EA Sports UFC 6 - PlayStation 5 Review

 

EA Sports UFC 6 by developer EA Sports and publisher Electronic Arts—PlayStation 5 review written by Nick with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

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Madden NFL 26 - PlayStation 5 Review

Madden NFL 26 is developed by EA Tiburon and published by Electronic Arts—Sony PlayStation 5 review written by Nick with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes.

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Madden NFL 23 Review

Madden NFL 23 by developers EA Sports, EA Tiburon and publisher Electronic Arts—Microsoft Xbox Series X|S review written by Nick with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

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Madden NFL 23 hits different right out of the gates. The tired argument of “It’s just a roster update” falls flat this year more so than even in other recent years. This year’s iteration is a notable improvement over the last few years.

Of course, credit to the team here for hitting me in the nostalgia right off of the bat. For those who follow the NFL, they know that John Madden passed away on Dec 28, 2021. An NFL Hall of Fame coach and one of the most colorful sports broadcasters ever, John Madden was one of those ever-present personalities as I was growing up, and this football video game franchise with his name on it had a lot to do with my love for the sport at a young age.

So it is only fitting that the game kicks off with a screenshot of John Madden in his younger years, and the ‘game loading’ video is a mash-up of modern and throwback Madden titles, with the tagline: Thanks, Coach. We then rolled into the Madden Legacy Game that features many of his favorite players from over the years. These aren’t necessarily ‘best player’ studs like Tom Brady, but workhorse players like Mike Vrabel as well. Add in the various commentary pieces that extoll not just the players, but John Madden’s career as well, and this felt like a really fitting way to open things up.

Given that this is a series I started playing when the Sega Genesis came out and was a weekly staple with my friends and I throughout our college years. It was also a means for us to play franchises together and stay in touch as we ‘grew up and moved away’. There’s a lot of sentiment I carry for this series. All of that said however, I wanted to take an objective look at what Madden NFL 23 brings to the table this year, and overall? I’m really happy with most of it.

First and foremost are the tweaks to the actual gameplay. Over the years, the devs have tried to tweak the passing game the most. Some of those things (like the ability to change velocity on your throws) worked better than others (looking at you ill-fated passing cone of yesteryear), but we haven’t really seen a lot of improvements over the last few years now. This introduces a new skill-based system that gives you a lot more control – and complication – over the passing game. Accuracy and power are big parts of this, but also the ability to lead your receiver.

This more open and free method of passing takes some time to get used to. As someone who has spent years just pressing the button harder to throw bullets and hope the odds favor me, I struggled with these controls for the first few games. Stick with it. I promise you – once you get the hang of it? It’s so worth it. If you have a speedy receiver who can take the top off of the defense? This is a much better way to leverage that assuming your quarterback has the arm power to see the throw through. This change greatly reduced the feeling that defenders were just glued to the ball’s trajectory for knockdowns or interceptions compared to years past.

Defense got a bit of love this year as well, with stand-up tackles that are a bigger part of the running game (especially with a bruising back like Derrick Henry) trying to bust free. Running backs have a little more control over their cuts as well, making for some truly fantastic moments if you have a quick, agile running back (and some truly embarrassing moments if I try that with a slower guy who feels like he has his cleats in cement). Still, the focus feels like it went primarily into the passing game, which honestly makes a ton of sense given that the real NFL product has become much more pass-heavy in recent years.

Beyond the gameplay itself, we still have the top-notch presentation. Not that there is a wealth of improvement to be had here. Some newly popular or just new players (shoutout to Aidan Hutchinson as a Detroit Lions fan here) get some nice face scans and accurate representations of their physiques out on the field. Uniforms can become visibly wrinkled at times throughout the game. There are some cool new on-field animations, particularly in those wide receivers versus defensive back duels where there is a lot of jockeying for position on routes, especially near the line of scrimmage. The arenas, the way stats are presented, the color commentators and more all do an excellent job of recreating the NFL experience, even if this is one area that hasn’t seen much change overall.

