One of the primary goals of this year’s Madden offering was to make the game more accessible. The idea being that Madden has grown so much in complexity over the years that your average gamer will have no idea how to play it effectively. Being a sports videogame nut I’ve personally never heard too many ‘Madden complexity’ complaints but that is clearly the direction in which EA Sports has taken the game this year – for better and for worse.

The most prominent new feature is the Madden IQ system. The idea is that by taking a series if holographic Star Trek tests the game will begin to tailor the AI to your playing style. If you score poorly at pass defense you’ll play pass defense on ‘rookie’ or ‘pro’ mode and if you score high in passing you’ll play quarterback on All Pro or All-Madden. These ratings are tweaked after each game you play so the difficulty level is always in flux. In theory it’s not a bad idea, if you want to play a game against someone with a very different skill level this feature allows you to each play with specific game settings. This is particularly useful when playing against another human opponent – the problem is when playing against the CPU. The Madden IQ tweaks certain settings but it doesn’t get too specific. In order to tweak specific game settings you’ll need to mess with the in-game sliders, which sort of makes the Madden IQ a moot point for solo users familiar with the slider system.

This is clearly a Madden Novice type of feature as veterans are going to want to go into the settings menu and manually tweak the in game sliders. The problem is, for reasons unknown, developer Tiburon removed the CPU sliders. They literally are not there. Want to change the QB Accuracy slider for the CPU? (and you will want to do this…) Well, you can’t. All you can do is boost your defensive back reaction time, which doesn’t do nearly enough to stop the pinpoint passing of the AI. So you are left with manually adjusting the sliders for your gameplay – not the CPU’s— and for hard-line players this is a devastating blow because the game needs these settings to be made available.

EA has said that sliders could return as downloadable content later this summer or fall and we certainly hope so. They are desperately needed not only to tone down the ridiculous accuracy of the CPU quarterbacks but also to boost the woeful CPU ground game. Until users can tweak the CPU game, Madden 09 is a tough sell for solo players because the Madden IQ, despite claims that the game “adapts top you”, doesn’t do nearly enough to tweak the game in certain areas.

Other new bits this year include the Backtrack and Rewind features. Backtrack is actually pretty neat as it details why you just gave up a sack or threw an interception, It‘s an X’s and O’s feature that breaks down the play for you, stopping the action and even showing you where the open man was on a play when you tossed the ball into coverage. Rewind is basically a “do over.” If you allow yourself a Rewind (or three…) during a game you can take back a play where you made a mistake and run the play over again. This feature has received a wide assortment of criticism from hardcore Madden players but it actually serves a few purposes: it evens the playing field when players of various skill levels are playing and it also can be used to simulate home field advantage by allowing the home team a do over when they screw up. Plus if you hate this feature you can simply turn it off. No harm no foul.