It's that time of the year again, with EA Sports pumping out the yearly updates to their sports franchises. Madden NFL 08 has already received some nasty remarks about bugs, some praise for its stunning new visuals and been at the center of controversy revolving around the fact that the PS3 version runs only at 30fps while Xbox 360 manages 60fps. But wait - all those things apply only to the new shiny console editions. What about the PC version? Well, the good news is that it sure runs at 60fps, and there are no bugs with players running off the field. The bad news is that the game actually has little to do with the much-publicized next-gen console versions.

Instead, the PC incarnation of Madden NFL 08 has its roots firmly planted on the PS2. And just like the PS2 version, PC version has received roughly zero engine programming effort since the 2006 edition, and back then the upgrades from 2005 were extremely minor. The gameplay side has received more tweaks and changes, but majority of them are things that could have been implemented as patches - except that free patches don't bring in the cash. Pushing out another full-price box to the stores does the trick, and EA Sports has turned the concept of milking with the same game every year into a form of art. As EA is the exclusive NFL licensee, the lack of competition is showing.


The Obligatory New Things

The new features listed on the PC game box for 2008 include such amazing breakthroughs as "New Widescreen Support" and "Players Smarter Than Ever Before". With features like these, you just know that the changes from the last year are going to be very minor. Yes, Madden 2008 is the first PC version to actually support widescreen resolutions, and I guess the AI controlling the players on the field has been polished slightly. Not to the tune of the $40 asked, but I guess EA Sports thinks that's beside the point.

The first actual difference in gameplay is that the controls for kick-offs and field goals have changed to use the analog stick of the controller instead of button presses. This reinforces the fact that the Madden series on the PC is firmly designed to be played with a dual-analog joypad such as the Xbox 360 controller or one of the PS2 pad look-a-likes from manufacturers such as Logitech. This has been true for the past few years, so it shouldn't be a shock to anyone.

While you can, in theory, play with keyboard, the sheer number of buttons and the lack of analog control makes it unfeasible. On the upside the game recognized every joypad we had on hand, and automatically assigned all the buttons, and even changed the in-game button icons to reflect the type of pad you are using - a feature worth copying for all the other developers doing pad-designed console ports on the PC.

The rest of the gameplay tweaks are limited to polished "Hit Stick 2.0" control scheme for tackles, and some new ways to tweak the play before the snap. These additions give a few new tools to rough up your opponents and add more ways to react when you recognize the play picked by your opposing team. New "special weapons" icons on players help you to recognize favorable match-ups on the field that could be exploited by tweaking the positioning pre-snap. Sadly the pre-snap controls have evolved to be so convoluted during the past couple of years that only true Madden fanatics really care about the changes at this point.

The only new game mode on the PC is the "Skill Drills" mode, adding a new way to practice basic elements of play on the field. For some reason these drills are run against huge "robot football dummies", so practices look very silly. What's wrong with practices against normal players? Oh, and the rosters have been updated once again. In total, nothing here justifies the full-price tag if you have any of the Madden games from the past three years already.

Special Weapons

Vintage Visuals

While Madden NFL looked absolutely amazing on the PS2 back in 2001, and even though it's received some further visual refinement for the next two yearly releases, at some point the engine development all but ceased. The PC build has been tied to the PS2 and GameCube versions for many years, and the engine used on the PC has not aged well. All 2D graphical elements are still drawn only to one resolution and while that got upgraded from the PS2-grade 640x480 to 800x600 (last year, if I recall right), it doesn't exactly match with today's most common resolution of 1280x1024 (or more). While the game supports higher resolutions and now has the support for such common PC widescreen resolutions as 1680x1050 for all the 3D graphics, the "intended" play resolution is still 800x600. At higher resolutions, you get the mismatch of sharp and detailed players overlaid by low resolution 2D elements such as the button icons and playbook menus. EA apparently has not received the memo about the new tech breakthrough called "resolution-independent user interface".
The same low resolution graphics turn the career and manager play modes into an exercise in frustration. While the UI does allow the use of mouse, it's painfully clear it's made for standard-definition TVs and joypads, which is not the combination usually used for serious sports manager games.


During actual play, the 3D graphics are passable, and most of the textures can be bumped up to a fairly high resolution - far beyond what's used on the PS2. As the engine is DX8-based and uses hardly any pixel shaders, it's completely unlike the new shiny engine used on the Xbox 360 and PS3. The minimum supported card is a NVIDIA GeForce 3 or ATI Radeon 8500, and while that was fine three years ago, these days that indicates a museum-grade graphics engine.


Performance

As the visuals range from poor to marginally passable, it's not much of a shock to find out that the game actually plays fine on a setup almost as poor as the box claims as the minimum.

Yes, even the NVIDIA GeForce 3 Ti500 that we used to find out the practical minimum manages to run the game at quite playable frame rates at the suggested 800x600 resolution - with the disclaimer that the CPU recommendation is a bit optimistic. If absolute smoothness is critical, you can turn the textures to a low-resolution mess, but even a 6 years old graphics card can maintain 30fps+ with acceptable visual quality - impressive, considering the age of the hardware.

Minimum Graphics Settings

Our recommended setup, with an ATI Radeon X1300 or NVIDIA GeForce 6600, allows you to bump the visuals very close to the maximum. It's pretty indicative of the game that just about any card you can still buy from a shop runs the game at nearly maximized settings at 1280x1024 resolution. One of our main test rigs with an ATI Radeon HD 2900XT unsurprisingly ran the game at rock solid 60fps regardless of the resolution used, and the only way to get down to any drops under 60fps was to bump up the antialiasing at very high resolutions.

Recommended Graphics Settings

In summary, as long as you have T&L support, and the CPU is a Pentium 4 or Athlon XP, the game will run acceptably well, with today's midrange systems running the game happily at maxed out settings, often with plenty of performance to spare. While 256MB RAM is theoretically enough, to avoid constant disk access the practical minimum is 512MB (and as seems common, add another 512MB to that for extra shiny desktop features if you happen to use Vista)

Maximum Graphics Settings

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.

Gameplay	80/100	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	56/100	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.
Sound	79/100	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	55/100	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 (not an average)	59/100	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.