Speaking of modes that didn’t get much love this year, there are a couple. With Madden NFL 23 being the latest in what is a franchise with annual releases, I don’t go into it expecting that there will be huge changes to every mode – my hope is that the improvements come to the modes I play most, and am fine of cobwebs that form around the ones I play least. For me The Yard and Madden Ultimate Team are probably the least interesting modes, and they’re the two that gathered a bit of dust from last season.

For those new to the series, or if you just haven’t played in some time, The Yard is basically a backyard six on six arcade style of game that leverages your Face of the Franchise as the only real reason to give it a go. Madden Ultimate Team seems like it should interest me more. I love fantasy football and I collect sports cards. So the idea of building a fantasy team out of packs of cards you earn should be a hoot for me, but the returns are only so-so. It’s incredibly grindy, but that’s intentional as it hopes to get you to spend more money on virtual packs of cards. This has become pretty common in a lot of sports games, but I don’t love it as a philosophy and this mode hasn’t really seen any growth in the last couple of years.

Where Madden NFL 23 has seen some change is the relatively recently added (a few years ago) Face of the Franchise mode. This has become EA’s answer to games like NBA 2K that have gained a ton of popularity around the idea of creating a superstar that then has a somewhat narrative-based career arc. The story itself has gotten a bit less cinematic than in years past, where you played a character through their high school or college years to make the pros – often as some sort of an underdog story.

Here it is a bit different as you are a fifth year player who everyone agrees has loads of potential – but it hasn’t quite clicked yet at previous stops. So now you get to pick a team to sign with, and to play more positions than ever (QB, WR, LB, CB and HB) as you develop your player and try to carve out a legendary career for yourself. Because of its aforementioned ties to The Yard, there’s a bit of connective tissue here that makes this mode a bit more relevant than it might be on its own. It feels like there’s still room to grow here, but I enjoyed my time with Face of the Franchise all the same.

Last and certainly not least we have Franchise mode. This is the heart of the Madden series for me. In college my buddies and I would pick teams, play through seasons over the span of weeks, eating wings, drinking beers and talking a ton of trash to one another. It’s where you take on a franchise (go Lions!) and assume the role of owner, general manager or coach. All have different perks, such as the coach improving himself through talent and progression, and thereby making his players better. The other role is as an owner, where you still play the games, but your focus is more on whether or not to relocate the team, or make other tweaks to your franchise to improve profitability.

However, the primary carrot dangled in this mode is the overall sense of progression. Play your games, meet certain goals, watch your players improve and do what you can to help your team improve too. That can be through internal player development, scouting for the best upcoming rookies, making major trades or free agent signings and more. There were some great changes made to how staffing and scouting worked last season, and those have been carried over here.

Madden NFL 23 drills down deeper into the players though, assigning them motivations that can impact their progression, but also how they feel about their relationship with the team. This is most notable in how it impacts things like contract negotiations. If the player doesn’t feel like you’ve done right by them, it’s going to be much harder to get them to come back on a reasonable salary, which in turn depletes the amount of money you have to field the best team you can.

If the gameplay simply stunk, none of the above would matter – but the football action is still a blast. Are there odd AI behaviors that pop up? Sure – there’s 22 players on the field all trying to work independently of one another and exploitable to outright odd things can happen in zone coverage for example. But by and large the way the lines mash against one another, the way wide receivers try to shed jams at the line of scrimmage, the way running backs try to eek out a few more yards and more all just feels good. Add to it the momentum meters and objectives during the game that might give one team an advantage over the other (for example during Lions home games, they can receive a slight acceleration boost if things break their way), and there was a lot that I enjoyed.

Madden NFL 23 continues to make improvements, and for those thinking it is just a roster update? Give it a go first and you’ll see that it’s a lot more. This is especially true of Franchise Mode, which is where I tend to spend the majority of my time. There’s still some rough edges here and there and room for improvement with some of the languishing modes, but by and large Madden NFL 23 is a great tribute to the series’ namesake and an entertaining game of football.

