State of the Station: The Great Failure

I could talk about the post-TGS fallout, but honestly, there's not much to say, considering that I called Dual Shock 3 a while ago. Not to pat myself on the back, but that's one that just felt too evident not to call. Beyond that, look for Sony to bring out a few more strong first-party titles this year like Ratchet & Clank Future and Uncharted, but really cash in the chips next Spring, when MGS 4 drops (and hopefully, the hardware price too, in a bundle with Dual Shock 3) and the average consumer is HD-ready. You wanna know who I think is going to win this holiday season for HD-gen? HDTV manufacturers, far more than Sony or Microsoft. Also, I like the slim PSP, for the record, although it's obvious that a better slim battery has to be cooking in the lab right now. But that's not what this week's piece is about.

I'll admit it. After over five years of playing FIFA, I still can't turnover a free kick into a point. Every year, I get a copy of Madden, and after a certain period of time, I find the experience so frustrating that I turn it off. Usually, the joys of playing a basketball game aren't found until I turn off most of the sliders and just enjoy play without too many technicalities. What does all of this have in common? One of the biggest complaints that I read about from gamers is how much many of them despise sports games, or sometimes, look down on sports gamers. The biggest issue that I've come to have with sports games as a whole is that they're just too damn inaccessible for many an average gamer.

But wait, you might say. What about EA's efforts on the Wii? Besides Madden 08's disappointing sales (word is that the Xbox version has outsold the Wii version), I don't think that the easiest solution to making sports games more accessible is by unplugging a nunchuk and letting the CPU take the wheel, no matter what someone tells you. The best place to start is to help people get into the game, and most importantly, understand why they're doing what they're doing. Why, pray tell, have tutorial modes become such an afterthought?

During a Madden preview I took earlier in the summer, I asked about the tutorial mode in 08, and how EA Tiburon planned to make it more accessible for people who aren't hardcore NFL fans. I won't say that I was laughed out of the room, but there was a sense that the question was fairly out of place, and the answer was pretty simplistic before moving onto weapons, 60 frames per second, bells, whistles, and so on.


And that's the problem. For people who don't bleed their team's colors from August to early February, why is a run play more important in a situation than just gunning the ball? Why is a Nickel formation more important during a certain play than something else? It would be great to have a step-by-step explanation, with freeze frames, during a play, but you don't really see it. You're supposed to learn this while playing the game, but if you don't know anything about timing a play, which never seems to be well-explained for laymen in the Madden training camps, then why would you continue playing, instead of getting frustrated and giving up?

In soccer games, you're supposed to learn about passing, and why sometimes, a through pass isn't always as good as a direct pass. After a certain amount of time, you'd ideally come to understand why a cross comes in handy. You will seldom, however, learn about positioning of your player, and the correct precision to turn a free kick into a point. You don't tend to learn about what to do when you're the goalkeeper during a penalty shootout. So, more often than not, once you've played the games a while, you'll jump online and some twelve year-old kid in England will beat you 6-0, even though he's playing dirtier, because you can't turn over your fouls into points.