I haven't had much reason to talk about the Chicago Bears this year. Since the preseason, the team has gone from bad to worse. Injuries has been the story of the season, but injuries are no excuse for the abysmally poor play from this team. The Bears have used all three of their quarterbacks and at least four of their running backs this season, as they've been going through a revolving door of injuries.

Rookie Jordan Howard has been the bright spot of the season. With injuries to Jeremy Langford and KaDeem Carey, Howard has been the bell-cow rusher for most of the season. And he has performed well. Not as well as the Cowboys' Ezekiel Elliot, but still pretty good. Howard carried the Bears to 3 touchdowns in a 26-6 victory over the 49ers earlier today. It looks like the Bears have found a replacement for Matt Forte, assuming that Howard can continue to perform this well in the years to come.

The Bears look like they've found a replacement for Matt Forte. Jordan Howard has been excellent.

The quarterback situation, however, hasn't been as fortuitous. Cutler was out for a while, and Brian Hoyer played well in his stead. It looked like Cutler's career as a starting quarterback for the Bears was over (finally). Then Hoyer got hurt, and the untested Matt Barkley finished the game without much fanfare. The Bears weren't confident in playing a third-string quarterback, so Cutler came back the following week and lead the team to its second win of the season (a 20-10 victory over the collapsing Vikings in week 8). So maybe Cutler was back to form? Maybe he was going to save his job with a late-season rally?

Not so. The Bears were embarrassed the following week by Tampa Bay, and Cutler got hurt once again the following week against the New York Giants. Cutler will have to have surgery to repair the damage, which means that his season (and possibly his career with the Bears) is over.

In comes young backup quarterback Matt Barkley...

Back in April, I expressed my dissapproval of the Raiders plan to relocate to Las Vegas. At the time, my primary objection was to the idea of building an NFL-size stadium adjacent to UNLV's campus. But as time has moved on, the plans have shifted, and the city has come up with new location proposals for the $1.9 billion stadium, as well as new financing plans. Last week, the Nevada State Legislature, on the order of Governor Brian Sandovall, convened a special session to vote on the proposed stadium financing plan. The successful vote was a win for the Raiders' plan to relocate, but was a major loss for the city of Las Vegas and state of Nevada.

The finance plan requires the city of Las Vegas to raise $750 million in funds from a hike in room taxes for its hotels. This leaves taxpayers supposedly off the hook by passing the bill onto tourists. Critics have complained that this takes money away from Las Vegas schools and other public infrastructure and services, but this criticism is a bit of a red herring, as there were no plans to collect such revenues and spend them on schools or other services to begin with. Critics are valid in pointing out, however, that this does take that money away from potentially being collected for the purposes of funding education or services in the future.

The city, tourists, and UNLV all get screwed

I would be fine with this $750 million price tag if the plan guaranteed some degree of revenue or profit-sharing for the city of Las Vegas. It would be an up-front investment with the potential of paying for itself over the long-term. No such fortune for us Vegas residents. This is a bum deal for the city of Las Vegas, however, as the plan does not allow for any revenue or profit-sharing from the proceeds that the stadium may gain. So public money is being spent on the project, but no money is going back to the public. Sheldon Adelson and Mark Davis are both billionaires. If they really wanted the Raiders to move to Las Vegas, they can afford to build their own damn stadium.

Mark Davis and Sheldon Adelson are both billionaires. They can afford to build their own damn stadium.

What really sours this deal though is that it also presents some other "screw you"-s to the city of Las Vegas. The plan to build a new stadium started out as a plan to build a new stadium for UNLV's football program. But UNLV gets screwed by this deal, as they will actually have to pay approximately $250,000 per game to the stadium's owners in order to play their home games there! They'd have to pay $250,000 per game to "rent" this facility! "Public stadium", my ass! If Las Vegas is raising tax money to pay for this stadium (and we're paying for almost half of the entire bill), then it should belong to the City of Las Vegas or Clark County. If it belonged to Las Vegas, then our public university (UNLV) should be able to use the facility, and should get revenue from ticket sales. Not so, apparently. Make no mistake, this is not Las Vegas' stadium; this is Mark Davis and Sheldon Adelson's stadium.