Score: 8.5 / 10

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Madden NFL 21 - XB1 Review

Madden NFL 21 by developer EA Sports and publisher Electronic Arts—Microsoft Xbox One review written by Nick with a purchased copy.

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

Football is back! My natural enthusiasm for the fall sports season has me incredibly excited to pick up the controller and juke some defenders with this latest iteration of the Madden series. However, there are some undeniable issues with this year's Madden NFL 21 release that won’t discourage those gamers who feel that the yearly releases are little more than glorified roster updates.

I am a fan of the yearly releases in sports video games, because it matches the cadence of the annual sports season. There is always a sense of renewed hope that comes with a new season, the deep hope of fans such as myself that this year will be better than last year. I have been playing the Madden series since its earliest days on the SEGA Genesis, and unfortunately a trend has emerged over the years that holds true this year as well: the series generally struggles during years when there is a new console generation being introduced.

I am not entirely sure why this is, but my theory is that the developers are having to split time and resources between the current gen and next generation consoles and that leaves them too thin to make sizable improvements with the tight one year timeline. That is how it felt again this year. From a core gameplay perspective, Madden NFL 21 is fine. The gameplay is still exciting, and the generally authentic presentation has me itching for the regular season’s kickoff. There are numerous modes here and ways to play as well, but the issue is that most of them feel very similar to last year.

One exception to that rule is The Yard, which is sort of a backyard take on football with family and friends with a shortened (60 yard) field that is more focused on arcade action than an authentic simulation experience like Franchise Mode. It is fun, but a mode I struggled to really get invested in. The other heavily updated feature is Face of the Franchise, which I generally enjoyed quite a bit. It is a mixture of the narrative-heavy Longshot story mode that Madden introduced a few years ago, and last year’s take on your custom quarterback going through a story mode that leads to a franchise experience.

Here Face of the Franchise finds your raw athlete having to sub in at quarterback for the local star (very Varsity Blues in that sense). However, your story doesn’t end in high school and goes to college and then to the pros. One of the things I really liked was that unlike last year, I wasn’t boxed into just being a quarterback, but I had the option to play a running back or wide receiver if I preferred. Seeing as I generally play a running back in my career modes, I welcomed that particular change. It will be interesting to see if this mode can mature into other roles such as defense as well (I tend to like to play a defensive lineman or linebacker as well).

The actual story is hardly revolutionary, but I liked the sense of ownership over the different decisions and how your pro team evolves based on some of the choices made along the way (even if they did not always make a lot of sense. For example in my Lions franchise, my player backed a stud receiver as well as two other really good ones on the roster and the big roster move presented to me was either another stud wideout or a subpar tight end – neither of which really made much sense when weighed against the roster’s current construction). The way it jumps from one big moment to another, interlacing story around these events actually kept me invested in how my player developed while the related achievements felt far less grindy than the Legacy achievements in prior versions of the game. All in all, this mode is a win with potential for growth that I’m pretty excited about.

Outside of these two modes however, not much else has changed. I liked the way everything kicked off with creating your avatar right away (similar too what UFC 4 did as well), but otherwise Madden Ultimate Team (MUT) still feels a bit like a money grab (over and beyond the premium $60 price tag the game costs). For those unfamiliar with this mode, it’s basically a combination of fantasy football and card collection. It has made some nice strides over the last couple of years and my favorite of EA’s ‘Ultimate Team’ modes found in FIFA, NHL and NBA (if that series ever gets back on its feet), but it’s still not my favorite mode.

Outside of career mode, I spend the majority of my team with franchise mode. My Detroit Lions might be terrible in real life, but here I can make them the champions that the real-life football gods will never seem to allow. It is a deep mode, with lots of options that… is pretty much where it was at near the end of the PlayStation 3 / Xbox 360 era. Over the last few years some ‘new’ things were added like owner mode… that had existed last generation. For being the most popular and robust feature in the Madden series, Franchise is starting to feel very neglected at this point and is in dire need of some innovation at this point.

