Madden NFL 07
Madden NFL 07 for the Wii isn’t just a quick-and-dirty port. It’s an excellent use of the Wii’s motion-sensing capabilities that revitalizes Madden in a number of ways.
The Good: Tons of motion-controlled moves that are responsive and intuitive; the new minigames are a blast with four players; all the features found in the gamecube version are present here; awesome tutorial system that teaches you everything you need to know.
The Bad: Graphics engine is getting a bit long in the tooth; time to get some new commentators; superstar mode still has a number of annoying issues.
One of the big complaints about sports games year after year is that
they just don’t change. Especially in the last few years, EA’s Madden
NFL franchise has weathered the brunt of many of these complaints,
largely in light of the mild upgrades made to older console versions
and the "tear it all down, build it back up" approach the company took
with its Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions. To some extent, though,
it all boils down to one question: How do you update football? The
answer may very well be found in Madden NFL 07 for the Wii. At first
glance, this looks like a pretty basic port of the older console
iteration of Madden 07 released earlier in the year. But once you get
your hands on it, you’ll find a highly revamped experience that makes
great use of the Wii’s unique capabilities. And it’s not just a few
things here and there, either. Tons of the various moves and actions of
football are mapped to the motion-sensing controls, with largely
positive results. There are a few things that maybe don’t work quite as
well as they could, but by and large, Madden on the Wii is a successful
reenvisioning of how football is played on consoles.
From the moment you boot up a game in Madden 07, you’ll find a heaping
helping of tutorials showing you the basics of the game’s controls
through some of the familiar minicamp games. In fact, all throughout
Madden you’ll find little tutorials about individual actions. Once you
jump into a full-on game for the first time, before each and every
play, a new tutorial icon pops up in the upper right corner, and by
pressing a button, it’ll bring you to a screen where it demonstrates a
new action and lets you try it out. It’s a phenomenal system,
especially since anyone who has ever played a standard football game
will need some adjustment to this new control scheme.
In most cases, the movements you make to perform an action in the game
are completely intuitive. To snap the ball, you flip the Wii Remote
upward with a quick snap. To pass, you simply press the button of the
desired receiver, and flip the remote forward in a passing motion. When
you’re carrying the ball, the Nunchuk acts as your body, while the
remote acts as your arms. What this means is that by tilting the
Nunchuk from side to side, you’ll juke in the appropriate direction,
and by tilting the remote from side to side, you’ll perform a right or
left stiff arm. Basic tackles are handled by simply running into other
players, but you can level them with big hits by holding down the Z
button and pushing both the remote and the Nunchuk forward. Kicks are
handled by simply swinging the remote upward after pressing the A
button to start a kick.
These are just the basics, mind you. There are tons of motion-control
moves to be found here, including moves for lead blocking, catching,
swiping at the ball, and pulling off various presnap offensive and
defensive moves. It’s a complex system, but many of the moves are so
easy to use that it becomes second nature after a couple of games. For
instance, even though it might seem counterintuitive to use the D pad
for receiver assignments, it’s just as easy as it ever was with the
normal button assignments in other versions of Madden. The running
moves are fantastic and feel completely natural. The timing’s a bit
tricky in the early goings, but once you get a feel for it, it works
like a dream. Even better, the game actually brings up icons to signify
when you’re doing something right or wrong with the running controls.
If you’re too late for a stiff arm, it tells you. It also occasionally
pulls off a "smart" move for you when it thinks it feels a tilt but you
haven’t necessarily moved the controller over far enough to pull it off
right.
That’s not to suggest every move is perfect. Defensive moves don’t
always feel like they’re registering properly, especially the big hit
move, and trying to figure out the timing for a manual catch for an
interception while playing on defense is an exercise in futility. The
game also doesn’t quite overcome the hurdles of mapping pre-snap
controls to this controller. To do just about any of these, you have to
point to a specific player on the field, and then a rather crazy map
full of control options pops up. It’s easier on offense, since you can
dictate when the ball is snapped and take your time a bit more to sift
through the options, but trying to pull off functions like the
defensive playmaker controls and line shifts can be a bit of a rush job
with this interface, partially because of the long list of functions,
and partially because the remote pointer doesn’t always go where you
want it to go. There’s also a bit of weirdness with kicking from time
to time. Getting the timing down for kick power doesn’t take long to
figure out, but the controller also tracks the angle slice, so if you
have the controller turned too far one way or the other, you’ll send it
in weird directions. However, even when you think you have it lined up
perfectly, you’ll sometimes get a phantom slice that shouldn’t be there.
These issues aside, Madden NFL 07 plays wonderfully. Despite the
initial learning curve, it’s an accessible game of football overall,
and it doesn’t sacrifice any of the depth of the other console
versions. The full playbooks are there and are sorted in the usual way,
but there’s also an update to the "by play type" playbook system
included for newer players who don’t know what an I-formation or a zone
blitz is. This new system specifically categorizes plays by easy-to-use
terminology, like "long pass," "inside run," or "deep pass D." These
playbooks are also smaller, making them a bit less daunting for
newcomers. Ultimately, both casual and longtime players will be able to
find something to suit their needs, and with all the tutorials on hand
and the largely responsive controls, just about anybody who likes
football ought to be able to have a great time with it.
