A Look at EA's 'Madden NFL 10' for iPhone

apple itouch EA Madden NFL
september 19,2009

This one new amazing features of apple Itouch for Gamers On Madden NFL

Detailed Look at EA's 'Madden NFL 10' for iPhone
posted September 9th, 2009 2:15 PM EDT by Eli Hodapp in $7.99, Reviews, Sports, iPhone games, iPod touch games

MaddenlogoIt's hard to describe the Madden series of games as a franchise anymore, they've been around so long it seems that a more appropriate way to describe the games would be the "Madden dynasty." The first Madden game appeared on the Apple II all the way back in 1989, it wasn't until Madden '94 that the real NFL teams were included, and sports gamers would have to wait another year until the real players were added. When you look back at the 20 years these games have been around, constantly improving each year, it's no surprise that Madden NFL 10 [App Store] is as good as it is.

Madden NFL 10 was one of the titles we previewed at PAX and spent some time with EA who highlighted the many features from the game.

Madden iPhone 1

First and foremost, Madden NFL 10 includes all of the NFL players, teams, and stadiums. Around 2000 players are in the game in addition to 200 free agents, and all of these players can be freely traded between teams. Whether you want to follow the real NFL trades and move players around based on the official rosters, or just turn your favorite team in to a dream team of the best players, EA says Madden NFL 10's team management can handle it.

Madden NFL 10 was specifically designed by EA's mobile team, which means it plays nicely as an iPhone game. If you get a phone call, need to answer a text message, or quit the game for some other reason, Madden NFL 10 saves the play you were on and reloads right back at the start of the play without any fumbling around with menus, intros, etc. EA also says they have really put a lot of emphasis on play time. Every cut scene, non-essential player animation, or instant replay can be skipped simply by tapping the screen. While there is a lot of fluff in the game, it's all quickly and easily skipped.

While behaving as a good iPhone app is nice, there were two other feature that I thought really stood out: Action Control Time and Hot Routes.

Madden iPhone 3Madden's "Action Control Time" seems to work so well it wouldn't surprise me if we see a lot more sports games imitating it:. When you're playing regularly, the game runs at normal speed, and while on offense you have buttons to sprint and spin. With Action Control Time enabled, however, the game slows down, and additional controls appear allowing you to do things like juking to the left or to the right. The ability to slow things down allows for extremely precise player movements and changes the game from being action oriented, to a more tactical experience as you're able to avoid tackles exactly when you need to, as well as make for the clearest path you can see to the end zone instead of just catching the ball, running forward, and mashing spin as many times as you can.

Playing defense in Action Control Time works just as well, and with it enabled you can jump for balls, dive tackle, or even go in for a big hit– A move that has a high risk of missing, but offers a higher chance of the opposing player fumbling. Again, slowing things down allows for a much more precise defensive attack instead of just switching to whatever player is closest to the one with the ball and mashing tackle.

The other cool feature of Madden NFL 10 is "Hot Routes". Before the snap, you can press the Hot Routes button and redraw the path of any of your players with your finger on the screen, you can even make nonsensical zigzags and they will follow your every command. This takes the 300 included plays and lets you customize them any way you want.

Madden iPhone 2

Passes are controled by tapping on icons appearing above your receivers heads that range from red to green depending on how open they are. When it's time to kick, the kicking controls work just like swinging in Tiger Woods PGA Tour [App Store]. A kicking interface appears on the right hand side of the screen, you drag your finger down to determine the power, then swipe back up to determine the accuracy of where you aimed. All of the player AI, detailed player attributes, and all the other inner workings are in place to allow you to do things like simulate games when playing in season mode instead of playing through each game yourself. And If you're a football statistics nerd, there are a stupid amount of different statistics being tracked with every play you make in Madden NFL 10.

My brief time with Madden NFL 10 was spent on an iPhone 3GS, though I was assured that they've developed the game to run well across the entire iPhone and iPod Touch family. Madden NFL 10 doesn't require 3.0, although you do need it if you want to access your music from inside the game.

