It’s like Madden 95 woke up on the wrong side of the bed.
Sega Genesis
Released in 1995 by EA Sports
Grade: C
This game plays curiously fast and makes the passing game 10 times harder than in Madden 95, and not in a good way.
Where it falls in the series
It’s the sixth of eight Maddens on Genesis, and it’s sandwiched between two excellent games, Madden 95 and Madden 97. This game is the oddball of the series, with gameplay so fast and erratic that it’s an exercise in controlling your anger.
Praises and gripes
I don’t know what EA was thinking. Maybe the game testers found Madden 95 too easy, and speeding the game up significantly was their best effort at giving gamers a new challenge.
Adding to the frustration, receivers break off their route too often and passes bounce right off them. Like in the other 16-bit Maddens, the offensive line usually does an awful job blocking, and QBs need to scramble out of the pocket to have time to throw. Mobile QBs are overpowered; running with the QB is too often your best offensive tactic.
The running game is unreliable. When handing the ball to a running back, you get about 70% 1-yard losses and 30% 20-yard gains. That’s way out of whack.
Defense is still fun and intuitive, I’ll give this game that. In truth, the speed of this game is probably closer to real NFL action than the others in the series.
There are other curious traits. The players all have black skin … not black, as in, “Hey, is that Steve Young or Randall Cunningham?” But black, as in, the HTML color code #000000.
The sound is devoid of any stadium-like atmosphere. On the opening kickoff, you might think your TV speakers suddenly stopped working. I don’t really care much about sound, but it reinforces the thought that EA was smoking the funny stuff when they made this game.
I gave this game more of a shot than a normal person would, just to make sure my review was fair. I threw 10 incomplete passes in the row to start my game, and I still ended up whooping on the CPU. This game suffers from an extreme case of what most football games suffer from: some plays are reliable, the rest are garbage. It was satisfying to finally complete some passes, but painfully obvious that I’d have more fun playing one of the other Maddens.