So Madden Vita news looks pretty good as we all know the screen shots don't hold a candle to the game on the OLED screen.
Madden 13 on the Vita is essentially Madden 12.5 due to limited resources and new hardware. It is disingenuous for EA Sports to market it as "Madden NFL 13," and consumers who buy it, They didn't call FIFA, FIFA 12 because it was based on FIFA 11 so they just called it FIFA Soccer.
According to the author of the piece, Samit Sarkar.
Among those major improvements to Madden, only the brand-new commentary made it into Madden 13 on Vita.
I played the Vita game this week, and to be clear, it appears to be shaping up nicely. Most of the touch controls, such as the ability to tap on a receiver and draw hot routes with a finger, are smart and welcome additions. The game includes full Franchise and Superstar modes, and will receive weekly roster updates and Madden Moments Live content throughout the 2012-13 NFL season. Of course, the graphics aren't quite up to par with Madden 12 on PS3, but they're still impressive on the Vita's five-inch screen.
This sound scary because from what I understand the VITA is supposed to be easy to program for. The Vita game was outsourced to HB Studios, based out of Nova Scotia. Development began in Sept. 2011. Here's the scary quote, that makes me skeptical.
Dan Baker told me that it took until February of this year "just to get the code running," which is only the first step of the process. A long cycle of optimizing the code followed, but the Vita version wasn't ready for a press demo back in mid-April, when I visited EA Tiburon to play a pre-alpha version of Madden 13 on console. At the time, Baker said the early build was running at only 15 frames per second — about half of the desired frame rate. It still wasn't in a satisfactory state even by E3 earlier this month. Only this week, at an EA press event in New York, did the publisher exhibit the Vita game for the first time.