Madden NFL 08 (GameCube)

The other new option, fantasy challenge, is a much more interesting addition, though also a bit ridiculous in its own right. Fantasy challenge tasks you with building the team of your dreams, sans the constraints of real contracts, depth charts, injuries, and other such humdrum aspects of the real NFL. Your dream team can be composed of any number of different elements. It can be an existing NFL roster, a fantasy draft of all NFL players, or a fantasy draft of all NFL players as well as a gaggle of Hall of Fame players. Whatever you choose, the only thing you have to pay attention to is a salary cap based on roster points. Roster point values are assigned to each player based on his performance rating, and you have a limit of 730 roster points at the outset. If you're drafting the team to end all teams, you'll have to balance it out a bit toward the back end, or you'll run out of points. You can certainly put Tom Brady, LaDainian Tomlinson, and Torry Holt on one squad--you just might have to skimp a bit when picking kickers.

Once your team is set, you're whisked off to a league that bears more resemblance to the fake, multitiered league of Blitz: The League than anything NFL-related. You start out on the bottom rung of a four-tier league, and play a series of games against the other scrub teams until you can claim that tier's championship. You move from tier to tier until you get to the top rung, playing against the Hall of Famers and fake teams with insane and rather dumb magical abilities. All the while, you'll be faced with constant roster-move decisions, whether you want to deal with them or not. After each game, you're awarded more roster points, which you can use to try to trade for other, better players, or simply parlay into improving your current roster's ratings. Of course, the artificial intelligence's teams can do the same thing, and they constantly do. Basically, you're better off just holding on to as many points as you can after each game to deal with the onslaught of trade and buyout offers from other teams. If you end up in a situation where you're lacking points and can't match another team's offer, all you get is their worst player in return and some freed-up salary-cap space. Yay. That irritation aside, the fantasy challenge actually can be kind of an addictive mode. Building up your team is cool, and the streamlined presentation makes it a lot easier to manage than the standard franchise mode. It's not quite worth the price of admission all on its own, but it's a neat addition all the same.

As for the mainstay Madden modes, the franchise, online, and superstar modes are tweaked at best, and unaltered at worst. Franchise mode has seen some menu-system adjustments but actually removes some features, such as the Tony Bruno radio show as well as newspaper headlines. Then again, considering that stuff costs money to license, and this year's game seems to be pretty much frills-free, that would make some measure of sense. Superstar mode ditches the "randomization of your parents" feature when creating your own player, and it lets you select from any of the available rookies from this year's draft class. It also adds in all the role-playing stuff from the 360 and PS3 versions, minus the improvements to the camera system. Online modes are all but unchanged: head-to-head matches against other players, and that's it. At least the game performs reasonably well on the Xbox and PS2. Lag popped up now and again, but nothing game-breaking. As always, the GameCube version is devoid of online play.

The fantasy challenge is like some kind of football team building role-playing game, or something. Too bad it's got too many random encounters and John Madden never joins your party.

The sameness from last year's game extends to the presentation as well. The graphics engine has seen little adjustment, save for some new gang-tackling animations that are actually pretty good. Players still have that squat, mutated look that they've had for a good, long while now, and nobody looks anything like their real-life counterparts. The frame rate does at least manage to hold steady for the most part, though the play-calling menus and other, similar areas of the game tend to hitch up for a moment or two when loading. Predictably, the Xbox version looks the best among the three older console versions, with the PS2 version looking second best, and the GameCube version just looking kind of blurry. Commentary consists of the same rehashed dialogue from Al Michaels and John Madden yet again, so if you were hoping for something new, or even for them to mention a few new players' last names, forget about it.

Again, it's no surprise that the older consoles would get something of the shaft when it came to development priority on this year's Madden. And save for holdover issues and a few missing features, this is still a good football game through and through. The new control additions are certainly worthwhile (even if the weapons system mostly isn't), and fantasy challenge is a unique and enjoyable new way to build and play a team of your own design. You're certainly served best by picking up one of the versions of Madden released for the current console hardware, but if that's not an option, then this game isn't a bad way to go.

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