Friday, August 13, 2010

More Madden 10 bugs

I know, dead horse and all that, and Madden 11 is out, but I have a Super Bowl to win in 10.

Anyway, this time the interception happened when the ball passed through my receiver. Through him. Not metaphorically speaking, like after a Brett Favre pass, but literally. The ball passes through his body.

I'm not holding my breath to see if it's fixed in 11.

4 comments:

  1. Perhaps this is what gives the game a little extra zing.

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  2. lol no. It's a lesson on monopolies: bad for the consumer, bad for the product. No other company can make an NFL-licensed football game, so even if gamers didn't buy titles habitually, EA wouldn't have much reason to make serious efforts to improve the game.

    There's really no reason for them do so, other than it being the right thing to do. Some of these bugs are so obvious that they have to have been caught during testing, but someone made a decision that they didn't have to be fixed. It's the same kind of thing that has Microsoft releasing a version of Excel where, say, random numbers aren't random, or rounding doesn't work properly. They always have an excuse for it, but the real excuse is "because you'll buy it anyway, so why should we make it better?"

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  3. and you bought it anyway so it appears that their evil plan is working.

    But I do find it interesting that you say they should fix things because it is "the right thing to do". I think this is one of the things that gives a distinction between a good company and a great company. I also thinks it is virtually impossible for a giant corporation to be a great company. They are just too big.

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  4. correct. The online franchise mode was a clever marketing trick; even though it sucks, it's a way to "compel" people to buy the game. If I want to participate in a friend's league, I have to buy the current game.

    I don't know that it's necessarily a function of company size, although that's probably arguing for the sake of arguing. There are few industries that can boast multiple giant companies, and it's probably true that a cartel acts in much the same way as a monopoly. Normally, what a business wants (to make as much money as possible) is balanced by what the customers want (to get as good of a deal as possible for as little money as possible). Once the company or companies gain a large enough share of the market, they no longer have to listen to the customers, because there are no feasible alternatives, so there is no counterbalance.

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