Madden NFL: Menu, Modes and Features: Part 2

Features is a mode that contains several small features that didn’t fit in with Game Modes. It contains several rather random features but that all add to the experience. The fun begins with the different create modes. Create a Fan allows the player to customize a fan with different attires and accessories. Each team’s fans have special outfits; such as the Chicago Bears’ fans can dress up in bear costumes while the Green Bay Packers can wear cheese hats. The neat feature of this function is that the created fan appears in games. Once in a while the camera will zoom in on a small group of fans in the stands when either a player does a Lambeau Leap into the end-zone stand or they’re leaving because their team is losing.

Create a Player combines Franchise Mode and Superstar Mode as you can create yourself as a player and then add yourself on a team but without the obligation of always playing as him. The feature also allows you to fill a roster that may be missing some players, while others will abuse the feature and create a player with a 99 overall. These players can however not be used in Online play so the abuse is only against the game which is a nice catch by EA Sports.

Create a Team is one of the more extensive features but also quite well done. It allows a player to start a NFL team from scratch. The player can select any name and town for their new team and are given a choice of pre-made logos and helmet designs. There are about 30 different logos, ranging from crowns to bulldogs. The player can also design their own uniforms using color finders.  Unfortunately the choice of logos is too limited. A nice feature would have been to allow the player to scan in his or her own designs or use images from the Internet to create a logo. The logos have pre-determined helmet colors which is a shame as you should be allowed to chose the helmet color independently of the logo. No matter how time you spend editing the game uniforms they are always painfully obviously self-made. This is probably a result of the fact that the game designer didn’t use their own uniform editor when creating the original uniforms.

The player can also create the stadium that their team plays on. While the options are varied they lack the same choices as the uniforms. Simply adding more options would most likely solve this issue. The only major complaint and annoyance I have with this feature is that you can only choose from five city backgrounds, such as rural, tropical and city. Instead EA Sports should have put the time into creating 50 different backgrounds that matched the 50 different states of America. They should also be linked to common weather patterns so that a team placed in Seattle would have a city background while often playing in the rain and a team based in Hawaii would perhaps have more tropical background with really sunny weather.

You can also create your own playbook. This feature is for the more experienced players who really want to get in the role of a coach is picking the best plays. The Create a Playbook allows you combine plays from all 32 playbooks and mesh them together to get a playbook that suits your playing style. I have personally never used this feature and I only play with playbooks that already exist. I am for example comfortable with the San Diego Chargers playbooks as I have used them for the majority of my playing experience.  

Features also contains the Rosters of all the teams and allows players to check up on ratings or move players around.

Ring of a Champion is a sort of out-dated achievement feature. Made to look like a Superbowl Ring given to the players of a Superbowl winning team, the player must complete several key moments or features of the game in order to fill out the ring with diamonds. There are four categories – General, Skills drills, Superstar, and Franchise.

General achievements are mostly accomplished in the Feature menu as they consist of things such as Create a Fan and Attempt a Two-Minute Drill. While Superstar mode has participate in an interview and play through an entire season. These achievements are very different from the now more common achievements such as “Kill three zombies with a shovel”, rather this feature tries to push players to make choices they might not have known of or didn’t want to. It’s quite clever and serves a sort of checklist of how to have a more fulfilling Madden 08 experience.

EA Sports Extras is a sort of misleading title of a sub-menu. All it contains is credits for the game developers and designers, a short introduction of the new features added and a commercial for one of their online features.

At the bottom of each game mode there is a Menu button and a Help button. These change accordingly to which ever mode or feature you are currently in. The Help feature explains shortly what the different buttons do in each mode. The Menu button is a collection of variety of things but the most important is probably Settings where the player can change the sliders and difficulty level.