season. You might never see a Romo or Cutler start mid-season.

4b. Fumbles and Pick 6’s are pretty high. These are carry-overs from Madden 08. They are toned down considerably.

4c. No CPU in super sim. This basically makes super sim a mode to finish games and blowouts. Otherwise you might see boxscores where your RB runs the ball over 40 times.

4d. The play creator has been neutered to the point of being pointless. You can not create orginal run plays. (I haven’t found a way!) Instead, you have to find a play that has the FB and HB blocking and hitting the game where you want — then edit the formation around them. Searching for plays to edit is a very tedius task.

4e. There are some stat anomolies like QBs having too many ints.

4f. The two-minute offense is broken’ish. You can’t audible, send in another play, spike the ball, or call another play. You are at the mercy of the last play you called unless you waste a timeout.

5. Save often! There is a freezing problem with most games. I don’t know what causes it but make sure to save every week or every day in your career.

6. The good.

6a. Draft classes add a unique flavor to the game. Virtual re-made greats like John Elway and Dan Marino are draftable. The game will actually give you status reports of how theses players are doing in their college career.

6b. Injuries are very well done. I lost an entire offensive line battery because of injuries. I’ve never had to worry about depth in Madden or NFL 2k.

6c. Drafting and free agency is fun.

6d. I enjoy how player bidding, player negotiations and trading are handled. You never really select what you want, you select packages. It’s really a mini-game of compromise where personality detemines how successful you are. So you might want to offer a low-ball contract offer to a free agent. He will counter with his offer. Every package that’s lower than yours and higher than his are taken off the board. You keeping going until you can find the same package to agree upon or the time runs out. If it runs out there’s a chance he won’t want to sign with your team.

6e. A GM might be terrible and overvalue busts. A player might be a pushover and you can lowball him. A player might be better (ratings) with a different coaching staff. Ratings mean everything!

6f. Playbooks are a weird design idea. You are given a very basic playbook set. You can gain plays when you hiring coaches or stealing your oppenent’s plays. The playbooks are very sparse.

6g. Playbook knowlege is key. If your players don’t know a play, that will not run their route, block or cover their man.

7. In-game graphics are nothing special. They are closer to PS2 than the 360. They are functional and do not take too much away from the game.

7a. The menus are good looking and very functional. There are some quirks like not being able to see your cap room with bidding on a free agent.

7b. The clipboard idea makes this game. The timer idea, while adding some drama shouldn’t be in a sim game. Leave if your FA bidding, drafting etc when I run out of time to gameplay because I want to look at the NFL injury board is silly. (The timer pauses when you are not in the main clipboard screen.)

8. Defining moments sometimes can affect your approval too much. While it’s rare, sometimes the game will give you a defining moment that makes you wonder, like calling a punt on 4th and 5, on your own 40.

9. Gameplay

9a. In-game gameplay is running off of a pretty basic Madden engine. The gameplays different as their are more offline throws and problems with players doing stupid things.

9b. The play calling screen isn’t any better or worse than Madden’s play calling screen. It’s pretty limiting and it should use more of the screen.

9c. The AI calls a pretty good game and avoids some of the AI gaffs that plague Madden.

9d. Teams play their style of ball. New England pass. Pittsburgh run. Mike Martz throws deep. Teams could use their star players a bit better but you will seem teams play similar to their NFL counterparts.

10. The game needs a patch. First it should focus on the play creator design bug. Second it should fix some of the roster issues like benching players. Lastly, it should look at letting teams at least spike a ball during the two-minute offense.

10a. No word of the patch. Okay the game isn’t Madden, but in days of release there was already word of a patch. Here, they are debating whether or not there should be a patch.

EA to Buy Euphoria Engine (Backbreaker)

If you look back in the archives, I hinted at Backbreaker positioning itself not for the consumers but for a huge publisher either to buy the real-time physics, animation, software or for a huge publisher to buy the company. With a summer of slow Backbreaker news, it looks like there might be a reason.

Gameplay is reporting that there might be an announcement of EA buying the Euphoria engine at the Leipzig Games Convention. Read the article.

Before you take that as Madden 10 using a real-time physics engine, it could mean something totally different.

1) They could be using the engine in their non-sports games.
2) They want to buy the software/company becuase more games are using the engine.
3) They don’t want another company to produce a football game.

