I'm back, baby!

And you thought disappearing for two months and moving to another state would deter your least-favorite blogger.
Got a new job (at a small Vermont paper), new digs and the same old mental defects.
Today, I'm going to hate on Madden '07 for the Xbox 360. I know I had previously criticized some for complaining about having both a Xbox 360 and Madden to play on it, and I can only say mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
Everything about the game just feels so cumbersome, though it's hard to explain why - cumbersome is the word that pops into my head whenever I play through it. Navigating through the menus feels like using a jackhammer to do open-heart surgery.
The tragedy about Madden is that it's not necessarily a bad game. You can still have a hell of a lot of fun playing through the game. It's just that Madden has hit it's "superstar" period, where it realizes that it can phone in performances for the rest of it's life and people will buy it up like candy. Just like George Lucas.
The game has become like eating Lucky Charms just for the marshmallows, especially if you dislike the regular pieces. You know you like the marshmallows, but the regular pieces temper your enjoyment. Every bite of marshmallow is mixed with something distasteful.
And can I call for the end of the challenge system in Madden? Quite frankly, I always thought it was a bad idea. Since the computer creates the universe in which the game is played, it has an intimate knowledge of it: it knows when a player is in-bounds, out-of-bounds, is down or has fumbled. In order for the challenge system to work, the programmers had to have the computer make calls it knows is wrong in order for the player to have any successful challenges.
Think about that for a minute.
In other words, the Madden system wasn't created to change wrong calls, wrong calls were added to make the system work.
If that isn't the definition of idiocy, I don't know what is. And it serves as a perfect example of the dysfunction that infests Madden today.