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Rating: Awesome Madden NFL 2000 isn't a huge leap over Madden NFL '99, but it didn't have to be a huge leap to be better than its competition. First of all, the introduction sequence is horrible thanks to cheesy rap music instead of the usual rock music from EA. The intro song gets worse as it goes along until it reaches the climax of the following actually being said four times: "What 'chu want? THE ROCK IN THE BALL OF MY HANDS! What 'chu got? I GOT JOHN MAAAAAADEN!" At first I thought that the intro sucks, but now I think it's cheesy in a good way. It's so bad, it's hilarious. Madden 2000 has 12 different music tracks (as opposed to Madden '99's one) for you to listen to on the menus, but most of them are embarrassingly bad. Unfortunately, it's not in a "so bad, it's hilarious" sort of way like the intro, it's just annoying. The commentary in the game isn't that great mainly because Pat Summerall speaks with about as much enthusiasm as... well, something without much enthusiasm. He often waits for a good five seconds after a touchdown to say "Touchdown!" and he repeats the same basic information way too much. On the average play, Summerall will say something like this in the same dry, un-enthusiastic voice: "Second and ten. Ball on the 41 yard line. Washington lines up in a 4-3. Man in motion." John Madden still has a lot of interesting things to say about lots of different NFL players, and it would have been nice if there were an option to turn Summerall off and keep Madden on. The graphics aren't much different than they were last year, which is disappointing when you consider how revolutionary NFL 2K's graphics are. On the bright side, this year Madden has different player sizes. Madden '99's players all seemed to be about the same weight, but in Madden 2000, the player models are scaled to each player's actual weight, so Dana Stubblefield really looks like he's 300 pounds. Also, this year there are players, photographers, and cheerleaders on the sidelines, but they're all tiny, static, 2D sprites, and all of the sideline players are #88. When the time comes to re-sign your players to new contracts in the Franchise Mode, you'll find that different players have different preferences when it comes to how long they want their contracts to be. If your negotiations go smoothly with a given player's virtual agent and the length of the contract is to the player's liking, you may be able to sign that player to an annual salary much smaller than his original demand. This may not make much difference in one player's salary, but if you're crafty enough in the negotiations of lots of contracts, you can free up a lot of salary cap room and have more money to sign a lot more big-time free agents. Also, you always have the option of signing players to new contracts even if their current deals haven't expired yet, and sometimes players will actually hold out and refuse to play if they're not given a raise. Re-signing players in Madden 2000 is much more involving than it was in Madden '99, and certainly more involving than it is in GameDay 2000. Signing free agents is also a lot more intuitive in Madden 2000. In Madden '99, if you made an offer to a free agent and another team later offered that player more money, you would have no way of knowing that unless you were on that player's screen. As a result, it wasn't unusual for free agents to be stolen out from under your feet. In Madden 2000, a little box pops up saying "X team has made a better offer to X player," so you always have a chance to make as many counter-offers as you'd like. There are a lot of other additions to the Franchise Mode that add up to make a big difference. Last year you could only trade players, but this year you can also trade draft picks (so you could trade your entire draft for Ricky Williams like the Saints did). A new screen pops up between seasons that tells you exactly how much each player improved or got worse in every single ability category. At any point in the game, you have the option of leaving your team and taking over any team that recently fired its coach. Unfortunately, one thing you can't do is modify any rosters except your own, so I failed in my attempts to start out the Franchise Mode with the real NFL rosters (no Barry Sanders, Vinny Testaverde, Jamal Anderson, etc). You can play or simulate up to 30 seasons with one franchise in Madden 2000, but your ability to do this is hampered by the fact that there's no way to change the difficulty level in the Franchise Mode. For example, if you start a franchise at the Pro difficulty level and after half a season you find that your skills have improved and Pro is now way too easy for you, you're screwed. You either keep playing on Pro, or you start a new franchise on All-Pro. It would be nice if you could just switch difficulty levels at any time in the Franchise Mode, and I can't think of a good reason why EA decided not to let you do this. The game's statistical package is not drastically different from last year's, but EA has slightly reduced the loading times that you have to sit through when going from menu to menu. Also, the player awards have been greatly expanded in Madden 2000. In addition to seeing who the offensive and defensive players of the week are, you can take a look at the current league MVPs not only in the whole NFL, but also broken down into each conference, division, and team. The Artificial Intelligence has some gaps in logic. For example, the computer sometimes lets the clock expire instead of kicking an easy field goal at the end of the first half. One time I led the Jets 10-2 in the fourth quarter and they drove all the way down the field and scored a touchdown, but they kicked the extra point instead of going for the game- tying two-point conversion, so they lost 10-9. As stupid as Madden's AI sometimes is, it's usually very smart, and as a whole it's much better than the AI in any other football game. EA has tweaked some areas of the game that didn't need to be tweaked. For example, interceptions take place way more often in Madden 2000 than they did in Madden '99, running backs and receivers break tackles a lot more often, and sacks take place slightly less often. It's one thing to want to tweak the gameplay and make it more fun, but every major gameplay modification in Madden 2000 seems to make the game less fun instead. One gameplay change that is for the better is the frequency of holding penalties being called. Last year, holding was called way too often, but this year it's only called occasionally. Also, the jumps between difficulty levels are too big. You might be able to breeze through the Pro level to the point that it's not even fun, and yet you get crushed every time you try to play on All-Pro. It's not very fun to win by 30 points or to lose by 30 points, so all you can do is keep playing on the next level until you're good enough to handle it. It takes a very determined gamer to do this, and I can imagine a lot of players giving up and never playing the game again. The gameplay is much smoother than the gameplay in NFL 2K and NFL GameDay 2000, and the running game is much more of a factor. It's far from perfect, but Madden NFL 2000 is still the most entertaining football game on the market. Send your thoughts on this review to ivan@mastergamer.com
© 2001 ivan@mastergamer.com