I actually think it’s a blend of 1 and 2. There’s potential for EA Games (not EA Sports) to put this engine it games like Battlefield, Skate, or The Sims.

As for the sports gamer, if this report is true, could imply that EA Sports will use a truly next-gen animation engine in their sports games. This would be moving from EA’s bread and butter of motion capture animation. This is the upside. The downside is that Backbreaker will never see the light of day. Backbreaker could have been nothing more than tech demo to achieve exactly this. Either way the odds are not looking good for the football genre to get another game anytime soon.

Head Coach: When Batman Should be Superman

One of the most dangerous aspects of creating a game in the American market is not making it for the casual crowd. Should you create a game that’s more football than Madden-nation football you will face the wrath of casual reviewers. Not part-time reviews just someone who wants the casual gamer experience.

Head Coach 09 will run into a lot of this and it might make EA question if it will make another Head Coach 09.

Take Game Informer’s review — regardless of the score let’s look at a few comments.

During games this feeling of relative powerlessness continues.

Huh? Isn’t that how the head coach is supposed to feel? Last time I checked the Tony Dungy wasn’t able to control the play on the field.

For instance, the computer controls which free agent bids come across your desk (including those for your own freakin’ players!), and the computer’s bizarre draft suggestions control your approval rating.

If you have room you can sign any free agent to fill a roster slot. However, the game doesn’t throw all the free agents in the pool at once. It’s quiet fair how the design of this let’s you as well as the CPU a chance to sign free agents. Had they let you do it the same way as Madden, you would be able to raid the FA pool.

This year’s game has added Defining Moments – where a key gametime decision can reduce your approval rating, but that’s more about what the fans and media think you should do than what’s a smart football decision. Great. Rube nation has more power than I do?!

Fair point but the old addage that winning solves all applies here. If you go 12-4, the bumps in approval is going to be through the roof. Had the developers made approval the end-all, then you could be fired even by making the playoffs. I think they didn’t make disapproval as penalizing as it could be, which might be the safe route.

This reviewer clearly went into the game wanting Madden: Head Coach. I think quite a few people would like to see the gameplay of Madden with a complete Franchise mode. Sadly EA Sports, wanted to make two different games so if you feel powerless you need to play Madden. If you want a decent franchise mode you need to play Head Coach. Just don’t go into one expecting it to be the other. That’s like Roger Ebert going into Batman and criticizing it for not having Superman.

The Madden Curve

The unofficial Madden week continues here at SC. I’ll move on to other sports a little later in the week but right now with the football hype in full effect, I’ll stay on Madden.

There are games that get a review bump no matter how good or how bad they turn out. Madden is the game that sets the sports review bar. I don’t mean the actual game but it seems the Madden score sets the mark for sports games reviews. A game would have to be astonishingly good to be rated better than Madden, at most review sites.

MLB The Show 2008 (PS3) was rated 85 on Metacritic. Madden (360) was also rated at the 85 mark. Few would argue how good of a baseball game MLB The Show turned out to be. Madden was a good all-around game if not a little stale. But for a great baseball game not to break the 90 barrier shows two things.

One, non-football games have to unconditionally great. And hype or a lack thereof can inflate or deflate your score.

Going back to the MLB example, what does a game have to do to get higher scores? It has great graphics and atmosphere, excellent gameplay, and two career modes (franchise, and Road to the Show). Take NBA 2k, a yearly contender for sports game of the year. Another game which falls off the Madden curve is NBA 2k8. Every release it’s a contender for sports game of the year and is critically recieved. Where do these two games go wrong? Hype because both are unconditionally great with a normal but accepted amount of issues.

What they had in gameplay, they lacked in hype. MLB: The Show was a great baseball title but that’s not enough for reviewers — they need to be hyped up. NBA 2k has been pretty stagnant as well. The gameplay has been stellar but again where are the two or three key features that drastically improve the experience.

EA Sports figured this out years ago. Refinement bores customers regardless of the game or its gameplay. Instead offer two or three new features to enhance the experience, hype them up where every preview drills this into readers minds and if you don’t get around to improving the gameplay drastically, you can fall back on the hype.

NHL is a good game with huge holes in it’s gameplay mainly, lack of defense and goalies being too good, but it had tremendous hype and it scored an 85, the same score as Madden. Why did it grade so high? Hype. It’s a second-year game with the hype that it can move the hockey genre forward. It did that even with some basic aspects of hockey missing. Bad game no, but with promising hype.

