Breaking News: Jake Missing From Madden 08

LET PLUMMER PLAY GAME NIGHT!

It’s that time of the year! Madden 08 came out yesterday and we picked up a copy, hoping against hope Jake “the Snake” Plummer was somehow in the game on the “Free Agents” list. Or at least, maybe the Tampa Bay reserves roster.

Wrong.

EA Sports took Jake’s retirement seriously and completely left him out of the game, which was the SECOND most disappointing thing about Madden 08. The WORST part is that our little web crew and a couple of extra friends have been fiending for MONTHS waiting on Madden so we could put together an online full-season league, with saved stats, records...a simulated NFL from Week 1 to the Super Bowl. Well, EA bamboozled us. Once again, even though the PS3 and 360 are into their second Madden games, and even though these machines are SO much better than the PS2 and XBox, and even though EA is always promising HUGE improvements to Madden every year, there are NO ONLINE LEAGUES IN MADDEN 08!

This, friends, is INEXCUSABLE. One of our favorite games around the web dungeon is SEGA’s NFL 2K5, which came out FOUR YEARS AGO. For twenty dollars brand new, you had a full ESPN presentation with great announcing, beautiful visuals, smooth play, personalized goodies, and a complete online service including fully tracked private leagues for 1 to 30 players. Naturally, EA Sports saw this rising threat and decided to one-up SEGA. Would EA Sports put their noses to the grindstone and make an effort to create a better game; a balls-out Madden that would blow 2K away with all of SEGA’s features cranked up times ten, giving gamers the best football experience of all time?

No. Instead, EA cried like little bitches, scraped all of their money together, and threw it at the NFL. EA got an exclusive license and yanked the rug out from under SEGA completely. To add insult to injury, the Madden series continued its streak of non-excellence, barely improving anything and spending more money on hyping the game than actually assuring it was any good. Four years and a hardware upgrade later, Madden looks pretty, but still plays sluggish (picking plays has actually gotten worse and less intuitive) and is missing that Holy Grail of modern sports game features, a feature that dozens of other games have been getting right for half a decade: no online leagues. That, friends, is INEXCUSABLE.

So while it was fun to run around with current rosters and new uniforms in high-definition, it was not as good as it could have been considering all the self-promotion EA does every year, somehow touting itself as “the best” when in fact its only “the best” because they paid to make competing NFL games IMPOSSIBLE. It’s acceptable because it’s the ONLY OPTION unless you want to illegally modify an older game, but acceptable is not excellent. We can almost forgive the exclusion of Jake Plummer because we can always Create-A-Jake, but the clumsy play selection and NO ONLINE LEAGUES just piss us off. Consider our faces slapped.

We here at LPP are done with Madden until they patch this up with a downloadable update (*a FREE downloadable update you leeches, this is a STUPID MISTAKE TO BE CORRECTED, not a “fun” extra option most gamers didn’t consider necessary) and by that I mean we will not be buying any more Electronic Arts video games at all until we see progress! We were bamboozled by Madden, and once you open a video game, all you can do is exchange it for half of what it’s worth or wait a week and a half on eBay to sell it back, and you might not get your money back there, either. Since we have no other options, we’ll keep this one, but EA Games: you’re on boycott! It’s not really that hard to boycott EA, of course. Most EA Games have sucked lately anyway. The only upcoming game I was waiting on was Half-Life: Orange Box, and frankly, I can live without another first-person shooter since there are about 100 of those out there.

Join us in our protest, game fans! EA Sports has given you the finger, give them one back! WE WANT ONLINE LEAGUES! Buy 2K Sports games, or whatever other options are available, until every EA Sports game has the online leagues that apparently weren’t all that hard to do half a decade ago for SEGA and Microsoft and Sony.

And if it’s not too much trouble, maybe they can do a free agent pool update so we can...

LET PLUMMER PLAY!!!

All of this while both Denver and Tampa Bay seek $14,000.00 a day from Jake!