The heart wants what the heart wants.
PlayStation 3
Released in 2009 by EA Sports
Grade: B
This one-off downloadable game is shallow, repetitive, and gimmicky, but I love it anyway, at least for the occasional one night stand.
Where it falls in the series
It came three years after EA’s NFL Street triology and three years before EA’s NFL Blitz 2012, but it’s so very different from those games.
Praises and gripes
You thought other arcade games boiled down football? Get this:
Madden NFL Arcade arms your five-man unit with only seven plays on offense and four plays on defense. There are no kickoffs, no field goals, no punts, not even first downs. You have four downs to score a touchdown on the 60-yard field.
Games are played up to a certain score (default is 30), which makes games quick and makes 2-point conversions critical. The pace from play to play is delightfully fast.
With 5-on-5 action, the small field still feels wide open. The engine is taken from the actual Madden game, with controls dumbed down. This is an important part of this game’s appeal for me, because players move with more physics than in other arcade style games.
There are a bunch of wacky power-ups that your team acquires at random. You can speed up the play, slow it down, freeze a player, earn an extra down, cheaply flip the score, and more. You can turn power-ups off, but unfortunately, you can’t pick and choose which ones to keep on or off.
The game lacks any kind of playoff or franchise mode. A game ends and that’s that.
The graphics look good, with players that are beefed up. The sound is full of fun gimmicks that remind you this game doesn’t take itself seriously.
The end result is pure fun if you ask me. Reviews upon its release were very critical, saying the lack of depth didn’t justify the $15 price. Whatever. I collect old video games, some cost $1, some cost $5, some cost $15, and once they’re on my shelf (or in my PS3’s hard drive), they’re valued on how much fun they are.
The one big knock: It didn’t take me long to dominate the CPU. So find a buddy and a bottle of liquor for the optimal experience.