What's the point of it all?

Reviewing EA Sports' yearly sports updates often feels fairly pointless. The fans of the genre always surrender their money to EA no matter what's in the box, and when hardly anything has changed from the last year (or two), there isn't much to tell about. Yes, Madden NFL 08 is still a playable and solid game representing American football fairly accurately, and even with the dated visuals there isn't anything inherently wrong with the underlying gameplay. Yet the score below is pretty poor, and the reason is simple - EA is offering horrendously poor value for money.

If EA can't be bothered to rewrite the Madden engine on the PC to actually take advantage of hardware features already included in every video card you can buy from a store today (DX9) while happily dishing out extra-shiny football on the new consoles, they should just stop pretending and give up on the PC version. Madden NFL 08 is effectively the same game as Madden NFL 06, which in itself was just a minor upgrade from the '05 edition; the problem is that EA keeps churning minor updates as long as people keep buying them just for the new rosters and continued online play support.

Summary of YouGamers Hardware Testing

The publisher of this game state the following specifications for their minimum and recommended requirements:

Component	Publisher's Minimum	Publisher's Recommended
Processor	Intel Pentium III 800 MHz / AMD Athlon 800 Mhz	Not specified
Memory	256 MB
Graphics Card	64MB DirectX 9.0c compatible with T&L hardware support
Graphics Card Example	NVIDIA GeForce 3 / ATI Radeon 8500
Free Disk Space	2 GB
Net Link	N/A

To learn more about how YouGamers performs its hardware testing, click here. Through our extensive gameplay and hardware testing across the full spectrum of PC configurations, YouGamers suggests that one should use the following guidelines for an appropriate minimum and recommended setup:

Component	YouGamers Minimum	YouGamers Recommended
Processor	AMD Athlon XP 1500+ / Intel Pentium 4 1800 MHz	AMD Athlon 64 3000+ / Intel Pentium 4 2800 MHz
Memory	512 MB	512 MB
Graphics Card	ATI Radeon 8500 64MB / NVIDIA GeForce 3 64MB	ATI Radeon X1300 256MB / NVIDIA GeForce 6600 256MB
Free Disk Space	2 GB	2 GB
Net Link	N/A	N/A

Scores

To learn more about our scoring methodology, please click here.

Gameplay	80	It's still a working game of football (the American version), and if you don't happen to have one of the previous Madden games from the past three years, it provides what the box says.
Graphics	56	A PS2 port was still fine 2-3 years ago on DX8 hardware. Today the game just looks sad, especially when compared to the new shiny Xbox 360 and PS3 versions. The 2D graphical elements being limited to 800x600 resolution is inexcusable.
Audio	79	Effects and music work fine - with the caveat that nothing has changed past few years. Commentary has again received a few tweaks but I doubt they'll ever get over the problems with announcers getting repetitive over time.
Technology	55	It runs on a PC that was low-end back in 2005, but that's the only saving grace. The best thing you can do is bump up is texture resolution, and today's midrange PCs will run everything maxed without flinching.

OVERALL

Madden NFL 08 is not a bad football game. It's just a bad PC game, and it feels like EA Sports has gotten stuck in time warp somewhere around 2005-2006. The PC version needs a new graphics engine badly.

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