Gadgetopia

Wired News: Madden Keeps Gaining Ground: An homage to the greatest sports sim ever created.

“‘EA has never been satisfied with Madden,’ says Bryan Intihar, associate editor at Electronic Gaming Monthly. ‘They have a formula and they keep to it, but they add little things every year to make it more realistic — you feel like you’re more and more on the field with each passing year. No other game has been able to immerse you in that way.’”

My son and I play it on the PS2 and I’ve never seen a game with this level of sophistication and complexity. The replay mode is amazing. I’m convinced they track every player’s individual limbs separately, because there have been occasions when I replay an incompletion, zoom in, and see the ball bounce of a player’s arm on its backswing while he’s running. The arm only occupies that point in “space” for a certain time, so how does the game know the arm is in that space at that time unless the arm is a separate object from the player?

One day, in Best Buy, I didn’t have my glasses on, and I looked at a Madden display from about 20 feet away. It wasn’t for 30 seconds or so that I realized I wasn’t watching an actual NFL game.