Monday, October 03, 2005

Don't Buy Madden 06 PSP

It's probably only a matter of time before the big news sites pick up on this, but Madden 06 for the PlayStation Portable (PSP) is horribly flawed and you shouldn't buy it. Check out the EASports Forums for Madden 06 PSP for the deluge of people that are reporting problems with this game. The worst is the game turns off the PSP most of the time after completing a Franchise mode game, and thus you lose your progress. There is a workaround of course, save your game right before the game ends, but it takes so long for Madden to load from cold boot that this ends up being a 5-10 minutes cycle to get back into the action, horrible and frustrating. There are other bugs all over the place, graphics not loading, freezes in other parts of the game, cancelling actions in Franchise mode Assistant Coach feature not working, and online play turning off the PSP. I even had the game hang just selecting a play today. I will be going back to EB Games tomorrow to see if I can get my money back or a store credit. The final straw for me was EA posting an "official" workaround on the above linked forums, which others have reported as not working. The right thing to do would be for EA to fix all the issues and ship people new builds of the game on UMD, soft patches won't work, PSP wasn't designed to allow game loading from the Memory Stick apparently, thats what someone claiming to be a game dev posted on the EA forums. This is completely disappointing, this is the game I have been waiting for, as I talked about here. I don't pay $50 for this much frustration. EA you have lost a customer for a long time, thanks for not doing the right thing for your customers.