Here is my full review for Madden NFL 10. I determined that it was too early to judge a game before a certain amount of time has passed so I waited until now. Hope you guys enjoy reading it!

Pro-Tak: When I first heard of the 9 man gang tackles I was thinking that this would be a great feature.  While the feature in Madden 10 shows potential, it falls short if what it could be.  The gang tackles look more like a bunch of people hugging and then they side to fall to the ground or let the runner go.  It’s also not as dynamic as the developer’s let us to believe.  There are times when you just can’t get other people to help out, this is usually when an animation starts and now no one can contribute to the play. There are time when I’m trying to add to the pile but my player just gets bumped around the pile and then the player falls forward for a first down, this is crucial on goal line plays.  EA might be working on this feature a lot for Madden 11 to make it work better, but right now, it has a lot to be wished for especially being able to add people to the pile when you want and not having the AI decide to add them.

Online Franchise: I am the commissioner of serious Madden league and before online franchise, the only option we had was leaguedaddy.com which charged at least $100 a year PER league.  I was quite excited for this feature hoping that it would be the salvation for all professional Madden leagues.  I have encountered many problems so far.  There are times where player stats appear on the wrong team, this happened to me in my week 1 game.  There’s also no way to prevent people from quitting, joining and open team, releasing all their good players, quitting and rejoining with their old team, and then signing all those players, so much about having the commissioner approve those things.  I also had problems with very one-sided trades.  What really seemed to kill my league the most, was that there wasn’t an option for flex scheduling.  Flex-Scheduling is almost a must if you want to keep most of your players.  If you’re going to be gone for a week, you can play as many games as you want the day before without needing the commissioner to advance the week, this is key to the success to many leagues.  Another thing I can’t control is nullifying a game.  If a player in the superbowl decides to glitch and all this other stuff and comes out with the win, the only thing I can do is kick him out, but he’ll be recorded as the Super Bowl winner and I can’t do anything about it.  I am now going to purchase two leaguedaddy subscriptions because of the lack of control I have in the Online franchise.  Online franchise is a good start, but these tools are necessary for a great league.  I would also like the ability for something similar but without all the franchise stuff and cancelling trading and drafts, play with NFL rosters all year long.  Hopefully, EA will hear us out, but this is a step in the right direction.  Some of the good things about Online franchise, if you can actually make it work at a 3-4 games a week pace is that it’s free, no need to lay down $100 a year PER league.  This is a great start, hopefully Madden 11 will fix many of these issues.

New Presentation: This is by far the best presentation I’ve ever seen in a game of Madden.  It’s getting closer to what 2k did for their presentation.  A big step for EA would be to try to get MNF, SNF, FOX, and CBS music and scoreboards and play them in the respective games.  If you’ve ever went to a Monday Night Football game, you would know that they start playing the MNF tune right before they kickoff and the kicker kicks the ball on the right beat, this would be awesome.  I know that it might not happen since they would need to pay to actually get all those rights but can’t those in-game ads help pay for those types of rights?  I know that EA has the money to make this happen, but are they willing enough to actually spend that much money out of their pocket?  I believe that this would help improve game sales due to the improved presentation they will have with this, but I would still be happy if they had great gameplay and average presentation.

Physics: The physics in this game are what really makes everyone angry.  I hate it when you have 3 defenders in front of the falling running back and the animation forces him to fall forward no matter how many people I have trying to push him back.  People on youtube (such as versuz2 and apexisfree) have stated this problem many times and are hoping that the EA will fix this.  The physics get way worse when you play on All-Madden which is the default difficulty in Elite ranked games, in the tournament community, and in the TMFL leagues.  There was also another video where you would see how the ball gets “sucked” in to the defenders hand, simply put, the QB’s can bend it like Beckham.  In the Madden world, the only thing that matters is speed, as told in the story of Rick No Ankles.  Hopefully, when Microsoft puts a machine with more teraflops (helps improve physics) Madden will improve as well.  The Xbox has 1 teraflop while the PS3 has 2 teraflops.  Backbreaker has a game engine that would be amazing in Madden, but I’m not sure if it’s copyrighted or that EA can at least duplicate.

Fight for the Fumble: OK, how come my player is usually holding the ball on the ground for like two seconds and then an offensive player comes and then starts the “fight for the fumble?”  You would think that he would get up and start running, but I guess I’m wrong.  Take the feature off, it hurts more than it helps, especially if you’re opponent is using a controller with the “turbo” feature.  Plus, there’s a glitch that involves this feature that makes every player go to the ball and you’re just stuck there.

Overall Thoughts: Even though there’s a lot of problems with this year’s game, it’s definitely a step forward for the Madden NFL franchise.  I hope EA can get it right, if they need the community help, they can get it.  It’s just a matter of them wanting to get the help because it’s there waiting for them.  I hope all of you understand that every game is going to have glitches, it’s the people who want to ruin the game that post in the internet or decided to sell them (yes there’s people who sell them for money).  Overall, I still like this version of Madden.  Those of you who play online against random people probably don’t like it because of the glitchers, that’s why I don’t play against random people.  I’m trying to create a place where people can play games against non-glitching players and it’s up to the rest of the community to make similar places.  Good step in the right direction, EA should focus on what’s there already and not add any new features, gameplay is key.  Two steps forward, one step back.