Madden or...um... Yeah nothing!!

I was on ESPN's Page 2 and stumbled on a great column about Madden '06 (read it here http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=hruby/050809). It's a bunch of interviews with people who get the game on release day and what they do to skip work for the next few days so they can play the hell out of the game. It's a good read if you like videogames. I remember when Halo 2 came out in November last year there were people calling in sick and taking the week off and things of that sort, but some of the stuff in Madden beats all of that, probably because it comes out every year as opposed to a game like Halo 2 which took about 4 years to come out.

In my case, I've only bought Madden once ('04 Mike Vick on the cover) and even played in a GameStop tournament that time (where I got owned in the first round by a guy using the Falcon's and Vick). Last year, I got ESPN's football game and thought it was on par if not better than Madden, however the NFL decided to sell its license to one bidder only which ended up being EA Sports (the publishers of the Madden game). Where am I going with this? Lets say that the NFL license deal never happened, fast forward 10 years and assume that ESPN kept putting out a good if not better product than Madden every year. Would ESPN have developed a similar following? Would gamers be calling for an ESPN Football national holiday? I say probably so. Can you imagine the fanboy battles on release day at your local GameStop, that would be worth waiting in line by itself. Most of the reason for Madden's cult like following is the fact that good competition did not exist until, Sega's Dreamcast came out and the whole 2K series started coming out in 2000. Remember Madden has been around for more than 13 years. Also the 2K series wasn't really competing until 2002 when Sega began to port the series to PS2, XBOX and GameCube (2K and 2K1 were only available for the Dreamcast system). We'll never know the outcome of this debate since once again Madden has no competition for the next 6 years I think (or maybe 10, I'm not sure). So, love it or hate it, if you play videogame football you're stuck with Madden like or not...or you can keep playing that old copy of ESPN Football, also you could do what my buddy Mike does: he buys the 2 year old version of Madden for 5 bucks used, if you really think about it the advancements from year to year aren't huge and if you don't care about them too much, you're good.

Wow this was really a rant...don't drop those controllers!!!