The first game to fall victim of the Madden curve might just be NFL Head Coach. The line will be something like, “It’s a deep game, with a lot of options but will people want to play as the Head Coach?” Their score will range from the 65 to 80 but probably fall closer to 75 on Metacritic.

If you see a sports game that breaks the 85 metacritic barrier this year, it might turn out to be sports game of the year and instant classic.

“Most significant sports game release in years”

Thinking Madden 09. Wrong.

I’ve been reading Bill’s stuff for a very long time and he’s one of the most objective reviewers on the net. Bill is a sports gamer at heart and reviewer by trade and while his reviews might not be at IGN or Gamepot, they are must reads most of the time. Gameshark’s Bill Abner posted the following quote on his blog about Head Coach 09.

As for Head Coach, the game simply takes much longer to review so expect to see that later this week, maybe as late as Friday but if you read this blog you know how I feel. Head Coach 09 is one of the most significant sports game releases in a long, long time. It’s not perfect, it’s got some flaws, but it is incredibly deep and entertaining and I HOPE that EA Sports sees this game for what it is — a game that fills an important niche to its fan base. I hope is sells like mad and that EA looks to increase this series into other venues. NCAA Head Coach, NBA Live Head Coach, NHL Head Coach…I’d be down for all of that.

Read Bill’s post.

Early Reports on Madden

So you have pre-ordered the game and waiting until 12:01 to get it. Here’s the early key thoughts on Madden.

• Franchise has the same leftover issues. Some impressions note key free agents (Manning) are not being signed by anyone.
• CPU running game needs help. Without CPU sliders this might needs a roster update to address the problems.
• Franchise draft logic has not improved.
• Defenders still fall down a bit too much on the pass rush but you sacks are possible.
• Robo-QBs not as bad as NCAA.
• Atmosphere drastically improved from the stale 08.
• The engine is more refined than the NCAA 09 engine. The wide-openess of NCAA 09 is not seen in Madden.

Head Coach 09: Refreshing to Hear

As you know by know the HC designers have been very active on the Operations Sports boards. They have been open and honest, answering questions on weekends, and taking blame for some missteps in their game.

How many times however do you here this kind of honesty? Donny Moore takes some of the blame for making a design decision which impacts the two-minute drill.

I'd actually like to front the blame for this one and help QA out here, this particular issue was a design call we had to make late in the project, not a huge bug QA missed. It is an area of the game we wish we would have spent more time and focus on for sure, and moving forward, it will certainly be addressed if/when another Head Coach is made.

Check it out.

Madden Curse through the years.

Here’s a compilation of players appearing on the cover of Madden. Since 2001 each one has either been injured or seen an immediate decline from that season forward. Is it because of the Madden curse or just coincidence?

Madden 2001 – Eddie George – Decline
In the 2000 season, Eddie George had his best season rushing. The next season (2001) he had his worst rushing year in the NFL not breaking the 1000 yard mark, excluding his last season.

Madden 2002 – Dante Culpepper – Injury
Culpepper only plays 11 games as he gets injured late in the season missing that final five games.

Madden 2003 – Marshall Faulk – Decline
Runs for a thousand yard season in the first 7 of his 8 seasons. Starting in 2002, he never breaks the 1000 yard barrier.

Madden 2004 – Michael Vick – Injury
Breaks his leg in a preseason game and misses the first 11 games of the 2003 season.

Madden 2005 – Ray Lewis – Decline
Has the last of his 100 tackle season in 2004. Suffers mild injuries during the season but plays 14 games. Lewis has never returned to the form of the 2003 season after appearing on the cover.

Madden 2006 – Donovan McNabb – Injury
McNabb and the Eagles were coming off a Super Bowl loss. McNabb only plays 9 games that year, and finishes the season on the injured reserve. He also has Terrell Owens blaming him from the SB loss.

Madden 07 – Shaun Alexander – Injury
Another player coming off a Super Bowl loss gets the cover. He fractures his toe in week 3.

Madden 08 – Vince Young – None
After LaDianian Tomlinson passed on being the cover boy, Young takes his place. Plays in every game of the season for the Titans, even taking them to the playoffs.

Madden 09 – Brett Farve – TBD
Arguably one of the best QBs in the history of the NFL, is not wanted back by his old team. Traded to the Jets. Stay tuned…