By Sherri L. Smith, BlackWeb20.com

Ladies, if you’ve been enjoying your summer hugged up with a  significant other or chilling with a male relative or guy friend, your good times are about to end. Tomorrow, “Madden NFL 10″ drops. Electronic Arts hit series returns, bring all the plays, jukes, and highlight reels that capture the male imagination long after you’ve gotten all the stains of out the carpet from the Super Bowl Party.

This year, the developers have put a lot into giving players gritty realism and authenticity. To that end, they utilized the all-new Pro-Tak Animation system is a dynamic system that affects blocking and tackling. Ever seen an eight-man tackle? Now you will, but instead of the players just attaching themselves to the hapless receiver and pulling him down, Pro-Tek lets some of the offensive line join the pile to push their guy through the tackle onto the first down or maybe a touchdown.

Other new features include “Fight for Fumble” pile–ups, a mini-game where rapid button presses heighten the drama of ball possession. There’s also QB Pressure Alert that causes your controller to rumble if you’re slow-gassing getting that ball down the field and you’re about to get sacked. But any game especially a sports game is only as good as it’s AI. This year’s Madden features a shiny new AI system that makes the CPU call more realistic plays, actually mimicking their real life counterparts which means there shouldn’t be any complete blowouts when playing against the computer. This is only the tip of the iceberg for new features – updated playbooks, new jukes and spins, it’s a wonder how the developers managed to get all this stuff in there given such a short development time.

So as a rule, I normally shy away from sports games, but I’m going to have the drop the $59.99 with my fellow Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 brethren. Wii-fanatics get off a little cheaper at $49.99, while PlayStation 2 and PSP owners shell out $39.99. Who knows, maybe you might see me in line at midnight waiting to cop my copy.

BlackWeb20.com covers website and application launches; culturally relevant Internet industry news; and mainstream Internet industry news from an African-American perspective.  They also analyze emerging web trends and how they apply to web properties that target African-Americans or African-American culture.

TAGS: AI, Electtronic Arts, Madden 2010, Playstation 2, Playstation 3, Pro-Tak Animation, PSP, sony, Sports, wii, Xbox360

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