We don't get the stadium; we only get the debt. NFL teams have a long, sad history of screwing cities with stadium deals...

UPDATE OCTOBER 23, 2016: LATEST PATCH AND/OR TUNER HAVE PRACTICALLY RUINED THE GAME FOR ME.

I've been having miserable experiences with Madden 17 since publishing this review. I suspect that either patch #2 or tuner #2 are the culprit. CPU QBs have become robots that have 80% completion percentages every game. Running the ball has become impossible (for both human and CPU teams). Man coverage simply doesn't work at all, making corner routes, in routes, out routes, and slant routes unstoppable. The throw out of sack mechanic has been tuned down to the point of being irrelevant. And the list goes on...

Sliders don't seem to improve the experience at all. In fact, certain sliders (like CPU QB Accuracy and CPU Pass Blocking) don't seem to have any effect at all anymore. I am tempted to rewrite this review with a much lower score (Somewhere in the range of a D or D-), but I'm hoping that EA will fix the problem - or at the very least, that deleting the most recent Tuner data will resolve some of the issues. Sadly, I don't think it's possible for me to re-download the first tuner data. This is a shame, since that one actually did fix some genuine problems the game had at launch.

DO NOT DOWNLOAD PATCH #2 OR TUNER #2!

Electronic Arts has supposedly spent the last three years or so rebuilding Madden from the ground up. Because of that, the past few years' games have felt very incremental, and somewhat incomplete. It was obvious that there were still major holes in many facets of gameplay. Personally, I would have preferred that EA just take a two or three year hiatus in order to hold off on releasing a game until it was actually complete. I'm happy that it seems like we're finally getting a "finished" version of EA's vision of a "next gen" Madden game, and I was curious to see if it would live up to expectations.

By their own admission, EA has finally rebuilt the final few phases of gameplay that still used predominantly legacy code (e.g. special teams and the football itself). For the first time in a long time, it feels like Madden can be approached and reviewed as a complete retail product rather than one step in a long-term incremental beta process. Is it worth the wait?

We'll, first impressions let it down a bit. Much like last year's game, the introduction and tutorial for Madden 17 seemed like a pointless waste of time that misrepresents the actual content of the game with its frequent cutscenes and dialogue from players and coaches. I'm not sure who these scripted gameplay intros are intended for. I would expect that new players would likely be confused and unsure what to do, resulting in failing the intro without any clue what they did wrong or what they were supposed to do. Experienced players, on the other hand, are probably just annoyed with the lack of control in this sequence. The inability to skip the cutscenes only makes repeat playthroughs (if you care enough to try to actually beat the scenario) feel tedious, as you'll have to sit through more cringe-worthy dialogue. EA Sports / Tiburon isn't Naughty Dog, and so writing dialogue and directing voice actors are not the studio's strong suits. About the only thing that this intro sequence does is highlight the new commentary team, which is actually pretty good.

Slowly becoming a complete football game

Despite the blocked field goal in the intro being an un-playable cutscene, special teams was one of the primary areas of focus this year. It's an area that's been mostly neglected since the analog kick meter was introduced back around 2007. And what was the innovation that EA decided was necessary to bring their kicking game into the next generation? Well, actually, they decided to bring back a kicking meter that works almost identically to the older PS1 / PS2 era games. You start the meter charging by pressing X, then press X again to set the kick strength as the meter fills, then press X again to set the kick accuracy as the meter returns to the bottom. Nothing new here.

The "new" kick meter is basically a return to the older kick meter.

However, you now have to hold the analog stick to aim the kick prior to starting the kick meter. If you let go, the kick trajectory will snap back to the default. This does require a bit more dexterity than either of the previous kick meter systems ever needed, but it's still fairly easy once you get used to it. Though, EA could maybe loosen up the accuracy window for online games because any amount of lag makes the kicking game virtually impossible. You also have to be more careful with timing your kicks, as the game and play clocks both continue to tick while the kick meter is charging. Not sure if this is a bug or a feature... So be careful that you don't wait too long and give yourself a delay of game (or let the game clock expire before) you get the kick off.

On the other side of the ball, defenders can now actually block kicks by jumping the snap...

