Last year was the big year for defense. This year
EA hasn’t stopped adding to the defense. There are some great additions to the D side of the ball in 06. The first is called Zone Lock and is my favorite. It’s been needed for quite some time. They added Man Lock but everyone knows that problem when in the Nickel covering a 3 WR set you would have to flip the play to get your Nickel back on the correct side. This is no longer the case as the Nickel back will go to the correct side initially and even follow the receiver if he goes in motion to the other side. It’s a very nice addition which will fix a lot of easy quick pass completions.
EA has also added Adaptive AI. The Defensive will now adjust to routes that are being run over and over. Think you can fool it by running the same route out of a different formation? Wrong. It tracks it by the route being run and not the play being run. What will happen is the defensive players involved will get a ratings boost. Not sure how much but some of the boosts mentioned were awareness and hands. Here’s hoping it takes care of those darn corner routes that were run so much in 05.
Another D feature I really liked was the DB shading option. You can now pick the shoulder of the receiver you want line up on. If you didn’t know which to be honest I never knew either … in all past Madden games they have shaded the inside shoulder. This is a lot of the reason the corner routes worked so well in last years game. Now if you know your opponent is running a lot of corner routes with the Slot receiver then you will want to shade that receiver to the outside shoulder and take away that route.
Some other things that are in the game that will improve the Defense
- you can now check the D assignment for 1 player at a time instead of showing the whole defense. This will work well for those local player vs. player games and won’t give away your complete strategy.
- I’m not sure to what extent but gang tackling is now in the game. Another player can come up when another defensive player is already in an animation with the offensive player and trigger another animation. So you can now try to strip the ball while the offensive player is “stood up”
- The play-maker pre snap read is back in the game
- This is a really cool part. You can now switch players pre-snap by holding down X or O (PS2) and using the D-pad to move the cursor around the field.
- For playcalling the quick audible option that you saw in NCAA last year has been added and improved. You do this by holding down R1 (PS2) and choosing your audibles on the fly.
Our offense write-up will be up later today so keep checking back.
