More Madden 10 fail

I'm in an online franchise league in Madden 10 ... we just finished the Super Bowl (obviously I was not in it) and are ready to start the draft, and as a result, we've discovered how not ready for release online franchise mode is.

For one thing, you can look back to previous seasons and see ... the Super Bowl scores. That's it. No stats, no standings.

For another, when you roll to the next season, for every team with fewer than 7 open spots, it automatically cuts players to make room for drafted players, even though you have plenty of room on your training camp roster for these players (or should). And then when the draft is ready, you can't pick up the free agents it cut for you.

The draft is something else. Small time slots, no way to make them significantly big, and no way for the commissioner to undo a pick ... which is really inexcusable, because the default time slot is apparently 15 seconds. Yeah. And you can't set what they call a "draft profile" on the 360 because that would be helpful: you can actually see all the draftees' attributes there. You have to do it online, where you can't see more than one attribute at a time unless you click on the person, and you can't even sort accurately across groups. For example, if you sort by overall, but you're showing draftees by speed, all you get are the top overall scores for the draftees with highest speed. There's no way to remove that second filter.

I would say this was a half-assed effort by EA, but it would be an insult to actual half-assed efforts. Someone who had no idea of the work involved made the decision to rush this out with Madden 10 when in reality it should have been held back at least a year.

If you don't have a copy of Madden 10 yet, but you saw online mode and are swayed by it, don't be. Wait. It's not worth it yet. At all.