Madden NFL 08 First Look
The biggest name in video games returns for another run for the end zone.
There's no better time to take a first look at Madden NFL 08 than the weekend when the NFL welcomes an entirely new group of stars into its ranks--the 2007 NFL Draft. Last year's draft was notable for a number of reasons--the snub of Reggie Bush as the number one overall pick for Mario Williams, as well as the draft of the player who would eventually be Madden NFL 08 cover athlete, the Tennessee Titans' Vince Young.
Nearly everyone, of course, expected LaDanian Tomlinson to make the cover. With 31 touchdowns and a league MVP award, it seemed only natural that the San Diego Chargers running back was a shoo-in for the cover of EA Sports' latest football game. Yet, when the time came for the announcement, it was Vince who took the honor, and only after LT turned it down. So what can we take away from the announcement of VY as the cover athlete Madden NFL 08? Well, for one, the publisher is hoping to avoid the so-called "Madden curse" with Vince: He's young (heading into his sophomore season in the NFL), big and strong, and seemingly impervious to harm from would-be tacklers.
But what does another quarterback on the cover of Madden mean for gameplay? After all, in previous seasons, the cover athlete was a sort of herald for what to expect from the game. Think of Madden NFL 2005's Ray Lewis and the defensive hit stick, or last year's game featuring Shaun Alexander and better blocking and run controls. Does Vince Young's cover mean a radically altered passing system, such as the passing cone from Madden 06 or a brand new way of looking at the field? Well, no, not really. Instead, much like VY's fundamentally sound play, Madden NFL 08 seems to be taking a back-to-basics approach to its on-the-field play, righting some wrongs and getting itself well and truly settled into the next generation of gaming.
This will, after all, be Madden's third appearance on the Xbox 360 and second for the PlayStation 3. During a recent EA Tiburon press event featuring an early look at the game, the Madden series producers were forthcoming about the team's need to balance the creation of a great-looking game with controls that are flexible. And it's clear they feel the two aspects aren't mutually exclusive. As producers put it, for the third year of Madden on the Xbox 360, it's time to start putting in the features they've always wanted in the game. These include such things as gang tackles, owner mode, the lateral, an upgraded fatigue system, improved defensive artificial intelligence; all of these features and more will be part of Madden NFL 08.
It starts with overhauled animations, specifically tons of new branching animations. How many times in previous Madden games did you throw to a tight end or wideout near the sidelines, only to have the animation take the guy out of bounds when he clearly could have gained a few more yards by staying in bounds? According to producers, that will be a thing of the past, thanks to branching animation that was borrowed from another EA property: NBA Street Homecourt. No, you won't be watching Reggie Wayne execute triple backflips into the end zone, but on those crossing routes where he's heading to the sidelines, you'll likely see him plant his feet once he's hauled in the ball and angle upfield to gain those crucial extra yards.
It seems branching animations will be visible in practically every part of gameplay. A gameplay video featuring Tomlinson showed the running back making an up-the-middle sprint through his offensive line, juking and spinning early for extra yards. The big benefit of this new branching technology seems to be more animation "breaking points" wherein the player holding the controller regains control of the player on the field quicker than ever before. Just as in NBA Street, taking control of a player in Madden 08 will let you "break" animations quicker, allowing the player to move on to the next move, juke, or spin. During that same LT run video, which featured the running back breaking a tackle, producers pointed out that the player will have control of the on-field player earlier than ever before; in this case, the moment LT begins to slip through the fingers of the would-be tackler.
And speaking of tackling, gang-tackles that were long missing from the series debuted in the PlayStation 3 version of Madden NFL 07 and will now spread to include every version of Madden 08. As producers demonstrated in a video, tacklers can be added on to a pile at any point when trying to bring down a ball carrier; equally important, tackles can be shed dynamically thanks to the aforementioned branching animation technology. One particularly cool video example of this showed Tomlinson, wrapped up by a defender, make a spin move, only to have an incoming defender run into the defender that first wrapped up LT, knocking him off the running back and letting Tomlinson gain a few more yards in the process.
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- GameSpot Score8.5great
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