The core gameplay is fun, as linebackers seem less superhuman and running backs have ample entertaining animations while blockers seem to lock-in properly – all things that you expect but often go underappreciated because a lot of effort goes into them. When you have 22 players smashing into one another on a field as big as this, there are numerous physics in play that the series had generally handled rather well. Still, there seemed to be more bugs than usual in this year’s release. Some of them are pretty cosmetic, some more annoying. For example, a weird animation occurred after my team recovered a fumble and my player wound up in sort of a crouched / hopping animation that the other team showed no interest in tackling. I sort of three-point stanced myself into the endzone. It was truly weird and I wish I had recorded it in retrospect.

Other odd bugs surfaced during gameplay, such as one of the times in Face of the Franchise, my team was lining up for a punt return except instead of it being my special teams – it was my starting offense. Equally odd, Matthew Stafford (my quarterback) jumped offsides immediately and the other team’s 4^th and 3 turned into a first down. It was a really buggy sequence. Simple text errors show up as well, such as when in Face of the Franchise my goal is two rushing touchdowns but the update tracker at the bottom of the screen said ‘receiving touchdowns’ in two different games. It still tracked properly based on rushing, but seems like a weird, simple oversight.

The commentary also struggles mightily this year. I enjoy the team they have bene using the last several years, but there is just wrong or too often repeated commentary. In one game, my running back Swift (which is just a fantastic running back name, by the way) had already had a reception for a touchdown in the first quarter. But each subsequent RUSHING touchdown triggered a line from the commentator that it was the running back’s first receiving touchdown… all three times. Repetition is particularly problematic at times also.

For example, there was a line about how the front office had made a concerted effort to improve the defense and how they have to be liking their returns. It was triggered by fumble recoveries for touchdowns – something that should be a relatively rare event, but I was playing the Bears and they suck – and I had three of those events. Each time I heard the same line. Other lines I heard sometimes two or three times in the same game as well. These kinds of on-field glitches really take away from what should be a polished, AAA experience by now, especially given how little actually changed from last year to this one.

Issues popped up off of the field for me as well. Voice acting is weirdly not there at times during Face of the Franchise, replaced by oddly flickering text splashes as questions and answers are dealt with. I get that they can’t voice players like Matthew Stafford but reporters and faux GMs? Also, for some reason my franchise mode’s save file went from my name (Nick Herber) to my FB turned TE (Nick Bawden). I have no idea how that happened, but it has me a bit concerned about the file save integrity as that’s just really weird.

Other glitches like an inability to train (selecting start training just kept kicking me back to the main hub screen in Franchise Mode) forced me to fully quit the game and restart on three separate occasions now. None of these is a deal breaker in and of itself, but it’s a solid sampling of issues for a game I’ve only been playing for about a week so far and that I generally expect much better from. It will be interesting to see if these kinds of issues persist on the next generation consoles in a couple of months.

None of these offenses in and off themselves is that big of a deal, but taken as a whole, they do detract from what is still a deep, entertaining sports simulation with a ton of things to do. Progressing through Face of the Franchise was really fun. I still spent hours tweaking my roster to fit my playing style in Franchise Mode. While The Yard is shallow, there is undeniable appeal in its fast-paced arcade style of gameplay. The visuals are better than ever. In particular I love the slick feeling of chaining together moves in the running game or delivering bone rattling hits with the right control stick. Some of the new ideas here are interesting, if some missed opportunities are visible as well.

Summary

Madden NFL 21 is a fun game of football, and as someone who has been missing the normalcy of sports this year, I am still excited to play it. However, looking past my longstanding affection for the series, this year’s release is not a strong one. Limited improvements and multiple bugs enforce the impression that the development team had to split their focus between current generation consoles and next, leading to a lackluster and only slightly above average result.

Score: 6.25 / 10

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EA SPORTS UFC 4 - PS4 Review

EA SPORTS UFC 4 by developer and publisher Electronic Arts (EA)—Sony PlayStation 4 review written by Nick with a purchased copy.

