The Official Madden NFL 2006 Thread
Well, it's either Madden or nothing this year, so I guess I'll have to bite the bullet and feed Great Mammon some of my cash.
In EA' s defence, they seem to have overhauled everything so it looks as good as ESPN did last year, maybe even better. Gamespot has gameplay videos up, looks nice, and the players are a little less stumpy than last year, though still not up to real life proportions. I'd link some screenshots, but nobody seems to have anything legit yet of the on-field stuff, just staged replay screens.
This year's new features are a little wacky. There's a mentor mode where a former player coaches a player you've made - yes indeed, you can learn the secrets of multiple blown knee ligaments and a 3 year career from Terrell Davis himself!
There's also a new feature called QB vision. Basically, the screen's dimmed except for an area representing your QB's field of vision. Passing to a reciever outside this field of vision means your pass will be siginificantly less accurate. Watching viedeo of this, apparently Peyton Manning's eyes are mounted on the side of his head because he can see everything at once, which is pretty weird considering he spent 3 straight years passing to Marvin Harrison over & over & over again. Does this mean Tom Brady can see behind himself? (I'm pretty sure he can in real life - either that or he has Spidey sense).
I'm assuming you can turn that feature off. I'm also curious to how it'll handle, because QBs in the video didn't seem to be able to move their field of vision all that quickly.
The best feature is that McNabb's on the cover, which means he'll go out for the season with a Chunky Soup injury or something. My poor Giants could use a break.
There are no (real) 360 screenshots yet - I'm guessing they'll wait until September so they don't kill the buzz on the game for current systems. That's probably the version I'll end upwating for, but the Xbox version will end up getting a rental just to see what they did with it.