14 DAY TRIAL // One of the video games that I love and spend hours playing every year is Football Manager, the title from Sports Interactive that allows me to guide the destiny of one football team, dealing with everything from signings, tactics, training, media appearances and actual match guidance.
Critics tend to disparage the experience by saying that fans are just “playing a spreadsheet,” and it is true that a lot of numbers are involved and that players do not pay attention to how they interact and combine in order to find a winning team and evaluate its performance after each match.
Madden NFL 15, which simulates American football and is more action driven, felt oddly familiar once it began to deliver a constant stream of information, both number and graph based, after each play, trying to offer the data that can make it easier to choose a winning strategy next time.
EA Sports is allowing players to move through a list of suggestions based on what the player community has been doing in similar situations or to take a look at plays based on the situation as interpreted by the game engine.
Veterans who have a deep knowledge of the NFL can easily continue to simply look up the plays that they know will work, but for 90 percent of the players, the new system is both easy to use and impressive in terms of streamlining the experience.
All of them come with justifications and a clear graphic showing their expected results, and it’s easy to get lost in all the info and forget about actually playing the game.
Another element of Madden NFL 15 that has been overhauled is the visual presentation for games, which is now much closer to that seen on television, with a focus on the emotions of all those involved, from players to coaches.
For the first 5 to 10 games I marveled at the way stadiums were brought to life and at the improved physique and faces of the players, but the quality of the presentation becomes secondary when a gamer is trying to cram as much gameplay as possible into a smaller number of hours.
EA Sports could have created a simple option to strip out all the interludes and small videos from the Connected Franchise mode, and I am sure that plenty of veterans of the series would have thanked them for all the time and button pushes they would have been able to save.