My goodness, are technical difficulties annoying.
I had my 5th anniversary final almost completely done, ready and scripted. The key word there is had. Thanks to some unfortunate computer issues, it got deleted, so I am going to have to re-write my entire 10 round fight. It's a lot of work to do those and I don't want to rush to try to get it done, I want to give Suikoden II and Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne their due time in the spotlight. So, I am going to pivot and do that next week. Besides, it allows me to continue yet another Gaming Off the Beaten Path tradition: starting the year with an old sports game.
I have already talked about Madden '04, it was actually the first 10s game I wrote about (I guess it was really about all the PS2 era Maddens, but '04 was the one I discussed the most). But again, that was the 6th generation version. Which I honestly thought was the only version. I didn't realize they were still making Madden games for the PS1 in 2004, so I was shocked when I found this in a random game pickup I did a few weeks ago. I guess it makes sense, the PSX had tons of titles and a huge player base, with most of them being more casual players. Remember, there weren't really a whole lot of "retro gamers" back in the day. Most people that were still using previous hardware were doing so because they weren't serious enough about gaming to upgrade, and a lot of those folks tend to play a lot of sports games. If you look at the consoles from this era, many of their last games were sports titles. That was true of the PS2 as well, though I was shocked how late they continued to release games for it. Here I am surprised about Madden '04, only to find out it was far from the last football game to be released for the console. The last game to come out for Sony's big black box was in fact a football game...but not an American Football game. The last PS2 title released in the west was, in fact, FIFA 2014. No, that's not a typo, it was actually 2014.
But back to Madden '04. I have said before that I tend to dislike 5th generation sports games, while I really like 6th gen ones. I don't know if any game I've ever played both versions of provides a better example as to why. Madden '04 isn't a bad game, it's a solid PS1 football title. I guess I'm not surprised, but these titles are the same in name only and have little in common gameplay wise. The PS1 version has that jerky, slow feel that I find most PS1 football titles have. Too many things are too difficult to do and it lags behind its outstanding older brother both in terms of gameplay and as a simulation experience. That said, it's an okay example of a sports game from the era, even if it's not the one I would choose to play. I have a lot of nostalgia for '00s era football, so it's always fun to go back and play some of these old titles. They are also very accessible; you don't really need to know all that much about football to play them. If I was playing a football game from the era, I'd probably choose Gameday, but I wouldn't actively avoid Madden.
I have to give credit where it is due, EA did their best to make the PS1 version of Madden '04 feel as much like the PS2 version as much as possible. The latter has an amazing soundtrack, which I didn't think would make it into the former at all. However, there were a few tracks that did manage to make it into the game. I only managed to get it to play three tracks (Feelin' This by Blink-182, All That's Left by Thrice and These Days by Alien Ant Farm, for the record) but that was more than I thought there would be. The menus are much more bare bones and stripped down, but honestly modern game design has kind of gone back to this aesthetic anyway. Perhaps the most surprising thing was the inclusion of franchise mode, something I wasn't expecting. I obviously didn't play through the whole thing, but it was awesome that they included it. There were a bunch of other modes as well, like 2-minute drill, while also including Madden cards and NFL records. There was way more here than I ever thought, which was a good start.
Once you start the game, however, things go downhill a little bit. Much like NFL Gameday, which I reviewed a very long time ago, you really need to throw out any pretense of actual football here. It's incredibly difficult to run up the middle, as your linemen struggle to hold their blocks for long and it feels like they automatically disengage as soon as you are past the line of scrimmage. Your best bet is to run to the outside and hope you get around opposing players. It's also beneficial to cut runs back, which any football coach will tell you is not something you want players doing in real life. Defense is a little bit more self explanatory, it's usually in your best interest to play linebacker, though defensive line is okay. It's not as deep as it would be in more modern sports games, but it's okay. The controls feel a bit unresponsive, though I think that's more a function of the limited animation and choppy movement of the players. It's also important to remember that you need to actually use the tackle button here. By 2004, all you had to do to make a tackle in Madden was walk into an opposing player, so it was a little bit weird to go back here.
The biggest issue though, is passing. Passing the ball is damn near impossible here, though this was another issue I found to be common in 5th gen football titles. The biggest problem is that receivers can't catch in stride, they pretty much need to run to a point and stay there. If they are open, you throw to them. If they aren't then good luck. You can throw to a covered receiver and it feels like you have about a 10 percent chance for a completion, so sometimes you just have to do that. It's really easy to have passes intercepted, which is very frustrating. The one caveat here is that passing is just as hard for the computer as it is for the player, I rarely gave up completions and averaged multiple interceptions per game without doing very much. And this wasn't a case of playing against lousy teams. The first game I played was against the Rams, who were still in their greatest show on turf years where they were lighting up scoreboards left and right. Yet the good-not-great Giants secondary was able to pick him off four times. I think this was the biggest issue, though it was one I kind of anticipated.
Overall, Madden '04 for the PS1 was a valiant effort to make a popular game series more accessible for casual gamers. Now, more than ever, I appreciate not forcing players to upgrade to new hardware that don't want to. I like that they did the best they could to include the various modes and features that were available in the more advanced versions of the game. The gameplay was flawed, but it kind of comes with the territory for 5th gen sports games. No one is going to call Madden '04 an accurate simulation experience. Even as an arcade style game, it kind of falls a little flat. That said, you can tell there was a clear effort to make this game as good as it could be. I can't recommend it, but I've also played far worse.
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