Earlier today, I experienced what might be the craziest, flukiest play that I've ever seen in a Madden video game! And not in the way that fluke plays in Madden are usually glitchy plays or plays in which the CPU cheats to affect an outcome. No, this was a fluke play in the genuine football sense of a fluke play.

Special teams is no longer to be ignored, and PATs are not forgone conclusions...

To put the situation in context, I was playing an exhibition game in Madden 17 as the Seahawks against the 49ers (on All Pro difficulty). It started out as an intense defensive struggle with the first score not coming until midway through the second quarter. Down 17-3 in the fourth, the 49ers started mounting a comeback. The 49ers got into the end zone in the waning minutes of the game to make the score 17-16. They lined up for the PAT that would have tied the game - a play that should be routine. But what happened next was anything but routine.

Therold Simon and Kam Chancellor rushed off the outside to block the PAT and ice the game. Simon beat Bruce Miller around the edge and successfully blocked the kick, but Miller was the one who managed to pick up the ball. He then proceeded to run around the edge and managed to make it into the end zone, turning the 49ers' blown extra point into a successful two-point conversion. Instead of tying the game, they now had a one-point lead.

I couldn't believe what I had seen.

And it was amazing!

Damnit Kam Chancellor! All you had to do was fall on the ball!

...

I haven't had a good rant on this blog for a long while. At least, not one that isn't part of tearing apart a terrible game in a review. But I have something that's been really grinding my gears throughout all of 2016, and I need to say something about it: I really dislike advertising. I have an especially intense dislike of internet advertising practices. It's not the ads themselves that get on my nerves; it's the ways in which websites and advertisers chose to deliver them. So many websites are crammed full of ugly, intrusive, and obnoxious ads that really hurt the experience of the user trying to actually view and navigate the website.

Streaming services like Comedy Central insist on crashing the video in the event that there's even the remotest hiccup in loading one of the five advertisements that it must play during the four advertising breaks that it includes in its half-hour episodes. I routinely run into issues in which the pre-episode ads fail to load, and so the whole episode refuses to load, and I have to ctrl-F5 to reload the page until it selects a set of five advertisements that actually work. But then it gets to one of the mid-episode commercial breaks, and even if the advertisements do load and play, the actual episode refuses to continue. Sometimes, I can hit the "rewind 10 seconds" button to fix the problem. Other times, I once again have to ctrl-F5 to reload the page, sit through the pre-episode ads again (hoping they don't cause yet another failure), then skip past the ad break in the timeline, watch the mid-episode ads (and hope that they don't also fail), and then maybe I can continue watching the content. This is why I haven't seen an episode of The Daily Show in a couple months and have no idea if new host Trevor Noah has finally hit a stride yet. I have similar issues with CBS steaming, which is why I also haven't been able to watch much of Stephen Colbert's new late night talk show. Sorry Stephen, I love you, but CBS apparently doesn't want me to watch you.

Issues with Comedy Central's ad-delivery abound: ads play over the actual content, their failure to load
prevents the content from playing, they have multiple ad breaks and not enough unique ads to fill them, etc.

To make matters worse, Comedy Central and CBS often doesn't even have enough distinct ads to fill up all these advertising breaks. I often see the same three or four ads in every ad break. Sometimes, the same exact ad will play back-to-back during the same advertising break!

Is this supposed to be punishment for not watching the show on cable TV? I actually do (at the time of this writing) have an active cable subscription, and that subscription does include Comedy Central and CBS. I could easily just DVR episodes of The Daily Show or Late Show with Stephen Colbert and watch them at home, but I prefer to watch them during my sit-in lunch breaks at work because it's just a more efficient use of time. Or at least, it would be, if it ever actually worked. Heck, on the DVR, I can just skip past the damned ads. I can't do that when streaming on the internet.

Comedy Central is far from unique in this regard. I've already pointed a finger at CBS as well, and this is one of the reasons that I'm not happy about Star Trek: Discovery being exclusive to CBS All-Access. I really don't want to pay for a streaming service to watch one show! Especially if it's still going to contain content-breaking advertisements that prevent me from even watching the show that I'm paying to watch...