I think, in the past 10 years or so, EA has brought a lot of this frustration, from the sports gamers, on themselves in really two significant ways. Limited QA and exclusive licenses.

The short development cycle is well documented, but I think limited QA is a serious problem. Now that sounds like a duh statement, but I think the true QA problem is really within management. In no way do I think the QA testers aren’t hard workers and I believe they probably noted almost all of the issues we are so worked up about. The problem is with mangament and the term “Shippable Bugs”. When I spent a summer doing QA for EA, a little over 10 years ago, “Shippable Bugs” was a term thrown around quite a bit. Now all software products will have bugs you just ship because you can’t fix everything, in a timely manner, and some bugs are insignificant and can be addressed later…others aren’t inisignificant. As we got closer to our release date, now this was 10 years ago when the Madden dev cycle was a little longer, we would define which bugs were shippable and which weren’t. At that time there was a willingness to delay a product if not all unshippable bugs were fixed. It seems now that the definition has gotten looser and looser within EA management. In reality the Marketing department at EA probably has significantly more say over when a product ships than the QA department does.

My second argument over why we sports gamers are so worked up is the exclusive licenses. It is true that these games are aimed at the 98% of buyers who are just wanting to play an explosive scoring game with their buddies, so they can raz each other. And why not, EA sports games were built on the foundation of being where you went for an action sports game as opposed to a game with depth and longevity beyond the last game you played. As sports gamers that was fine with us. We knew that we could play Front Page Sports Football or High Heat or NASCAR from papyrus if we wanted a simulation. Once they started buying up licenses, the competition was eliminated. By purchasing those licenses they took on the responsibility, whether they intended to or not, to provide the functionality that other games provided us gamers. This is why us sim/dynasty gamers get so frustrated with EA. They aren’t interested in properly addressing the features we want which were provided by the competition they eliminated. It would probably be better if they just released a game that only played a quick game of football and admitted “this is what we do best and all that we are going to do”. Adding the sim and dynasty features w/o putting a real effort to get it right, when EA’s real intent is to deliver a fast-action game, is just rubbing salt in the wound of us sim/dynasty players.

Put the two together and you have the current state of sports gaming. Marketing controllers when a product goes out, irregardless of the state, and exclusive licenses ensure there is nowhere else to turn to if we are unhappy with the product.

I will have to remember to turn down the Wii Remote volume. I just can’t believe there isn’t an option menu in the game to do so.

I’ve only had a few putts go wrong due to wonky controls.

If you take a nice relaxing swing backward and then follow through quickly, you can get the timing down for stopping to be relatively accurate. It’s not a perfect control method… that’s for sure… but I still find it enjoyable.

Also, there’s just way too much stuff on the screen at once. I feel like I’m going to have a seizure.

I hate the Wiimote voice too. If you press the Home button while in the game, you can lower the Wiimote speaker volume. I haven’t done it, but will be giving it a try.

Have you tried any online games? I tried to connect last night and gave up after several minutes without finding a match. My Wii’s network connectivity was working like a champ with the Internet Channel, so I know that it’s working, it’s just that no one was playing.