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

It can be easy to assume that a series of sports games is little more than a roster update, but making that assumption about EA Sports UFC 4 would be a huge mistake. The series has continued to play to its strengths while weeding out some of the things that simply did not work before to release a well-rounded and thoroughly entertaining mixed martial arts experience.

Right off of the bat, I noticed that Avatar trend that EA seems to be adopting this year (I had a very similar experience when playing Madden over the last week as well), and I think it’s a change for the better. It puts the focus on you – and the idea that this is your career, with an emphasis on narrative that makes the sporting experience infinitely more personal. While discussing modes, let me just say that I do not miss the Ultimate Team mode in the least. In fact, I’m sort of stunned that it’s gone. This has been an EA staple of sports games for a long time, and while my mileage varies on the mode depending on what game I am playing (it works better for me in Madden than any of the other titles), UFC was always the most awkward and frustrating fit for me personally. Glad to see it gone so the focus could be put into other areas. You can still spend real money, but it’s mostly just focused on cosmetics that are nice to have but hardly made me feel like EA was dipping back into my wallet a second time.

Fans returning from UFC 3 will spot many similarities in this release, but I like that the core experience is wrapped up in my avatar. There are a handful of modes that have both online and offline focus, but by far the career one was where I spent the majority of my cycles. Kudos to the development team for integrating the training and introductory story into a nice, clean package that teaches you the ropes while giving you some backstory at the same time. Once you graduate from that, you enter the career’s mode’s primary gameplay loops, and it’s an addictive one.

How addictive? Well, the first day I fired it up, I was playing until about 3am – about seven hours later with only a handful of breaks. Essentially you sign a contract for X number of fights, and you can select a promotional reward with goals to try and meet above and beyond that. Some of these are easier than others, such as making sure you’re in peak condition for all of your matches, while others are more challenging such as getting three wins by knockout or submission in the first round. Fulfilling these contracts gets you more money and fans. The fans come in useful, because they make it easier to hype your matches up. More hype means more spectators when the time comes, which means more money. It’s all very cyclical.

Once you iron out your contract and select your opponent, you go into a camp that lets you have 100 points per week to spend on activities as you see fit. Want to spar with a boxing partner? That’s going to help get you in shape for your match as well as boosting your abilities. The first time you do it during a camp, it will chew up 40 of your action points. Want to do it again? No sweat, but it’ll cost you 45 points this time – assuming you don’t injure your sparring partner and force them out of the camp for the rest of the duration. There’s some risk and reward to these sparring sessions as well for you, as you could sustain an injury that impacts your health, your available action points or your money (if you decide to spend top dollar to heal up as quickly as possible).

There are some other ways to spend you action points, as you can do events that boost your popularity as well as the upcoming match hype. Some of these are ‘required’ events by the UFC (such as a photoshoot). You can skip those, but expect to take a hit to your wallet if you do. You can also study film on your opponent, helping you to gain an upper hand in the match against them. One of the more interesting subsystems in place is also the primary way you learn new moves – by inviting other fighters to your camp. If you have a healthy relationship with them (usually done by being pleasant via social media engagement), they will charge you less money to come to your camp. If you have a tense relationship, they’ll charge more – but hey, if you even wind up fighting that person, the bad blood only helps the hype of the match. Once they’re in your camp, you do a sparring session where you execute said move so many times and unlock it. Generally speaking, the striking moves are easier to learn than the wrestling, at least for me – but that has always been the way of it for this series and me.

When creating my new fighter, I went the kickboxer route. I like the flashy kicks, and admit to trying to set them up for big knockouts, but the meat and potatoes of my gameplay style is the boxing.

I will use this moment to make a plug for another Fight Night. I really mix good boxing simulations and that series was always one of the best. Anyways…

I will say that wrestling is improved this year, at least from my standpoint. It still has some rough edges, but significant strides were made in making it more approachable, and the results show. If you go for a joint submission, you have a fairly simple-to-do, but hard-to-master mini-game with your left and right triggers to line up a bar of yours over the bar of your opponent. Meanwhile the defender is trying to get their bar ‘away’ from yours to escape. It is a similar principle on the choke-outs as well, but using a stick to move your bar around instead of triggers. The stick manipulations for the ground game in general have seen streamlining as well that makes the whole process a lot less confusing than it used to be. I still prefer the striking of the standup game over the ground game, but I no longer feel like a paralyzed crab on the mat either, so I appreciate that.

