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Breaking Madden

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Has anybody been following Breaking Madden, by Jon Bois on SBNation? It's kind of fantastic. I'm not into sports games, but Bois makes a very irreverent and insightful critique on the Madden franchise.

The Super Bowl episode from last year is a good entry point.

http://www.sbnation.com/2014/1/30/5351052/breaking-madden-super-bowl-broncos-seahawks

Bois basically takes Madden and pushes the settings to their limits to see how the game handles itself. For the Super Bowl he makes one team of supermen players with all traits at maximum (size, speed, strentgh, etc.) and one team with all players at the minimum. He pretty quickly runs up against the limits of what the simulation can handle. It's a good read.

Anybody into this as much as me?

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I haven't had a chance to catch up on the new ones that just started, but yeah, Breaking Madden is great.  There's something about it that reminds me of that Old Man Murray article about getting revenge for 9/11 using NHL 2002.

 

In the same vein, Jon Bois did a series NBA Y2K, which was much the same thing but with the NBA2K games.  The last article in that series is one of the funniest and most amazing things I've read in a long time, just an absolute must-read piece.

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The Super Bowl episode from last year is a good entry point.

http://www.sbnation.com/2014/1/30/5351052/breaking-madden-super-bowl-broncos-seahawks

In the same vein, Jon Bois did a series NBA Y2K, which was much the same thing but with the NBA2K games.  The last article in that series is one of the funniest and most amazing things I've read in a long time, just an absolute must-read piece.

 

The amazing thing about Bois, both in Breaking Madden and elsewhere, is the willingness he is to do an ungodly amount of work to achieve his comedic goal. The "Death of Basketball" feature is a brutal slog, and reading his latest football one where he tries to get over two hundred sacks by a single player in a single game actually involves him breaking several different ways that Madden 15 keeps track of the number, to the point that he was forced to keep his own tally on paper.

 

They're all well-written and hilariously dedicated reads, and I don't even like sports!

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I haven't had a chance to catch up on the new ones that just started, but yeah, Breaking Madden is great.  There's something about it that reminds me of that Old Man Murray article about getting revenge for 9/11 using NHL 2002.

 

In the same vein, Jon Bois did a series NBA Y2K, which was much the same thing but with the NBA2K games.  The last article in that series is one of the funniest and most amazing things I've read in a long time, just an absolute must-read piece.

 

That NBA piece is really incredible. 

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The new season of BM is promising to be great - last year's Superbowl episode is pretty special, and this year began with some serious legwork on Madden 2015. It has a habit of making me snort with laughter at work, though, which isn't always appropriate...

 

Oh, there's a new one out. Better read that at somepoint, then.

 

And you're all spot on about how readable they are, even if you don't like sports! Bois' timing is cracking. As, incidentally, is his pitch-perfect use of animated gifs - he's done the legwork on video capture, too). More gifs in games articles, people. 

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I love Breaking Madden. The recent post where he tried to break the career sacks record in one game was hilarious.

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I'm a little uncomfortable with SBNation because a friend of mine was bullied by some of the writers, but the Breaking Madden pieces are pretty great.

 

(Same reason I'm not fond of James Mielke.)

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I've been following a while and they're great - honestly think it's some of my favourite games writing out there currently. Jon Bois is an excellent writer in general, which helps.


The Death of the NBA he did for NBAY2K series of articles is incredible. Joyous, infact.

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I'm a little uncomfortable with SBNation because a friend of mine was bullied by some of the writers, but the Breaking Madden pieces are pretty great.

 

(Same reason I'm not fond of James Mielke.)

 

That's really unfortunate to hear. I find it hard to paint sites like that with one brush, just because they're so huge.

 

I'll give any site that employs Jon Bois a shot. He was one of the writers of The Dugout, which is where I learned who he was and where internet chat rooms were cool within the last decade.

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