Justin's Attempt to Break Madden

Last night, inspired by Jon Bois and his endlessly entertaining Breaking Madden series, I sought out to perform an experiment within Madden 15 (I have developed commitment issues with slapping down full price for new iterations of NFL games based on the last 3 being fairly disappointing, so I lack Madden 16). Based on an embarrassing performance last week by the Kansas City Chiefs, where they became the only team in NFL history to kick seven field goals in a game and lose, I wanted to take the idea to a new level.

Kansas City committed very hard to the field goal in Week 4. Even in situations where they had a 40% chance or better to convert on 4th and short, they opted to boot the ball through the uprights. Doing so doomed them, as they could never get the lead back. As punishment, I have taken away their offensive playbook, and left them with just a single card, detailing the formation and instructions of how to kick a field goal. They’re going to try and take this newly developed playbook and win a World Championship.

THE SET UP

1. Make Kansas City kicker Cairo Santos a God among kickers.

This involved me bumping Kicking Power, Kicking Accuracy, Strength, Awareness, Agility, Stamina, Consistency, and Confidence all to 99 and flipping the Clutch trigger.

2. Turn Kansas City’s offensive line into an impenetrable wall.

As you probably guessed, this meant every stat even remotely important to an offensive lineman tasked with not letting a ball get touched got bumped up to 99 here as well. Originally I was going to make mountain men and have them join the team, but I got kind of lazy, so we’re going with the same line in place at the end of the 2015 season, sans any injuries.

3. Change how football is played in Kansas City.

Kansas City can only kick field goals on offense. Nothing else. Defense will be completely played through SuperSim. So if the defense steps up and scores points, it’ll all be based on Madden’s mathematics. Offensively, the goal is an empty statline with exception of Cairo Santos.

4. Put the game conditions in favor of our experiment.

This means global Kicking Accuracy and Power goes up to 100. This shouldn’t affect any of our opponents, since SuperSim is a tricky thing that doesn’t really seem to consider sliders, weather, or consistent stats and just kind of does what it wants.

THE GAME

So there we go. We’re playing on Pro difficulty with full 15 minute quarters. I simulate all defensive plays and also all punt/kickoff returns. Once offense is up, I kick the ball. Wind and weather will do what they do.

My initial concern with this is if the experiment was even feasible. I mean, of course it isn’t in real life, but Madden normally allows some crazy things to happen once you mess with sliders and stats enough. As it turns out, I found out just how viable it was when I kicked a 97-yard field goal on my 3rd possession (took me a bit to get used to lining everything up).

At the end of the 1st quarter, the score was Tennessee Titans 34, Kansas City 27. So the downside to missing a field goal after a touchback is it gives the other team the ball on my 20. Not great stuff. Titans QB Zach Mettenberger’s stats looked positively insane not long into the game.

The 2nd quarter was a different beast. With the wind having now turned around and blowing at me, 97 yards was simply out of man-god Cairo Santos’ range. This meant on over 50% of the possessions of the 2nd quarter I’d miss the field goal and Tennessee would score in some fashion. I entered the 2nd half down 87 to 54.

The 3rd quarter was all about making up ground. I hit the dirt running and started evening things up quickly. Defense even managed to help out with a nice pick 6. At the end of the 3rd, the score was Tennessee 103, Kansas City 94.

But then, in the 4th, the wheels fell of the wagon, when with 5 minutes and some change left to go, Madden locked up following a successful Kansas City field goal. Which, this happens with games every now and then, so it’s something you have to deal with. I restarted the game, loaded the auto save, this time missed the field goal (the wind had inexplicably changed intensity and direction after the load, because surely weather isn’t an important condition to maintain when resuming a game), and the game locked up again. Two more attempts, two more lock ups. Madden had been broken on my first ever experiment.

So, based on the conditions behind the lockup, my best guess is I tripped some internal counter and the game didn’t want to process any more field goal attempts. So, I need to work around that. For one, I could actually do the kick/punt returns to try and get better field position, that way it’s not consistently a touchback. For another, I could reduce the game time down to 10 minutes to try and reduce the number of opportunity. Another options is… wait. What the fuck am I doing?

THE BREAKDOWN

Let’s recap, a video game released in 2014 for the Xbox One based around the most popular sport in the United States that has been around since the early 90’s through multiple iterations and is part of the most successful video game franchises of all time has broken because I kicked the dang ball too many times???

If Madden NFL was made by a small independent studio with a handful of employees, I could understand this. But it’s one of the biggest money-making franchises out there. It’s been getting annual releases for almost as long as I’ve been alive. When the game breaks in stress-tests the nature of replacing one team with tiny incapable people and putting them up against 7-foot tall 400 pound abominations of nature, I can understand why something inside might break. But that’s not what happened. What I did is akin to taking the Madden Dream Team (which in many iterations of the game existed as a combination of the greatest players of all time) and just kicking the ball over and over again. I didn’t change anyone’s physical stature, and I didn’t change anything on the opposing team. I only modified 12 players.

