Thank you, Mr. Moore
I’m sure you’ve seen this, but Peter Moore is going to be in EA’s new arcade boxing title Facebreaker. Wow. Can I think of a more useless feature in a game. The fact that sites are spinning this as a way to get back at Moore for the poor EA Sports titles, is just stupid.
Moore is in charge of the company that just released their worst, and most bug-ridden title in recent memory, NCAA Football 09. Punching a virtual version of him will do nothing to make EA pay for what this man is helping do to the sports game genre. If anything, he should pull a Uwe Boll and get into the ring and take a beating from people that have bought the game.
Of course, if you look at Metacritic, you’ll see that NCAA Football for the 360 is averaging an 85 currently. Shocking.
Since you’re reading this site, I’m guessing that you know more than a bit about sports games. One major problem with the reviews that come out for sports games (at least over the past few years) is that it’s done by people, who don’t “really” play them. Even the reviewer at 1up, who claims to be the “sports guy,” missed the fact that the online dynasty mode is broken. He comments on the fact that the fact that roster editing is a problem, but disregards it with “when it gets sorted, will rule.” He goes on to give the game an ‘A-,’ which should be evidence enough to avoid any review he ever does again.
My anger isn’t just directed at the reviewers for the game and how they might misdirect unfortunate souls into buying the game, it’s mainly directed at EA Sports.
I don’t think I can word strongly enough how frustrated I am with EA Sports right now.
One of their best sports titles in the past few years, and you’ll probably laugh at me for writing it, was Madden football for the Wii. This year, they release the first version of the NCAA Football franchise for the Wii and what do they do? Create the ‘All-Play’ series, which takes what was potentially a promising sports game series on the Wii and turns it into a game that focuses on Mascot Play.
It’s gotten to the point, where I don’t even know who we can blame at this point. EA Sports keeps putting out more and more mediocre titles and people keep buying them. People like Bill Abner and Bill Harris have been detailing year after year how the games seem fine at first glance, but get worse as you spend time with them.
What do we have to look forward to next? Madden Rewind. Don’t bother fixing the ‘money plays’ in the game… just put in a feature so that you can have a ‘do-over’ if you don’t like the result.
Please people, I emplore you. Tell your family…. Tell your friends… Don’t buy any more EA Sports titles for the time being. I’m at a loss to come up with another way to get them to start putting an actual effort into their sports games.
Of course it’s asking a lot for the man who helped drive Sega out of the console business and did his part to eliminate Microsoft’s lead in the console business for this generation, to guide EA Sports to greatness. The best that we could probably hope for from him would be if he hired Ben Brinkman back, so that MLB2K9 has a chance of being a good baseball game next year.
July 21st, 2008 at 11:14 pm
The only exception I would make with EA right now is with NHL. The dual analog control is more fun than I thought it would be.
July 21st, 2008 at 11:29 pm
I’ll give you that, but I can’t hold out any hope that the game will be improved on the last version… as they didn’t even talk about it at E3.
July 22nd, 2008 at 6:44 am
The thing is to the mainstream consumer (the ones who go out and buy the majority of copies of NCAA, Madden, etc. every year) in this case they really don’t care about the stuff many of us do: simulating games, playing online in order to determine stats, etc. Instead all they are looking for is a fun game of football or the ability to play with their friends online. That is the type of person a review like 1Up’s is going to shoot for (I haven’t read it, so pardon me if he goes into the problems with the game), not the sim heavy crowds of the Bills (Harris and Abner), Operation Sports forum goers, us and whomever else likes to run simulations.
The fact is that NCAA 09 plays a better game of football than last year or the year before. The game seems faster, the graphics on the field are better (trust me, I went back to 08 to be sure I wasn’t hallucinating), the stuttering in-between plays is absent, etc.. There are many broken things that EA may or may not be able to fix (Human sliders tied to CPU sliders, CPU sliders not working by themselves, broken kickoff/punt, broken defensive line mechanic, broken online dynasty, sameness of Campus Legend from last year, etc.), but the game does bring an enjoyable football experience to the table. Sometimes that is all the mainstream player cares about to be perfectly honest. We are the ones that worry over such things as CPU Robo QB, QB high completion rate in simulation, moving a slider one way or the other ruining simulations, etc.
I think we lose that perspective every year when these games come out honestly. We go into these games looking for problems when maybe we should also be thinking about the mainstream player and how they might perceive the game versus how we perceive it, you know?
July 22nd, 2008 at 7:47 am
Peter Moore= Failed Dreamcast
Peter Moore= 3 rings of Death
Peter Moore= Perfect Guy to lead shitty EA to Hell!
July 22nd, 2008 at 8:59 am
you’re joking about ben brinkman right? mlb2k8 is so much worse than mlb2k7 - he can’t go on living on mvp2005 laurels forever
July 22nd, 2008 at 10:06 am
I was being sarcastic about Brinkman. He’s made worse games each year in the 2K series. Bringing him back to EA might allow the 2K games to finally improve…
Loren, I don’t think we go in looking for problems… we should be able to go in hoping that things work as they should. You just listed off more things than should ever be acceptable for a sports game release (and still left off others.) They keep trying to add more and more features every year, which would be great if they didn’t keep making their development cycle shorter every season, which leads to more and more broken features. Sure they might fix one or two things that were broken last year, but they add more bugs than they fix.
If we, the hardcore sports gamer, don’t complain about what’s broken, who will?
I think they all want us to become part of the mainstream and just look at a game and say, well… they did a decent job… that’s worth $60 every year.
I can’t do that anymore. I want them to do a great job. That’s when it’s worth $60 for me.
July 22nd, 2008 at 11:57 am
“I was being sarcastic about Brinkman. He’s made worse games each year in the 2K series. Bringing him back to EA might allow the 2K games to finally improve… ”
Why? And by the way, I hated the MVP series. I don’t understand the love for it.
Brinkman adds too much extraneous shit to his games that don’t really improve the important things - AI, fielding, etc.