“Madden NFL 09 brings the most realistic graphics in the 20-year history of the game, so players in this year’s Madden Challenge will feel the every tackle and the rush of the crowd as they put their skills and pride on the line,” said Brian Movalson, EA Sports marketing director.

“It is an honor to be featured on the cover of Madden NFL 09 En Español. As a first generation Mexican American, this opportunity provides an amazing and unique way for me to represent my Hispanic heritage,” says cover athlete Roberto Garza. “Madden NFL is a game that I have enjoyed for years and I will certainly treasure this forever.”

“EA is proud to share in the NFL’s efforts to deliver customized content to Spanish-speaking fans,” says senior product manager, Anthony Stevenson. “Offering the Hispanic fan base an opportunity to further develop their passion for the game by playing Madden NFL 09 En Español is a tremendous honor and something we hope to build upon down the road.”

“We are pleased to partner with EA to bring Madden NFL 09 en Español to our fans,” says Peter O’Reilly, NFL director of marketing. “This customized version of Madden provides Spanish-speaking fans yet another way to engage with the NFL and experience the game all year round.”

1. Kicking play disconnect: If two opponents play a game with two different camera angles, in any situation where a game winning or tying kick was to be made, a disconnect could occur. “ActionCam” forces the game to go into slow-motion to add drama to these late kicks, but unfortunately the Classic camera does not, thus forcing the “disconnect”. This has been fixed…all cameras can still be used as well.

Workaround until the patch: If possible, ensure that you and your opponent have the same camera type chosen before starting an online game.

2. Stability issues in the play call / halftime highlights / postgame highlights screens (especially in Franchise mode after training games): This was a hard one to track down as not everyone was seeing it , we did find the issue however with some Instant Replay / cache corruption, and have a fix ready for patch 2.

Workaround until the patch: Save and re-boot after any point where you have entered the game. We learned that the likelihood of this issue appearing is magnified after multiple loads into and out of the game engine. From what we’ve seen so far, people that have tried playing only one game at a time (or even one Franchise training session at a time), and saving/rebooting afterwards, have had zero crashes.

3. Stability issues with Madden IQ end of game popup: This has been fixed.

Workaround until the patch: Always choose “No” at the Madden IQ end of game popup.

4. “WR direct snap” exploit: Cheesers found an exploit to direct snap to a WR for easy short yardage gain. Not only are we fixing this play (i.e. we aren’t removing it), we are also going to be re-setting records for anyone with a winning record that has been found to be using this play.

5. Franchise Progression / Regression (or lack thereof): The lack of higher numbers was a tuning value that I think everyone agreed was just too low. This has been juiced up so you should see more realistic progression now.

6. Edited players don’t progress: Players were not progressing after their jersey number (or pretty much any other attribute). This has been fixed.

7. Stability issue when exiting Madden ‘93 in CE version: This has been fixed.

8. Deep ball glitch: Some enterprising gamers found a way to throw a deep ball while crossing the LOS and hit a receiver wide open at a decent rate. We addressed this by making sure the DB will no longer break on the ball when the QB crosses the line while throwing.

9. CPU running out of bounds: This bug appears when the CPU tries to switch hands while running to the sidelines. This is fixed for patch 2.

10. Penalty sliders ineffective: A common complaint from the hardcore community was the lack of effect from the penalty sliders. We increased these substantially for patch 2.

11. Field degradation: Another common complaint was the lack of field degradation. Our effect was very subtle, which was also getting overshadowed by our lighting and post effects, so we increased this effect for the patch.

12. Stability issue with the Eagles and a full ring meter: We found and fixed a rare issue where the gamer could run into stability issues while using the Eagles in mini-game with a ring meter that was completely full.

13. Play call screen hitch: We found and fixed a bug that was causing a noticeable hitch when exiting the play call screen

14. Prevent Defense issue: We found and fixed an issue where defenders sharing a deep zone/prevent assignment would loosen their coverage (because they thought the other guy was covering for them), which allowed the receiver to get behind them even though they were in Prevent.

15. Brett Favre stats: With the late addition of Brett Favre, we were not able to get his Career and Season statistics into the game for the roster update. This has now been added for patch 2.

16. Defensive Preplay Mis-cue: We found and fixed an issue where defenders would leave their man wide open in a Cover 3.

17. CPU quick-snap: A very common complaint on the forums was the speed at which the CPU snapped the ball. We added a random length of time (no less than 5 seconds) for the CPU to wait and even make pre-play adjustments.

18. Online playbook switch: We found and fixed an issue where playbooks were re-setting to the defaults after the playbook select popup was closed.

Source

Thanks to Examiner.com.

Patch #1 (currently with MS/Sony for certification)
1. Changed default quarter length of online leagues to 5 minutes.
2. Solved a very rare stability issue that occured when using a couple of playbooks.
3. Eliminated a button mashing glitch during high latency online games.
4. Eliminated a stability issue that sometimes occured while viewing the player HUB in online leagues.
5. Fixed a tricky disc eject glitch that occured at specific points of online games.
6. Kick Return Tuning - made improvements to help reduce frequent long kick returns.
7. Safety Tuning - eliminated issue where safeties in deep zone coverage would sometimes not react to a run to their side.
8. The game skill slider for interceptions was tuned to amplify it’s affect.

Patch #2 Possibilities
1. Ghost Juking OOB fix - aka CPU players running out of bounds
2. CPU Accuracy tuning
3. Amplify the field degredation effect (the system is currently working but is hidden by some of our late added post effects)
4. Other post-release community feedback