20 out of 20 people found this review helpful.
A Thoroughly Entertaining Waste of Time
Date of Review: Jun 26, 2007
The Bottom Line: If you are going to play anyway, then I recommend this over other games.
It happened a long time ago, back in the old days. Yep, all the way back to when, as a fourteen year old eight grader, I purchased my first Madden game. It was "Madden '96". I remember the agonizingly slow gameplay, the awful graphics, and the "Madden '96" theme song, the one that just kept playing over and over, never changing. But that didn't matter to me. I could sit for hours with my Nintendo 64, pushing buttons until I could almost believe that I was actually Steve Young, Garrison Hearst, or Jerry Rice.
Since those wasted days of my youth, I have come to the conclusion that there were plenty of other things I could have done with my time. The hours that I spent cradling that useless controller could have been turned to something productive. I could have learned to play the piano, or worked on my jump shot, maybe done a little bit of homework. But instead I spent eight years learning to rock the world of Madden NFL football. All you die-hard, fanatical gamers, maybe you should just skip this next line... for your own safety and well being. Video games, I have decided, are the biggest waste of time known to man.
Woops, I said it. The ultimate sacrilege in the world of gaming. Well, it can't be helped, I've said it and I can't take it back now.
While I can understand that it is impossible at this point to completely eliminate video games from our society, at least it would be good to "clean them up" a bit. Parents: I'm not telling you what to do, but I can tell you that, over time, the crap that gets put into your kids head through these things will have an affect. It might not hurt to, at the least, make sure the games they are playing are appropriate. While games like "Grand Theft Auto" and "Halo" are fun, exciting, and original, the violence, language, and attitudes that they portray can have psychological impacts on their users. Sports games, including "Madden '07" provide a clean alternative for every gamer to enjoy.
"Madden '07" introduces several new features to the game, including a whole new running style, and more official "player roles." While in past versions I have had difficulty getting basic moves, such as stiff arms and juke moves, to work consistently, all such moves are simple and easy in '07. The player roles, (e.g. team distraction, go to guy, franchise running back... there are too many to list) are assigned to players who earn them in the offseason, and provide special bonuses to the players to which they are assigned. The game also includes all the features from previous versions, including the same offseason roster management style.
The soundtrack can match any put forth in previous "Madden" games, with songs from (among others) AFI, Taking Back Sunday, and Dashboard Confessional. While they don't actually play during games, the songs on the soundtrack make the offseason a little more bearable.
There are downsides to this game (besides the fact that, as I said before, it is a waste of time). The gameplay on the all-pro level, (the second hardest) is far too easy, while the all-madden difficulty setting (the hardest) is ridiculously stupid, thanks to EA-Sports thinking that the "quarterback vision" is absolutely necessary at that level. Maybe you might like that kind of thing, but I can't stand that. (For all you people who have never played "Madden" the "QB vision" is a feature that makes it nearly impossible to pass the football. Sucks, huh?) The other downside is that the PS2 is not meant to handle games with this much data, so at times it gets really slow. (Sucks again, huh?)
All in all, I'd say if you are going to play video games, "Madden '07" is the second best choice (right behind throwing away your system and getting a job.)
