Sports games are too complicated (for me) with modern consoles

Initially I was kind of excited when I saw that NFL 2026 was part of the PS-Plus Extra catalog this month. This of course was one of those fake "free" games that you have to DLC if you want all the content but I simply wanted to see what I have been missing all of these years. Many eons ago I was basically addicted to Joe Montana Football on the Sega Genesis (3 buttons) and John Madden Football (6 buttons, not all used) on the SNES. These were games I would play for hours with friends and we would just have a blast.

So I was hoping to revisit my love for this sort of competition in the latest and greatest from EA Sports and to say that I was a bit let down is a complete understatement.

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Compare the above with it's simplistic design and easy to control gameplay to what it is that Madden 2026 looks like.

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I gotta hand it to them on the graphical side of things, we have come a long way in 30 years, that much is for sure. The Madden of now looks F**king REAL. But there is a massive downside for someone like me and I am certain I am not going to get past this.

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This is just the offensive controls and just for when you start out with the ball. Once the ball is in the air, the controls change, when you receive the ball the controls change, when you are playing defense the controls change. That's 14 buttons you have to remember just for one portion of the game and while I am not going to fully count them, lets just make a conservative estimate and suggest defense has just as many controls and add in a few more that would be on kicks and special teams and now we have probably around 35 buttons to remember.

I'm not going to do that

I think back to the easy days of my youth and while we didn't have the ability to call just anything under the sun and maybe our players couldn't stiff-arm or do anything other than sprint, spin, and jump, we were fine with that. Why do we need a button to perform a lateral backwards pass on the controller when this actual move is used like 2 times a season in real world football? It's a stupid!

Plus, when you are playing against the computer the game sucks even more because they try to simulate what a real game would be like on TV. It sometimes takes ages for the other team to select their play even though it's a machine and made that decision 35 plays ago and can definitely read what play you are running. The delay on the hikes and the holdup in play is more real to life, I get that, but it's also f**king boring.

The same is true with the last time I tried to play and NHL game, which was one of me and my roommates' favorite back in the day, mostly because of the fights.

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These graphics are not good, I suppose they were at the time but this was back when Lara Croft had a triangle-shaped chest and we were "wowed" with that. The graphics were simple and we were cool with that. The gameplay was where it was at and again, it was simple. Pass, directional press, and shoot on net. On defense you had sprint, hard check, and intentional foul (which was used a great deal in my household).

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Once again this is just for offense so you can presume that defense adds another dozen.

Am I just too stupid to remember all this junk?

One thing I really wish that all of these games had was a 'retro' mode where you play with extremely simple controls for a time and then when you feel as though you are ready you can add a bit more as you progress. Throwing 30 button combinations at me for me to remember simply isn't going to happen. Even if I did manage to remember them if I take a few days off all that information is going to be overwritten by the things that I actually have to do in my living life and when I sit down to try to play it again I am just going to give up.

NBA is a bit different because there are fewer moves but again with this, I only enjoy playing coop against another person so that we can both hit the wrong buttons and be launching shots accidentally from the other end of the court.

I guess I'm just a grumpy old gamer