Earlier this week I got stuck into Madden NFL 10 for my yearly dose of American Football and the associated review. Pressure is on these sports games developers to deliver new features year after year, despite the rather constricted 12 month production style they face. Sometimes major features introduced in one year of a sports game will be axed two or three years down the track – and in some cases even reintroduced as “new” features down the line.

This week, The Warp Pipe will look at some of the major sports game features which have been cut over the years.

Feature Demotion

We have previously complained about the poor transition of sports games from the PlayStation 2, Xbox and GameCube era to the HD consoles. The games not only suffered from a drop in quality, but many staple features were absent from early iterations, like player creation and fantasy drafts in Madden NFL and many of the leagues in FIFA. In this case, these features were gradually reintroduced, but there were many good features in these games that were cut and have not (yet) returned.

A personal favourite of mine was the indoor soccer mode featured in FIFA ‘97 and its follow-up FIFA: Road to World Cup ‘98. Indoor soccer put players in a six a side contest with no outs or corners, making for some pretty fast paced matches. Of course, due to the sheer lack of difficulty in these games (particularly Road to World Cup ’98), scores were pretty high, but it was all in good fun. Players could even run through a full club season in indoor mode. However, the feature was cut for FIFA 99, and has never returned since. Interestingly enough, FIFA ’97 also introduced 20 player matches over LAN for the PC version, a feature that would be touted as “revolutionary” when reintroduced into the console versions of FIFA 09. Speaking of EA and soccer, their Total Club Manager series may not have been anywhere near as popular as Sports Interactive’s Championship Manager and Football Manager outings of the time, but the 2004 and 2005 games supported a really cool feature called “Football Fusion”. Essentially what you’d do is handle all of your managerial activities in Total Club Manager, and when it came to game day, you could throw in your FIFA 2004 or FIFA 2005 disc (years had to match, obviously) and play the match like a regular game of FIFA. A cool idea, but it did make Total Club Manager quite a bit easier, and much more time consuming. The feature met its end when EA decided to rebrand the series to FIFA Manager, change developers and restrict the game to the PC. Sega, and later 2K Sports’ NBA 2K series featured a 3 on 3 street court option all the way through to about 2006. Unlike games such as NBA Street and NBA Ballers, the action could be played out realistically, with all the usual NBA rules and regular Earth physics. Later iterations of the series (starting with ESPN NBA Basketball) featured a dedicated single player street mode called NBA 24/7, where you’d take a no-name player and develop his abilities through mini-games and tournaments across the United States – the available games would vary based on the time of day you played. NBA 24/7 and the street modes haven’t been seen since NBA 2K8, where NBA Blacktop mode was introduced. Blacktop consists mainly of contests from the NBA All Star Weekend, and has little of the same depth or variety as 24/7 mode. In the latter PSOne and early PlayStation 2 versions of Madden NFL, EA had a mode called the Madden Challenge, which ran in the background of every game. Essentially the Madden Challenge awarded players points for certain accomplishments during a match, such as scoring a set number of points, sacking the quarterback or returning a kick/punt for a touchdown. Points were split into a number of tiers based on the difficulty of the task, and a multiplayer was applied based on the difficulty you played on (1x for Rookie up to 5x for All-Madden). Points could be redeemed for Madden Cards, which could give players certain advantages or disadvantage the opposing team. Players could also wager cards in multiplayer matches and trade them with friends. The concept later spread to the NHL series from the 2002 game, but appeared to meet its end across the board for the 06 season offerings. Starting with Madden NFL 2004, the franchise mode gained an additional management layer with owner mode. On top of managing the roster of the club and playing matches, players now had the ability to make financial decisions for the club, from expanding the stadium right down to deciding how much to charge for a hot dog. Players could even uproot and move their franchise to a new city. Unfortunately owner mode was one of many features lost in the transition to the Xbox 360 with Madden NFL 06. Certain parts of owner mode made it back into regular franchise play since Madden NFL 08, but most players would like to see a return to the more explicit form of owner control. For its 2004 season, EA Sports introduced a cross range feature called the EA Sports Bio. It was a level based system where players would gain experience from play time and reaching certain milestones in each game. Rewards would be unlocked across the whole range of sports for reaching set levels – special cards and teams in Madden NFL, for example. Sadly the EA Sports Bio suffered the same fate as many other popular features in the transition to the HD generation. The 06 and 07 versions of Madden NFL featured a similar level system tied only to that game, but it too was scrapped. However, EA Sports eventually decided to build upon the EA Sports Bio with its web-based EA Sports World service, which tracks players play time, achievements and such over the entire range of EA games starting with the 2008 range. Although it doesn’t unlock anything fancy in game, EA Sports World does reward players with points that can be spent customising an avatar online. Far more useful is the ability to upload and share media from your games, like saved replays and screenshots. Finally, one could argue that competition in the sports genre is a lost feature. Since EA gained the exclusive NFL license, progression in the series has become increasingly harder to pinpoint for all but the die-hard fans, and big name competing titles NFL 2K and (to a lesser extent) NFL Game Day are no longer with us, much like how EA’s popular MVP Baseball bit the dust when 2K tied up the MLB license in retaliation. Time will tell if competition will reappear once these exclusive agreements expire.		Oh indoor soccer, how I miss thee
		NBA 2K’s 24/7 mode was street basketball sans moon physics
		Franchise is good, but owner mode brought that little bit extra to the table
		EA Sports World is an evolution of the Bio concept from 2004