The computer brain of “Madden NFL 09” thinks I’m really good at video game football.

It is wrong.

The Madden Test, a new feature in this year’s “Madden,” was designed to help flawed “Madden” gamers like myself share just enough about their gaming abilities so that the game could craft a personalized difficulty setting. It’s a great idea that doesn’t quite work.

The test consists of four challenges, two offensive and two defensive. When I first took the test I participated in offensive rushing and passing drills. And wouldn’t you know it: the game thought I was great! It classified me as performing at the highest All-Madden level on offense.

How could the game be so wrong about me? Easy. The drills required me to use a control stick to run a player down the field while pressing various action buttons to perform the jumps, stiff-arms and spins that shake off defenders. The test assists by displaying a button prompt above the player-character’s head at the moment it needs to be pressed. Well, that makes it quite easy for a gamer like me who has spent years sharpening my ability to input button prompts while beheading a Gorgon in “God of War” or striking a chord in “Guitar Hero.” What should have been a test of control knowledge and reflexes winds up only being an examination of the latter.

Put me on the “Madden” field and ask me to run offense without the help of button prompts and I will fail. And I did during the first game of “Madden NFL 09″ football that I played after the Test. I failed hard, because the difficulty of the computer-controlled defenders was ratcheted to the hardest setting because of my supposedly stellar performance during the Test.

Following my first full four quarters of “Madden NFL 09,” I was not only defeated but presented with a visual tweaking of my custom difficulty setting. The game lowered its approximation of my offensive skill (just a tiny bit, disturbingly enough) and slightly raised its estimation of my defensive abilities, which had been propely determined by the Madden Test as nearly non-existent.

I believe several more sessions with the new “Madden” would result in a tweaked difficulty that matches my abominable abilities. But I certainly would habe liked the Test to work the first time. Too bad it mistakes my existing “God of War” skills for “Madden” skill. Here’s hoping the Test is refined for “Madden NFL ‘10” and then applied to other games.

Next: One more world to master in “Braid,” but time may be limited tonight and, in real life, I don’t have a slow-down circle to compensate.