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.