If you’re familiar at all with the recent entries in the Madden series,
you’ll find every feature you’ve come to expect in Madden NFL 07. The
franchise mode is mostly untouched from Madden NFL 06, with all the
usual bells and whistles, such as the Tony Bruno radio show, newspaper
headlines, minicamp games, owner mode, and the like. The one new
addition to the package involves rookie scouting. You now have the
option to play through the college all-star game and to run individual
rookie prospects through combined workouts to gain more statistical
information about players prior to the draft. Getting more involved in
rookie scouting is always a plus, and both of these features are a nice
touch.
Superstar mode remains largely as it did last year in the PS2, Xbox,
and GameCube versions of Madden, letting you create your own rookie
player and letting you play every game specifically as that player for
the length of a career. All the secondary concerns, like interviews,
endorsements, movie roles, and the like are here again, and they suffer
from the same problems as last year too. The same weird disconnects
between what goes on in an interview versus the actual scenario you’re
in tends to rear its head at times, and the amount of menu trudging
you’ll find yourself doing throughout the mode is rather tedious.
However, one big, new addition to the mode makes it a significantly
more compelling experience than it was last year. The goal for the
superstar mode is to get your player into the Hall of Fame at the end
of his career. Throughout your superstar’s career, a menu will depict
how far along your player is toward establishing his legacy as one of
the best of all time. Apart from just throwing a lot of touchdown
passes while playing as a quarterback, or intercepting a billion passes
as a defensive back, and so on and so forth, you also have to interact
with your team and establish a personality. You do this through various
interviews, which give you specific answers that gear you toward a
team-minded player, or a Terrell Owens-like brat, as well as through a
new influence system. Every superstar has the ability to play certain
roles on the field. These roles include a field general for a
quarterback, a possession receiver for a wide receiver, a rookie
for–you guessed it–a rookie, and so on.
These roles actually give you tangible bonuses and control over players
on the field. A quarterback using the field general role, for instance,
can upgrade his passing accuracy rating as well as the blocking ratings
for his various offensive linemen. Another role he can take, the team
leader, lets him upgrade the awareness, injury, acceleration, and
agility ratings for all the other offensive players on the field. You
gain these points by upping your influence rating. This rating goes up
or down based on what you do on the field. Make a huge completion for a
first down, and you’ll get a nice bonus. Throw a lame interception
that’s returned for a touchdown, and it will drop through the floor.
It’s a great and addictive system that actually makes you want to play
through superstar mode games rather than just simulate them. As
annoying as some of the holdover problems from last year’s superstar
mode still are, this year’s mode is exponentially more fun to play
with, thanks almost exclusively to this feature.
Like the GameCube version of Madden NFL 07, Madden on the Wii lacks
online play. However, in its place you’ll find a trio of multiplayer
minigames that go a long way toward making up for that one omission.
The best one is two-on-two, a schoolyard-style game of football where
two players play offense and the other two play defense. You each get a
set of plays to score as many touchdowns as you can or to try to defend
against the offense, respectively. The defensive player assigned to the
quarterback even has to count "Mississippis" before he can rush the QB,
and the QB can send signals via "buzzes" with the controller’s rumble
function by simply pressing A before the snap. It’s an ingenious little
mode that’s completely awesome when you’ve got a group of four players
huddled around playing. "YAC Attack" is another fun one, which has a
full offensive squad going up against a full defense. The goal here is
not only to complete catches and score points, but also to burn the
opposing defense for as many yards as possible. Each time you run for
extra yards, points get taken away from the defense, and you get bonus
points if you throw to the receiver that’s being covered by a
player-controlled character versus a computer-controlled one. Defenses
score points by swatting away and intercepting passes. Less engaging is
the kicking combine, a mode where each player takes a turn kicking the
ball for however many rounds are designated. Along the way, the other
players can drum on the controllers to try to turn the wind against the
kicker. The problem here is that the wind is almost always too
effective, making it near impossible to get most of your kicks off
without ridiculous overcompensation. But even with kicking combine
being less than stellar, the other two games are so much fun that they
make that one lemon irrelevant.
Unsurprisingly, Madden on the Wii uses the same basic graphics engine
that the series has been using for years on older console platforms. To
make a direct comparison, this version looks closest to the Xbox
version of the game, though maybe not quite as good overall. The game
does support 480p resolution and widescreen, and it looks quite good
when viewed this way. Yet, these changes aside, this graphics engine
has been around for a long while, and it’s not aging gracefully. The
player models still have a stunted, chunky look to them that seems like
it should have been reworked long ago, and while the basic animation
looks solid, it could stand a bit of tweaking to get rid of some of the
obvious clipping problems that continually pop up. Audio also hasn’t
changed much in the last few years. The soundtrack is filled to the
brim with a mishmash of popular rock and hip-hop, and just like in
every other year, it’s a wildly varied mix that doesn’t gel at all–not
to mention that some song choices, such as Spank Rock’s "Backyard
Betty," seem a little seedy for an E for Everyone game, even with
lyrical edits. Madden and Michaels are still recycling a lot of the
same commentary lines they have for the last couple of years, and the
on-field effects still sound entirely decent.
At its best, Madden NFL 07 can feel revelatory, if only because it
takes the existing Madden gameplay and tweaks it nicely to work with
the Wii technology. It would have been so easy to just cram in some
lousy, half-baked motion controls and call it a day, but it seems like
some legitimate care went into the updated design in this version of
Madden. While there’s certainly room to improve on this debut, it’s a
wonderful start for the series on the Wii. Even if you’ve picked up
other editions of Madden this year, Madden on the Wii is absolutely
worth playing, because it’s a whole different ballgame.
Source: gamespot.com