When you test a video game, it’s not uncommon to take a single feature of a game and test it over and over and over and over in every scenario to make sure it works. Surely, kicking endless field goals is a simple thing to test. And it’s not like I broke the scoreboard, the game crashed even when I missed the posts completely.

When Madden removed the fully canned animations and went with a true physics engine, one of the understandable risks of doing so was that bizarre bugs would occur. And sure enough they have. Players skidding across the ground, flying in the opposite direction they were hit, the ball doing whatever the hell it feels like, and those are accepted things when you cram physics into a game in less than a year. This is the third year of the engine, so by now it’s been tested both internally and by a massive player base, so you’d expect most of the issues to be ironed out, and you certainly wouldn’t expect the game to lock up because of a stat going too high.

I can’t really stress how unacceptable this is. I work with software for a living and have done my fair share of scripting and coding. To have a video game developed in 2013/2014 that consistently fails because of a number going too high simply isn’t acceptable. And what I get even less is how experiments like these occur with no crashes, but too many field goal attempts causes consistent failures. I know in real football not every stat is equal, but c'mon.

EA, fix your game. As the proud holders of a monopoly on this license, you kind of owe it to fans of the sport of football to produce a game that has had actual beta testing done to ensure this kind of thing doesn’t happen. If I run into a 5’0” 160-pound quarter back at full speed with a 7’0” 400-pound linebacker and he spins around in a circle six times and doesn’t properly get up next play, fine, I did something you may have honestly never expected. But numbers should never break a sports game.

Some Thoughts on Society

This is going to be kind of rambling and all over the place but here we go.

The world is a different place than it was 10 years ago. Ask anyone, and they'll give you their personal list of the major things that have changed. In particular, though, you'll find one thing echoed by what seems like a limitless number of people, though said in many ways: people are too sensitive now/everyone gets offended over everything/people can't take a joke/Political Correctness is killing comedy/etc.

Take your pick of any of those, but they all boil down to the same thing: people have become very vocal about the things that bother them. This is a stark difference from the world I grew up in. When I grew up, you kept thoughts that made you different from the crowd to yourself, that way you didn't get ostracized or beaten up for them. (For the record: this becomes more true of a scenario based on the region of the world you live in. Having grown up in the 'burbs south of Detroit, I feel that my situation was probably still much better than someone in the bible belt or, say, the middle east.)

When I was growing up in the 90's, and even into the early 2000's, people's worlds were pretty much just their social bubbles. That bubble tended to just be the people you know. Sometimes that would branch out to include people on the internet, but it was mostly within small, closed communities (chat rooms, instant messenger, etc.) As such, if someone held beliefs that would but them at odds with the people in their bubble, it's a safe bet they'd keep that to themselves, for fear of the bubble bursting and they be left alone.

As we moved into the late 2000's and through today, through the advent of social media, public comment boards, and the blogosphere, people now can step outside of that bubble and find people that feel the way they do, they can learn that their thoughts/beliefs/feelings are shared by others. This gives people more confidence to stand up and say something where they previously held silent, because they know others out there that will back them up.

There's also access to so much more information and news sources than ever before. Suddenly you don't become a conspiracy theorist for saying things like "black people seem like they get mistreated by the police a lot", because you can cite sources that you might not have found before in say, Missouri.

What's happening as a result of these changes is that people no longer have the same fear of being cast away for their thoughts. Where before a woman might sit silently during a rape joke at the local chucklehouse, despite the fact it offended her or brought back horrific feelings of the past, she can now go to the internet and post her thoughts. While this can go many ways, at the very least a dialog exists, it doesn't just die internally.

The problem with that scenario is then you will inevitably get people who will make such statements as "it's just a joke", "lighten up", or "people just don't have a sense of humor anymore." These often can be summarized up thusly: "it bothers the hell out of me that my jokes could be considered hurtful because up until now I never cared about how my words might affect others and this changes everything." Or, it could be summarized as the most dangerous word on the internet: privilege.

For decades, people just kept their problems to themselves. They didn't speak up when things bothered them. Historically, it's not until something comes alone that helps validate their beliefs that they start to speak up. The civil rights movement is a perfect example of that, as suddenly people felt like they had support when they said "enough of this." The internet has provided that validation to many.

The biggest issue with this are the people who get bothered by this. Suddenly they're being faced with the reality that maybe their worldview isn't aligned with the way things actually are. They're unable to accept that they may be held accountable for the things they say. They simply can't fathom how people can't tell when they're joking. It's not that people are just now being offended by it, it's just they are just now TELLING YOU that it offends them.