The way characters progress however, was where the dangling carrot was at for me. Don’t get me wrong – I loved working up the rankings and earning Scrooge McDuck levels of money to swim around in, but the hook that kept me coming back were those improvements in my fighter. There are multiple systems at work simultaneously. For one, the more you use a particular move, the better you get with it. That creates a leveling system within those moves as you attempt to five-star them and then prestige them (by knocking out one of your opponents using it).

Additionally, there’s the aforementioned invite a fighter to your camp to learn new moves. In addition to that, you earn Evolution Points that you can put into perks suck as reduced stamina consumption on strikes in the first two rounds, or faster and more dangerous use of elbows and knees. These points can also be put into numerous fields on your character, from strike accuracy to kicking power or kicking accuracy to submission defense and chin health. One interesting change is the aforementioned injuries that can occur in a spar or match. You might wind up with something small – you could wind up with something major. Take a good enough hit to the chin, and your chin rating will drop half a star and force you to put precious Evolution Points back into it to recover.

The presentation is cleaner across the board, with character models looking better than ever and arenas feeling alive with activity. There are still some odd moments as a fighter hits the mat and their limbs flail about a bit oddly, and while the commentators were solid enough, there was a ton of repetition in what they said. Maybe that was partially my own fault for playing seven straight hours, but I was hearing the same lines over and over again about midway through the experience – to the points where I generally just tuned them out.

Summary

EA Sports UFC 4 didn’t reinvent the wheel here – but it did a nice job of making sure that it was as round and smooth as possible. The end result was an experience I found hard to put down as I binged it for hours on end and appreciated the improvements that have been made. I still think more can be done to improve the ground game, but I appreciated the improvements that were made and am hopeful for the future of the series.

Score: 8.25 / 10

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NHL 17 and Ichabod - Beeps and Beers

Fall is undoubtedly here. From fall sports (hello NFL, NHL and NBA) to different foods and of course, seasonal beers. NHL 17 is doing a nice job of getting me to play the game differently than in years past. Traditionally I stick to the hometown teams in Madden, NHL and MLB: The Show, working through their franchise modes. For whatever reason however, this year NHL 17 has had me sinking a lot of time into my career mode, and by and large I have been thoroughly enjoying it. Of course it helps when I am enjoying a cool beer or two as well, as these modes can be major time sinks, so sipping on something like Ichabod certainly helps some of these hours-long play sessions.

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NHL 17 - Play Time

Earlier in the week I showed a couple of different games of Madden 17, but today I wanted to talk a bit about the recently released NHL 17. For one, I decided to keep most of the settings at default, like usual when showing gameplay footage. But beyond that, I wanted to show a couple of different modes. Traditionally I play Franchise mode most heavily in the NHL series, so the first string of videos touches on this.

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NHL 17 - Xbox One Review

I am not a sports fan, at least not when it comes to the sports genre with video games. I grew up playing various sports and still have a healthy appreciation for athletics, but when it comes to video games, I am less interested. That changed a few years back when I reviewed NHL 15. It had been years since I had played a non-racing sports game (though I did play a golf game or two over the years). I loved NHL 15 and last year, with NHL 16 being among the best NHL games ever, NHL 17 has some serious shoes to fill.

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Madden NFL 17 - Play Time

While we never got a scored review out for Madden NFL 17, that does not mean we haven't had a chance to play the game (a lot). My team of choice is always the local one with sports games, which means I am responsible for turning around the annually terrible Detroit Lions. Here we have videos from two complete games, showing Madden NFL 17 off on default settings in a franchise mode.