Here's our hands on video with the game from PAX:

We'll have the opportunity to spend more time with the game now that it's been released, but it's overall a really impressive package that we expect football fans will love. EA has also announced that a soon to come update will support "multiplayer". Madden has been launched at $7.99 as a one day sale, and will go up to the full price of $9.99 on Thursday evening.

iPod touch comes into its own as a game platform

The “Rock & Roll” event totaled about an hour and a quarter, and 20 minutes of that were dedicated to showing off the iPod touch’s proclivity as a gaming platform. Apple senior vice president of worldwide product marketing Phil Schiller started off the game segment by repeating a quote offered by Arik Hesseldahl of BusinessWeek: “Apple could be on the cusp of claiming the crown as the world’s leader in handheld gaming.”

You’d be wrong to assume that Hesseldahl’s comment—which came in a November 2008 editorial—is more moon-eyed Apple fanaticism from an easily swayed tech journalist. In context, Hesseldahl is comparing sales of iPhones and iPod touches to Nintendo’s DS handheld system. In sheer volume, Apple is doing very well—the company has been selling tens of millions of units. And that pace hasn’t slowed down since last autumn. Of course, not every iPhone or iPod touch is being used for games. But each of them is capable.

I don’t see Apple competing for the same hearts and minds that Nintendo does, but I think a compelling argument can be made that Apple is competing for the exact same consumers who might otherwise buy Sony’s forthcoming PSPgo handheld gaming system. In this respect, Apple is already several steps ahead of Sony. Apple already owns this market.

The PSPgo, similar in concept to the iPod touch, works wirelessly (there is no disc slot, as there are on other PSP models). It’s smaller and more portable than other PSP systems; the PSPgo easily fits into a pocket, just like the iPod touch. Sony is also managing software distribution through its own online store, which currently enables PSP and PlayStation 3 owners to purchase and download games, demos, video content and more. Sony’s revealed plans to release “minis,” games with a smaller storage footprint and a lower price than the current crop of titles available for the PSP.

Compare that to Apple’s efforts: There are tens of thousands of game titles already in the App Store, including an ever-increasing number from major publishers like Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, even Id Software, makers of Doom and Quake.

The iPod touch has also created its own ecosystem of top-tier game publishers. Ngmoco, makers of Rolando, didn’t exist prior to the iPhone’s introduction. Gameloft, which has long been a purveyor of games for mobile handsets, now says the iPhone and iPod touch is its single biggest platform.

Where’s Nintendo in all this? The company that makes the world’s most popular handheld gaming system recently registered the iPod touch and iPhone as a competing product, during a call with financial analysts to discuss lower-than-expected results. Nintendo’s DSi is the first handheld system the company has released that emphasizes downloadable content, but Nintendo’s bread-and-butter remains cartridge-based games. Nintendo has been notoriously slow to move in the direction of ubiquitous online connectivity and gobs of downloadable content.

Just like every other gaming platform before it, the iPod touch will live or die ultimately based on the quality of the software that’s developed for it. And that takes time. Time for developers to learn the environment they’re programming for. Time for them to create or find tools to help them work. And time for designers to get a sense of what the equipment can do, and more important, how its users want it to work.

Let’s face it: The first year of the iPod touch and iPhone’s life as a commercial game platform has been underscored by a lot of “shovelware”—crap that was pushed out the door as quickly as possible to make a buck. That same cash-grab philosophy sent the average price of games in the App Store spiraling downward to bargain-basement levels. Phil Schiller’s slide showing 21,000-plus iPhone games compared to a relatively paltry number of games for the PSP and DS ignores the fact that many of those thousands of iPhone games are, not to put too fine a point on it, garbage.

But some big companies with deep pockets are making investments that are beginning to pay dividends, not only for them but also for iPod touch game players. Look at the depth and breadth of Madden NFL 2010, EA’s legendary American football game franchise, now available on the iPhone. Madden has been in development for a year, and that right there should give you some sense of where we are on the evolutionary scale of iPhone and iPod touch game development—the commercial market for iPhone and iPod touch games is barely a year old.