I took the 05 year off from Madden, because the game just fucking infuriated me in 04. I'm a couple years older, and a couple years more experienced at controlling my plentiful rage. Unfortunately, as it turns out, the way I control rage is by uninstalling games that enrage me, and Madden 06 is no longer installed.
There's numerous difficulty settings in this game, but they all boil down to just two: “So easy it's sorta fun, but not really,” and “random shit happens so that you lose.” The first setting gets a 4/10, and the second gets the vaunted “Monster Fucking Gay/10.” Since the actual real life John Madden is totally fucking sweet, I decided to go with the 4/10 rating out of respect for him.
I've gotten to the point where I sorta enjoy the running game in Madden. New players are tempted to sprint the whole time they're on a running play, to always bounce it outside, and to generally not play football. It's fun to wait for holes to develop, burst through them, or see them close up and bounce outside when it's right. This aspect of the game works pretty well, even on “Random Shit” settings.
The passing game is just stupid. Receivers run routes that make no sense. They won't shorten up a pattern to find gaps in a zone. When they get open, they don't stay in the hole, they just keep running around until they're covered again. Defenders don't have any sort of body language, so you can't really read what they're doing. The animations are so generic that it's almost entirely impossible to decipher what happened and why. Sometimes the ball just bounces off your receiver and he drops it. You can't really tell why he dropped it, since it generally always hits him in the numbers. Sometimes he'll have a step on the defender, you'll throw at him, and then the game does a weird spinny thing and suddenly it's picked. You can't really tell why the defender was suddenly able to regain two steps and pick off your pass.
It basically degenerates down to football theory. What route do you throw at in this defense, or that defense? You have to pick out of it's man, or zone, and then throw to whatever route at whatever time. That's difficult, and it's certainly an accurate reflection of how football works, but it's really not how it's actually played. Quarterbacks actually see people come open before they pass to them. They don't generally just throw at routes and hope it all works out, except deep timing routes.
Take a hook pattern.
If you're playing on “too easy” then basically what happens, is you know the timing of the route, you wait till the receiver is about to hook, then you throw at him. It doesn't matter if there's dudes all over, he will generally catch the pass. Or, hell, maybe you don't do any of that. Maybe you accidentally hit the wrong button and throw into triple coverage. No problem, it's still complete. Or, at worst, batted down.
If you're playing “random shit,” and you correctly time the throw to the route, and make sure nobody is dropping into a flat under the route, you will generally get the pass there. But one or two passes doesn't make a drive. At some point or another, some “random shit” will happen. Maybe the back on your receiver will just sorta bump into him as he hooks, and then sorta mini-teleport in front of him and pick the pass. Maybe some random linebacker will suddenly leap into the sky and pick it off. The perspective the game gives you makes it almost impossible to understand how high off the ground your pass is, so it's hard to really know what various degrees of pass button mashing are doing. That doesn't mean the game won't use it against you.
The “random shit” system also applies itself in other ways.
The kicking game is simple on “too easy” and a 50 yard field goal is pretty mundane. On “random shit,” suddenly the kicky-o-meter jumps around, and hitches, it moves faster, and generally makes it impossible to hit a field goal outside of 40 yards. I missed two extra points in a row cause it was so wonky. I routinely shank punts out of bounds at the line of scrimmage. I don't care how “hard” the settings are. College kickers hit 40 yarders pretty much every time. How about leave the kicky-o-meter speed the same, and just vary the outcome by difficulty? It makes the game nonsensical to play if the 30 yard line isn't in field goal range.
Then there's the fumbles, dropped passes, etc. If “random shit” is the setting, you can expect your team to fumble the ball right when the other team needs it in order to pull a comeback. If “random shit” is the setting, expect the key 3rd down pass to the wide open player to drop. The game somehow knows how to always do it at the exact right moment to make it completely infuriating.
Just called the perfect series of defenses to stop the other team in the red zome, complete with a sack by the DE you were controlling? Yeah! That field goal still leaves you up by 4. Just take the kickoff, run the clock out, and sit on your lead... Kickoff... FUMBLE! Defense recovers! Ok, just stop them again... They call some running play, and their back sheds every player on your team, twice each, to run in for the TD. Game over. Yaaaay!
No. Sorry Madden, you're just not fun.