Firstly: this entire post is one giant spoiler. If you haven’t yet seen this week’s episode of Breaking Madden, you can do so here.
A breakdown of The 344th, one of the greatest miracles in Breaking Madden history
It wasn’t supposed to happen. This episode of Breaking Madden was supposed to be a story of defeat. But sometimes I am not in charge.
This week, I also debuted a new feature called Breaking Madden: Roster Cuts, which is all about the people who made it into the game and the horrible, horrible things they’ve done. That is right here.
Week 7 of Breaking Madden was supposed to be an honest-to-God story of failure. I certainly could have tweaked Madden’s settings in any number of ways, but I chose to use the version of Tom Brady that came on the disc. The idea of trying the impossible, failing, trying again, and failing again was really compelling to me. In the original post I explained my love of the movie Edge of Tomorrow, but you know what movie I’d be even more interested in? A movie in which Tom Cruise’s character never learned. Never improved. Just died forever. Maybe he’d have spiritual awakenings and come to better understand his existence and whatnot, but he’d never escape his fate.
The completely unexpected happy ending arrived on my 344th try. I made sure to take an extra shot of it:
As I mentioned, I tried everything I could think of to get Tom Brady to score a 99-yard touchdown up the middle on a quarterback sneak. I jumped, I dove, I trucked, I juked, I protected the ball, and I spun.
Here’s the thing: when I hit the B button, Tom would always spin to his right. This would allow him to shed one tackle, which wasn’t really that useful, because that tackler would slow him down so much that four other dudes could jump on him. So I started messing with the right stick, and remembered I could spin him the other way. Whether this is an effective strategy in the broad sense, I can’t really say, but it does seem clear that a left spin is the only thing that could have possibly worked in that play.
This was a total fluke that has nothing to do with how good or not-good I am at Madden. I don’t think I could repeat it if you gave me a thousand more tries. This time, it just wasn’t up to me.
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