When John Madden was originally approached by EA about consulting with them on a new 7-on-7 football video game, he insisted that the game be "simulation football". He wanted authentic, 11-on-11 gameplay that could potentially be used as a tool for teaching the sport of football. It was the only way that he was willing to put his name on the product, and EA held fairly true to the philosophy of "simulation football" through the 90's and into the 2000's.

I think John Madden's last major contributions to the video game were around 2008, when he provided commentary and narration for the "Madden IQ" Skill Trainer. It wasn't long after this that EA's dedication to "simulation football" began to wane. A few years later, Ultimate Team was added to the game, Franchise Mode was gutted and replaced with a stripped down "My Careers" mode, and Madden himself stopped providing commentary for the game. Franchise Mode and core gameplay have been largely neglected in the years since, in favor of introducing terrible story modes, expanding the arcadey Ultimate Team mode, and adding even more arcadey game modes like SuperStar KO and 5-on-5 The Yard. The Madden video game series has fallen far from the goals and priorities of its namesake -- a fall that is made even more tragic and frustrating by an exclusivity deal with the NFL that bars any other company from producing an NFL-licensed "simulation" football game.

Madden 23 starts off with a tribute to the life of John Madden, who passed away this past December.

It's fitting that, with John Madden himself having passed away this past year, EA Sports and Tiburon seems to be trying to honor him by taking the video game back to basics and finally, after years of neglect, trying to address long-standing issues with the on-field gameplay, physics, and A.I.. Is it enough to satisfy the "simulation" expectations of John Madden, himself? Spoiler alert: NO.

Back to Simulation Football?

Madden 23 starts off well enough. The very first thing that the game asks the user to do is play through a tutorial of the new charge-up passing mechanics (largely ripped-off from Legend Bowl). Madden doesn't simply throw the user into a live game situation and expect new players to just know how to play -- though, expecting users to already know how to play the game from last year was always a sad testament to how little had changed in Madden from year to year.

After finishing the tutorial and deciding how difficult I want the passing mechanic to be, Madden 23 threw me directly into a demo "Legend Game". It's a Pro Bowl of All-Madden players from throughout NFL history, with 2 versions of John Madden coaching each respective team. The entire game is largely an excuse to let the commentary team of Charles Davis and Brandon Gaudin give a history lesson about John Madden's career and celebrate his accomplishments. My partner commented that I'd been playing for 15 minutes and she was already sick of listening to the game flagellate John Madden. Personally, I was more annoyed that the game defaulted to Pro difficulty, so scoring was relatively easy for me, and the CPU Tom Brady threw 3 interceptions. Each score and turnover interrupted the commentary about Madden's career, preventing me from hearing the unique dialogue, which the commentary team would not return to if an interruption occurred.

Madden 23 tutorializes its new mechanics before throwing users into a game situation.

Whatever. The game itself is mildly entertaining. It uses clips and graphics from older Madden games as part of its presentation, some NFL Films music, and it includes old commentary clips of Madden himself introducing some of his favorite players, from Brett Favre to Tom Brady to Tony Gonzalez. It's as good and fitting a tribute to the ol' coach and commentator as I would have expected to see in a video game, short of playing through some kind of story mode and re-living moments from his actual career.

But that's just the tutorial and demo game. Is the rest of the actual game as fitting a tribute to the man who demanded "simulation football" from video games bearing his likeness?

I am really struggling to see how the National Football League thinks that it's NFL+ subscription service is worth $30 - $80 a year. I tried a free trial of the app during the first week of the NFL regular season and was thoroughly disappointed by the service in almost every conceivable way.

First of all, just signing up for it is a pain in the ass because their payment provider, Cleeng takes forever to load. I had to refresh it several times and wait several minutes before I was finally able to actually activate the trial.

The NFL wants $30-$80 for its streaming service. Is it worth it? Spoiler: NO.

The real kicker is that I can only watch live games that are televised anyway, as well as in-market games. So I can watch the Raiders (because I live in Las Vegas), even though I hate the Raiders; but I can't watch the Bears unless they're on TV anyway. I don't have cable, but I do have a broadcast TV antennae, and an Amazon Prime subscription (which carries Thursday night games). I can already watch every game that NFL+ offers at no extra charge, with the sole exception of Monday night games on ESPN, because even though we have a Disney+ subscription that supposedly includes ESPN+, we can't actually watch any live sports on ESPN+ because the Disney subscription only covers the basic ESPN+ content, and live sports requires the premium ESPN+ subscription. So, without needing to write another review, ESPN+ is also a complete waste of money.

If I really want to watch a Monday night game, I can go to my parents' house and watch it. They have cable, and they live less than 2 miles away.

The only thing that NFL+ offers that has any value to me is the ability to watch replays of games. But that's a feature of the premium ($80) subscription, and isn't offered by the basic ($30) subscription, and it's not something that is likely to be particularly valuable to most casual NFL viewers. It's only potentially valuable to me because I make YouTube content about Madden and other football video games, and I often use NFL footage (under Fair Use) to demonstrate how those games get football right or (more often) wrong. Most people don't bother to watch replays of live sports. The appeal of sports is to watch it in the moment. Once the moment has passes, so has the appeal. People watch highlights after the fact, but not entire games. The only time I've ever watched re-broadcasts of NFL games was when I would watch replays of Bears preseason games on NFL Network in order to see how the backups play. I have no interest in watching re-broadcasts of regular season or playoff games, except in the context of using it in a YouTube video. And that also has limited value because I'm usually able to find the clips or highlights that I need for free on YouTube or from NFL or ESPN highlight and analysis shows.

