Electronic Arts Reveals Next-Gen Madden 47
Tim Grube writes "Electronic Arts has released the very first image of Madden NFL running on the next-generation consoles. This Saturday, on April 23rd, the NFL Draft begins on TV and EA has already scored a promotional commercial to unveil Madden Next-Gen. It will air on ESPN."
Newsflash (Score:2, Interesting)
Of all the nextgen things to reveal, did it have to be football? Show me a shooter, show me a platformer, show me a flight sim, show me anything but sports.
Actually, sports games are a wonderful benchmark (Score:3, Interesting)
1) You hate sports and/or sports games (a *shocker* on slashdot). Joking aside, this is entirely reasonable. I personally don't much care for RPGs or MMORPGs myself, so I don't get excited when I see those screenshots or 9.7/10 ratings.
2) You simply don't think sports are a good benchmark for system performance.
If it is #2, then I (politely) believe you are entirely mistaken. Put it this way... let's take a beautiful game from this generation: Doom3. The gameplay might have been subpar or perhaps it was too dark or overall not worth the 10 year wait, but it was still pretty. As nice-looking as it was, who the hell knows what a demon from hell looks like? Who knows what a Space Station/whatever is "supposed" to look like?
Sports games, and football in particular, are becoming more-and-more television like. Back in SNES/Genesis days (perhaps before), we first had players looking distinct (real-life black players were black in the game, huge linebackers resembled their true self). In PS1/N64 we started to see realistic looking players. By this generation, Eli Manning really looked like Eli Manning. Players faces were scanned and looked very realistic (I think this might have been done in the PS1/N64 days too).
But... as gorgeous as it still is, the "Holy Grail" (in some people's opinion) is for video game football to eventually look something like controlling actual live-NFL TV type games. I dunno about you, but I could see the wrinkles and individual freckles in that screenshot player's nose. Looks amazing. Perhaps we'll see individual blades of grass on the field, and eventually, crowds with 4,000 uniquely-rendered fans.
Then again, I still find my favorite football game to be Tecmo Bowl on NES and Joe Montana 1 on Genesis. Go figure...
Commentators (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh and making the players look nice is all well and good, but I hope to hell that they did something about the crowd. Low-res sprites just look awful. Oh and the cheerleaders need a ton of work too. The ones in Madden 2005... yeesh.