I finally got my hands on my copy of Madden ‘09 ear­lier this week. I had actu­ally gotten the game pre-​ordered way back in early-​July, but didn’t end up get­ting it until this week.

Let me get this part out of the way first: Dear EA Sports. For the love of god, please hire some frack­ing user inter­face design­ers. The user inter­face for Madden sucks, and seems to get worse every year. Quit spend­ing all of your time making every­thing glossy and shiny. Just make it better. If you’re unsure of how to do this, WWDC might be a good place to start.

Moving on. My first impres­sions of the game went some­thing like this:

• Load­ing, Wait­ing, Load­ing, Waiting
• Madden Test. Neat idea. What’s with the weird glassy field and see-​through players?
• Appar­ently I am close to all-​madden on offense, but am still at rookie level on defense. Inter­est­ing. The com­bined IQ puts me at below 500.
• Load­ing, Wait­ing, Load­ing, Waiting
• Start up fran­chise mode. No need to save, I just started.
• Start first game. Oh wait, I can prac­tice for points. Umm, really con­fus­ing, I have no idea what I’m doing. OK, I com­pletely bug­gered up what­ever that was. Let’s start the god­damned game already.
• Load­ing, Wait­ing, Load­ing, Waiting
• Because of my offense in the madden test, play­ing offense now is com­pletely impos­si­ble for me. I quickly throw one inter­cep­tion and punt twice. Despite my rookie-​level defen­sive set­tings, the Jaguars quickly pass and rush their way down the field and score on me. This is not going very well.
• What’s with all of the ridicu­lous camera angles?
• Is it just me or is the game-​pace faster?
• Some­time in the late first quar­ter or early second, I call a play from the play call screen. The sound con­tin­ues, but the screen freezes at the play call. I hear my play­ers run the play I called, the con­troller vibrates, announc­ers con­tinue talk­ing. I can actu­ally con­tinue pick­ing plays an even call time­outs, but the screen is com­pletely frozen. I have to restart the game.
• At this point, I real­ize that I had not saved any­thing yet and decide that maybe I would rather do some­thing else.

That was Wednes­day night. Thurs­day night went like this:

• Repeat all steps from Wednes­day night

So basi­cally, I’ve attempted to play exactly two fran­chise games. I have not even made it to half­time with­out the game freez­ing on me. WTF EA Sports. This is the sor­ri­est excuse of a release game. It is unplayable. Even worse, a quick Google search shows that I’m not the only one:

Keep in mind here that this game is brand new and I played it exactly twice; both times it froze. My PS3 is only a couple of months old as well. The offi­cial EA Forum has a thread about the freez­ing issues. It’s cur­rently 37 pages long.

I was really hoping that this game would look great on the PS3. I didn’t expect for it not to work at all. I really hope that that class action law­suit suc­ceeds and they sue the shit out of EA.