When I booted up my PS5 for the first time and signed into the PSN, I immediately downloaded a few of the must-have games. You know, the Demon's Souls remake, Miles Morales, and Returnal. I also downloaded some other ... shall we say "less high profile" games that piqued my interest, including the [ultimately very impressive] World War II shooter Hell Let Loose and a little indie game that claimed to be a sequel to H.G. Wells' classic sci-fi novel The War of the World, called Darker Skies.

Darker Skies takes place during the aftermath of H.G. Wells' classic novel The War of the Worlds,
but the visual and sound design is clearly pulled from the 2004 Steven Spielberg movie starring Tom Cruise.

Budget "Last of Us"

I didn't have high hopes for this budget indie title, but I was curious what a game developer would even do with a property like War of the Worlds. As soon as I saw the first enemy, a zombie shambling around just like a Clicker from The Last of Us, my heart sank. With all the potential of the source material, Steel Arts had to go with a zombie game?! The War of the Worlds is a classic sci-fi novel about a Martian invasion of Earth. My expectation for a video game adaptation of The War of the Worlds would either be some kind of survival horror game about surviving against Martians who survived exposure to Earth's microbes, or an action shooter about humans counter-attacking the Martians on Mars, or something akin to XCOM. It absolutely would not be a total knock off of The Last of Us, right down to having infected zombie humans.

And when I say this is a knock off of The Last of Us, I'm not just talking about the presence of Clicker-like zombies. The protagonist has an X-Ray "focus" vision, he scavenges random supplies in order to craft consumables supplies, and most encounters with enemies are intended to be dealt with by various throwable tools. There's even areas of the map that are overgrown with red Martian tendrils, similar to the spore-infested areas of The Last of Us, except this time around, the character doesn't need a gas mask to get through.

The character can use X-ray vision to detect enemies through walls, but only if they are moving.

The only thing missing is the tag-along NPC child character -- which is a big problem because the interactions between the two characters is a huge part of what makes The Last of Us a great game. That's where the heart and soul of that game was. If you played The Last of Us, and you thought the best thing to emulate is the crafting system, then I feel like maybe you missed the point...

Before I begin this essay, I would like to invite my readers to become supporters through Patreon and be able to vote in a poll to decide the next topic in this series. I have several broad outlines for topics, but no actual draft yet. So I'm asking my Patrons to decide which of those topics I should cover. The poll closes at the end of October, at which time, I expect to start work on the draft for the next topic.

I'd like to take this moment real quick to sincerely thank my current Patrons. Your support really helps, to by offsetting the maintenance of this site, and the cost of software licensing that I use to create content for this site and my YouTube channel.

I also want to provide a short disclaimer that the original video was posted before I had a chance to play any of Madden 23. I have since played several matches in Madden 23, and can confirm that none of the problems discussed in this video have been fixed or addressed. In fact, issues with fumbled footballs teleporting into the hands of the recovering player seem to have gotten worse in the newer game. In just a handful of matches, I've already seen multiple examples of the football teleporting through the bodies of prone players and into the hand of a recovering player who is a full yard or two away from the football. It's bad.

Anyway, onto the actual topic!

The previous topic was about Longsnapping, and included proposals for adding both ratings-based and skill-based botched snaps into the game. Botching a snap might lead to a bad kick, or a kick being blocked, or the snap sailing over the head of the holder or punter for a fumble. But even though I want botched snaps to be represented in the game, there is one caveat. One of the biggest and most long-standing A.I. and animation problems with Madden is its lose-ball scenarios, and putting bad snaps into the game might not be a good idea unless Tiburon and EA also address this long-standing problem.

But hey, Madden already has muffed punt returns, onside kicks, strip sacks, and just regular old fumbles in the game already, so once again I ask: why are all these other things in the game, but botched snaps are a bridge too far?

Anyway, some of the issues with the pass rush that I mentioned in the Pass Rush essay would also be alleviated by better loose-ball logic. The excessive strip sacks of Madden 17 and Madden 21 might not have been such a big problem if the players were smarter about recovering their own fumbles, and if scooping and scoring weren't so easy for defenders. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's now look at how Madden fails to model fumbles, fumble recoveries, onside kicks, and other loose-ball situations.

Photo credit: Sports Illustraded

Adding botched snaps to the game would exacerbate existing issues with fumbles and fumble recoveries.

I came across an interesting new phishing scam in my personal inbox earlier this week. The scam came in the form of an email from ... paypal.com ... ?

Yep, that's right! I received an invoice from service@paypal.com requesting that I pay a sum of $600 for a gift card for someone who I have never heard of.

This caught me off guard at first. Obviously, I hadn't bought a $600 gift card for a complete stranger, so I suspected phishing right out of the gate. But for a phishing attack like this, I would normally expect the email to come from some random email made up of alphabet soup and coming from a clearly illegitimate domain, and for all the links in the email to refer to similarly illegitimate addresses. But that wasn't the case. The email came from PayPal, and all the buttons and links referred to pages in the PayPal domain. This email looked like a legitimate invoice from PayPal.

I received this email invoice from service@paypal.com, and all the links go to pages in the PayPal domain.

Turns out, it is a legitimate invoice from PayPal! Well, sort of. It is "Legitimate" in the sense that it actually came from PayPal. It is not "legitimate" in the sense that I did not actually buy the thing, nor did I actually owe the money.

After doing a bit of research, I found that this particular scam has been happening since at least 2020, but has been gaining popularity in the past couple months. Basically, the scammers take advantage of a legitimate feature of PayPal, which is the ability for any PayPal user to send an invoice for payment to any other PayPal user. The invoice is, thus, very real. In fact, if the target logs into your actual PayPal account, you might see the invoice there as well, which grants an extra illusion of authenticity to the scam, and might scare people into thinking that they actually owe the money (especially if the email threatens penalties for not paying immediately).