When I tired of practice, I cranked the game down to the easiest settings and played my first real match. I took the Titans, because I had never heard of them, and I played against a team called the Jaguars.
I crushed them.
And as I did so, I had another breakthrough: I finally saw the genius of downs. Now, if you're anybody but me, odds are good that you already know how downs work. But consider it from the perspective of a fan of role-playing games. Football is a turn-based game: The other guys have the ball, and they try to score against you. You get the ball, and drive it down the field. Battles in role-playing games are also turn-based. You hit the monsters, they hit you, you hit them, they hit you, and then you win, 'cause the player usually does.
Football is so much more magnificent than that. When you have the ball, you get four tries to move it just 10 yards down the field. If you can't do it, the game gets fed up and gives the other guys a chance. But here's the awesome part: Let's say you lose possession. You give up the ball, and the other guys are storming their way to the end zone -- but unlike, say, Dragon Quest IX, you don't have to just sit there and take it. You don't have to stand there with your spiky hair and your giant sword, watching something smack you in the head. When you don't have the ball, you can play defense.
You can go for a tackle. You can swat the ball out of their hands. You can even make an interception. (This happened to me a lot, and it made me suspicious.) You can fight them for every inch of every yard until you finally wrestle the ball back. You're constantly battling for power, making it a game of drama -- one of building and thwarting momentum, instead of a stale tit-for-tat turn-taking.
This whole downs thing is so great, so well-balanced, and so exciting, that I'm surprised more games don't try something like it. Madden, you got this one right. Next year, don't change a thing.
Lesson #3: Those Are Real People Down There
In one of my first games, a nasty tackle brought down one of my players. I was warned that he had an injury. "So what?" I asked. "I've got other guys sitting around, don't I?" But then I realized, that's the point: These are all real people. They make up my team. And I can't just make more of them.
You can skip many of the hardcore features of Madden -- for instance, I never traded a player or went through training, I knew I wasn't going to start memorizing stats or even learn any of the players' names (although I noticed that one guy, named C. Johnson, kills it pretty consistently). But playing as an absolute rookie is so easy that even I got tired of it. As I got more familiar with the concept and the controls, I started taking charge of my game. Instead of letting the computer pick my plays, I tried choosing my own.
I bumped it up one rung from Rookie to Pro, and I felt the pain immediately. All those lucky interceptions I'd been getting were gone. Instead of rolling over for me on every play, the other team fought back -- hard. My first game at Pro ended in a 17-13 loss to the Bengals. I was ahead in the last minute of the game, when I decided to pass instead of rush. Little did I know (and no one warned me!) that passing stops the clock, and rushing doesn't. My mistake gave the Bengals a chance to score a game-winning touchdown in literally the last second of the game, leaving me red-faced, jabbering, and ready to kill.
Damn you, Bengals, wherever you're from (India?). And damn you, rules of football.
But I have to admit, it was the most exciting game of anything that I've played in a long, long time.