Examples of this crop up now more frequently than ever. "Feminism is destroying games", "The confederate flag isn't a symbol of slavery", and "SJWs are the devil" are just some examples of this. All of these are examples of deflective verbiage intended to not address the problem and instead pretend like this is the fault of the people complaining, not with the system we operate in.

Many people have been comfortable for years with zero accountability on how what they say or do might affect those around them. The fact is that this is no longer the case. You can and WILL be scrutinized for your beliefs and views if they bother someone. Instead of immediately blaming them for being offended, take a few moments of your time to try and understand WHY it bothers them. Engage them. Discuss, but don't accuse or deflect.

It comes down to empathy. You don't have to have firsthand experience with something to know why it affects someone. And you can still be funny and entertaining without relying on offensive humor. It just requires a bit more creativity... and a bit more thought.

I know this was kind of a brain dump, but it's something I've been thinking about for a couple of days now and wanted to get out there. Discussion is always welcome.

The Protomen and The Megas

So, about a year-ish ago, I was told by a friend of mine about a couple of video game inspired bands, The Protomen and The Megas. I had heard of both of these bands before, but never listened to any of their music. Then Capcom released a 25th anniversary album of Mega Man inspired music, which featured a wide variety of bands and artists, including 3 songs each by The Protomen and The Megas. I immediately was grabbed by both groups as the songs were catchy, fun, and also seemed to have a story to tell.

I decided to first take the plunge on The Megas, buying up Get Equipped (music from Mega Man 2), and both History Repeating Red and Blue (music from Mega Man 3). As a huge fan of Mega Man 2 (especially the music), I decided to start off with Get Equipped, which also included 2 tracks that were featured on the 25th anniversary album. However the versions on Get Equipped are different, in that they feel more like rough cuts while the versions on the anniversary album are much more polished. Overall, I enjoyed Get Equipped and one element I liked is that for the robot master's stage music, they tried to basically infuse a personality and story into each of them, usually told from the perspective of the respective robot master the song is about. They tried to paint some interesting pictures of them which really kind of grabbed me and fleshed out the ideas behind the game.

Then I checked out the History Repeating albums, and suddenly I shifted The Megas way up my list. These albums are phenomenal. Much like Get Equipped, the music is all based on tracks from the game, but they lyrical quality gets a huge step up and some of the stories given to the robot masters are just fantastic. From paining Hard Man as a former champion looking to take on Mega Man to regain his former glory, to Needle Man being a kind robot trapped in the body of a killer. Some really interesting concepts. The best of which comes in the form of an encounter between Proto Man and Mega Man which is built up and hinted at throughout the albums and pans out over the course of 4 really great tracks. I've always loved albums that tell stories and it really helps that this is building a story on top of content I already really liked (in Mega Man 3). Overall, regardless of your attachment to the games, the music is fantastic and I really recommend it. As a bonus, they are great live, sounding even better than they do on album (which I always use as a testament to the actual quality of a group, because it's harded to sound good live than on a produced album).

The Protomen were a different case. While I really enjoyed the tracks on the anniversary album (especially Built to Last, which is just great in every way), for whatever reason I didn't pick up the albums. They kind of remained on the fringe, though I can's say specifically why. Then, we went to MAGFest and saw them do two live shows, and I became completely enthralled with them. They have such an energy and devotion to their music and are all around amazing performers. Plus, the energy from the crowd just made their main show a shining moment in a great weekend at MAGFest. So I naturally picked up their main albums (The Protomen and Act 2: The Father of Death) and listened to them on the long car ride back to Indiana from Maryland.

This is where things get interesting. I don't have a ton of background on The Protomen, I only knew that I liked their music, and that they wrote original tracks inspired by Mega Man, instead of using the songs already in the games. Listening to the albums, it was clear that similar to The Megas, there is a story being told through the music and actions. Listening to both albums there was that same energy present that really made me interested to know more. I could tell the first album revolved around the city being taken over by Dr. Wily and Proto Man being sent to stop him, but that's about all I was able to pick up on my first listen. Act 2, meanwhile, focused on the fallout between Dr. Light and Dr. Wily that took place before the first album, and I got a bit more out of that one (it feels like Act 2 polished a lot of the musical elements from the first album and had a better overall sound to it.)

Then, I pulled out the booklets included in each album, which actually told the whole story (as well as gave the lyrics) for each album, and I suddenly found myself completely engrossed with these albums. There is a full, very interesting and very well told story to each album which flesh out the world in which The Protomen sing about (which is quite different from the world the actual Mega Man games take part in). Basically, The Protomen are making an epic rock opera, and it should be experienced by everyone. The story being told is deep, interesting, and very engaging, and it's accompanied by some fantastic music. Again, I can't recommend them enough.

I know it's been awhile since I blogged about anything, but this was something cool enough that I wanted to share it. Hopefully some other people will discover these bands through this.

-Justin