Madden 11 - Xbox Freezes Guide & Solutions
Madden 11 Xbox Freezes & Crashes
Video games are indelibly tested and re-tested before release. Quality assurance and bug reporting during development is paramount in rooting out the glitches and niggles contained within the coding et al. Unfortunately, some games are either neglected when it comes to this kind of testing or are pushed to release with a modicum of obsolescence. Madden and developers EA Tiburon are no different. The Madden 11 Xbox freezes and lockups can hinder game players toiling through the online or franchise modes in the game. This article will focus on these Madden 11 Xbox game crashes in the NFL based game as well as trying to provide solutions to the inherent game breaking bugs.
Madden 11 Xbox Freezes Guide & Solutions
Firstly, the faux-crashes of Madden 11 that can throw many a player off, even causing them to quit the game thinking their game has frozen. These Madden 11 Xbox freezes occur during games when a replay or other cutscene is displayed. For example, after completing a play, the camera will shift to a replay of it or show the bench for a couple of seconds. This is where the game pauses and the screen will turn black, while the announcers still commentate and the crowd can still be heard. To fix this, press the A button and wait for the next replay to appear or the playbook UI to be shown.
The aforementioned Madden 11 Xbox freezes can be easily fixed, however the game still has problems with crashes and game breaking glitches during the cutscene or replay sections in-game. A prevalent example of this would be after winning a Super Bowl. After finishing the game, a series of cutscenes will be shown, with confetti, celebrations and the presentation of the Lombardi trophy. During these scenes, the game can freeze or crash permanently, forcing players to replay the Super Bowl again or restart from their last save. There is no way to truly fix this and sucking it up is pretty much the only real solution.
Madden 11 Game Freezes & Problems
Another Madden 11 game freeze happens during load screens for the Franchise mode. These will pause on the load screen after completing a regular season or playoff game and stay there ad infinitum, unless you restart the Xbox and load another save. There is a solution for this problem however, as this particular Madden 11 game freeze is directly related to the use of custom gameplans. By deleting or returning to the default gameplans this problem can be eradicated, along with any tweaked tactical workings you may have saved. There are more menial and less obvious crashes and freezes in the Franchise mode but they are too numerous for this article to aggrandize.
Online modes have similar problems with game crashes and random (seemingly) freezing. Not only this, but the “Be A Superstar” and normal exhibition matches have shown themselves to freeze and crash also. In general, Madden 11 was shipped with an almost stratospheric number of bugs, glitches and most importantly freezes. Although clearing your Xbox cache (which isn’t recommended) can solve some of the persisting problems, there isn’t a clear definitive way to handle the numerous game breakers. It is disappointing that hours of play could be lost or an online match could be scuppered through neglectful testing and the only people who suffer are those NFL fans who continue to purchase new Madden titles.
This post is part of the series: Madden NFL 11
A series of articles regarding the EA Tiburon developed Madden NFL 11. There are a variety of different articles with diverging subject matter and content.
