Football games, if you believe the sales numbers, don’t need saving. By football games of course I mean EA’s Madden franchise and to a lesser extent its little brother: NCAA Football. But for people like me, people who love the numbers of the game as much as the action, there remains a missing element to today’s next-gen football games.

I grew up when home videogame systems were first introduced to the public. The sports games were crude and realism, if you wanted to control the action, wasn’t part of the equation. When I was a kid, thanks to my father, I turned to board games like the Statis-Pro series to simulate real NFL, NBA, and MLB games, and what stood out most were the numbers.

In these cardboard sports games you knew that John Elway was better than Lynn Dickey and not because of some nebulous player rating but because the numbers inside the game were tangible. In a board game, particularly in a game like Statis-Pro, the numbers were everything. Walter Payton was just flat out better than Tony Nathan – because the numbers said it was so. Of course Sweetness still needed decent blocking and other factors were tossed into the equation of simulating an NFL play, but it was crystal clear who the better players were.

In today’s big budget football games, the player ratings are the subject of great debate. Can you really tell a difference between players unless the numbers are drastically different? It’s easy enough to see a difference in player speed but what about other areas? A quarterback with an “85” Arm Strength looks about the same as one with an 82. And what’s the deal with the Awareness rating? What’s that supposed to do? And can you tell the difference between players with a high and low rating in that category?

Not only do I have a hard time telling the difference between players that are rated relatively close to one another, but I also can see very little difference in the defensive players – specifically the defensive backs in how they cover receivers. In short, the player ratings just aren’t doing it for me anymore.

I need the numbers to really mean something.

When I first saw the post-nuclear RPG Fallout 3 in action back during its development I was amazed at how seamless the “VATS” system transitioned the action from first person shooter to a stationary system with percentages based on where you were aiming.

If you aren’t familiar with Bethesda’s action-RPG, you basically start combat like a standard first or third person shooter but by pressing a button you enter the VATS targeting system. The game then freezes, showing you the target and a percentage on each body part. This shows you in cold hard numbers the chance that you have to score a head shot, cap a knee, smash an arm or blast a foe in the chest. The percentage shown is based off a number of variables like the gun you are using, the distance to the target, the cover the target is using, the armor used as well as your skill in using certain firearms. It works brilliantly, but it wouldn’t work at all if you felt like this system was intrusive – thrusting you out of this action-oriented romp into a static firefight.