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Madden NFL 17 and Oktoberfest - Beeps and Beers

Fall has certainly arrived here in Michigan. Cool breezes, leaves are turning color and the NFL season is well underway now. While we did not get a Madden 17 review up this year like usual (no review copy = later acquisition), that does not mean I am skipping my yearly dose of video game pigskin. Fall generally means a couple more things for me as well. Crock-Pot foods is one, and autumn beers is the other. There are two different styles I look forward to in the fall, various forms of pumpkin ale and also Oktoberfest beers, and I would have to say that the Oktoberfest by Bell's Brewery has been my favorite this year by a considerable margin.

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New NHL 17 Gameplay Preview Trailer Details On-Ice Changes

We were big fans of NHL 16 last year, but a new year means a new version of popular sports titles, and we are pretty excited to share out this new trailer.

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NHL 16 - Xbox One Review

The NHL franchise by EA Sports has been around for 24 years and has gone through numerous changes, some good, some bad. Last year's NHL title was critiqued heavily due to the lack of various game modes as it went "back to basic." This year's iteration of the franchise title is without a doubt, the best in many years. With snappy controls, fantastic commentary, gorgeous graphics and a plethora of easy-to-use modes, NHL 16 will be a tough title to beat come next year's Silver Anniversary (25th anniversary) title.

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Madden NFL 16 - PS4 Review

Another season and another Madden game. You could be forgiven for having a cynical standpoint on the series, given that it has yearly releases and is the only NFL game in town ever since EA signed an exclusive deal for the NFL rights. It is completely understandable if you feel that every season is a generic roster update and nothing more. However, you would be wrong if you held these opinions about the newly released Madden NFL 16, which has moved the sticks forward more than ten yards this season.

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NHL 15 - Xbox One Review

I was recently speaking with my brother about sports games and I was trying to determine what the last sport-based video game I had played was. Depending on who you are and how you see racing games it would be Forza Motorsports 5 however, I do not believe that the Forza games are "sports;" they are a way of life that must be taken, so the Forza titles do not count. That would leave The Golf Club and before it, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2012 and prior to that, it was the original Tiger Woods game. We then got onto the subject of the NHL game franchise and it dawned on the two of us that the last hockey game we seriously played was an NHL title for the original Xbox (and before that, was that Wayne Gretzky game for the Nintendo 64) so it has been some time since I got my mitts on a hockey title for some real in-depth playing.

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Madden 15 - Xbox One Review

Madden, like the sport it emulates, is a cyclical thing. Year after year teams trot out some changes (rosters, game plans or coaches) in hopes of achieving a better result that the prior year. Most of the time the teams are not dramatically different, and in the end fans still watch because each year unfolds differently - oftentimes in unexpected ways. Madden is perhaps a bit more predictable, but the parallels are certainly there. This year's Madden trots out its best game of football in a few years.

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Madden 25 cover - Barry is the best

This gave me a grin when I read it. I am a big Madden fan, as most people here know. I also follow the NFL quite closely and am a huge homer, rooting for my Detroit Lions. I have been voting Barry throughout the contest, and he won.

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Madden 13 - A look back at the season

Happy Monday! So my weekend consisted mostly of Madden and... Guild Wars 2. I just picked that up late Saturday night and played until an incredibly early hour of morning on Sunday when my son promptly took over and created an account. I got to level six and he's sitting up around eleven or twelve. I get the feeling my PC will keep busy over the holidays when school lets out.

After watching an abysmal Lions performance yesterday as the NFL regular season nears its end (just like my fantasy football leagues!), I thought this would be an appropriate time to take a look back at Madden 13 and how it has held up months after my initial review.

When a game first comes out, there is this rush to try and play as much as possible as quickly as possible. This is especially true for those of us who are trying to review the game. Most games I review on here are ones that have been out for some time, but others like Madden I got to right away. I thought it might be interesting to take a look at the 'season that was' so to speak on Madden 13, now that the NFL season is starting to wind down. I have had a lot more time to play the game, and overall I have enjoyed it - but there have been some problems along the way as well.

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