Madden 09 gameplay footage and online play details

Well I was wrong about nothing significant coming out in an effort to avoid getting swallowed up by GTA IV on its release day. IGN has the full details on Madden 09’s online leagues via an interview with two of the Madden developers which you can read in its entirety here. It focuses on the league aspect but later in the interview shifts to discussion on the Virtual Training Center. They’ve also posted up the first gameplay footage. You can watch that video by clicking here (make sure to watch in hi-res).

Flex scheduling is cool for a multitude of reasons. First off, flex scheduling is what we refer to as an ‘open schedule’ with no set order. What this means is that if you log online and ten members of your twenty member league are online, you can play any of your opponents that you have remaining games with. The nice thing about this is that it doesn’t allow for leagues to get stale or held up waiting for others to play. If the stars align, and you have all of your opponents online, you can, in theory, knock out your entire league in one day.

Leagues are always difficult to see through to the end. You need a good group of owners and a wide array of options for the commissioner. I like the idea of offering open schedules and providing the ability to have the same team controlled by different owners. Those are the type of options that are helpful and assist in making them more likely to succeed.

It sounds as though they’ve thought them through pretty well and aren’t the glorified tournaments recently touted as leagues for titles such as NBA Live 08 and NHL 08. Those didn’t even include playoffs which essentially made them worthless. I’m going to assume that playoffs are included in Madden’s leagues, although not hearing them mention it within the interview was noticeable. Hopefully there is some sort of confirmation soon that there will be playoffs in the leagues.

GTA IV and other news

It goes without saying that today is GTA IV day. I doubt there will be much (if any) sports gaming news or info to be released with all the concentration around GTA. So I’ll be online playing (360) this evening and anyone who’d like to get together for some matches just leave your info in the comments. If there is anything interesting relating to the sports titles that makes its way out today I’ll be sure to get it up as usual.

• I expect the daily NCAA Football 09 screenshots to return on Thursday after taking a few days off.

• It looks like Facebreaker for the 360/PS3 (originally thought to be an early November release) may be out in early September. Four new screenshots have been added to the gallery.

• An effort is being made to possibly add online weather in Madden 09 after the community reacted unfavorably to the news that it wouldn’t be included. I’ll have some thoughts on this and more in the near future after a discussion with Phil Frazier last week.

• Make sure to vote in the poll for which NFL team had the best Madden Draft. Kansas City and Pittsburgh are the two that have separated themselves from the pack.

• Who else is excited for Iron Man coming out? This is really the kickoff to the summer movie season. Other than Cloverfield and Forgetting Sarah Marshall I haven’t felt the desire to head out to the theaters over the past several months.