As a spectator, it has to look good. As a player, it has to play fun. If they keep concentrating on making the game look fantastic, they are going to wind up with a game that nobody can distinguish from real football, but that no one is going to play. Sometimes graphics gets in the way.

I played one last game last night, and remembered a few things I forgot in my original list after I hit 10.

11. The on screen displays are stupid and convey nearly zero information. In particular, nowhere is there an indication of how many time outs you have left unless you go to some pause menu.

12. The game uses animations on the in-game “jumbo-tron” to take 15 seconds to tell you things like “first down”, or “the kick is good” which can be communicated in .5 seconds with a small piece of text. This also has the side effect that it’s impossible to tell that some in-game events have happened. Fumbles for example.

13. The interface for calling an audible is similarly different, and less usable. It’s easy to accidentally hit the audible button and have no idea that you’ve done it because the UI is too subtle.

14. I mostly hate the new cascading menu system.

15. When will they remove the shit music soundtracks from these games and just leave me in peace? OK. That’s a problem on the PSP too.

The second Pete? You are dead to me.

Man, the only football video game I ever liked was the old Mutant League game. Somebody needs to make another one of those with modern technology.