Cons: bad controls, bad gameplay, bad play selections
The Bottom Line: very user-unfriendly, horrible controls, horrible gameplay. only good thing is graphics, which, above a certain level, is of insignificance in this genre.
Bornio's Full Review: Madden NFL 2002 for Game Boy Advance (GBA)
A friend and I played this game together and together, we couldn't figure this game out. First big problem...
Controls::
They suck. My friend used a game pad. I used the keyboard. The keyboard controls were the most unintuitive I have ever encountered in a sports game. Other games I've played are NFL Fever 2000 (which I still consider the best football game), NFL Blitz, NHL 2000, NHL 2001. The controls in these other games were at least decent and easy to commit to memory so that they soon become instinctive. The controls for Madden _never_ stuck. I was always fumbling around for the right keys. Even my friend using the game pad kept hitting the wrong keys. Now, you might ask, "Why doesn't this idiot just change the keys binds?" The answer is, "You can't." Not in any way I know of, at least. My friend and I tried everything we could think of, looking in every option provided in the game, and could not find an option to change the keys. This is enough for you not to play the game. It's not fun always pressing the wrong keys or panicking about which button to push.
Gameplay::
From what I could tell, it was pretty hard to do anything in this game. Passing was okay. But running the ball was almost impossible. Another thing is the play selection. The screen is kind of confusing, and I never got used to it. In NFL Fever 200, the play selection screen was very clear and very organized. That game was the first football game I ever played and I learned to use the play selections very quickly. The Madden selection screen just confused the hell outta me and was not very well organized. Also, sometimes my friend would pick the play quickly and I would clueless as to which play he selected. But once you start lining up for the play, there's nothing you can do about it. In NFL Fever 2000, you could press a key while you were in formation and your selected play would pop up in the corner of your screen as long as you held that button down. It just seems to me that this game is a bare-bones, user-unfriendly game. The only thing selling it is the
Graphics::
The graphics were crisp, but, I must say, not enough to impress me. Yes, the players all had shadows rendered in real time. But really, who cares? It's a football game. NFL Fever 2000 had comparable graphics. And Madden even had bugs where the logo on the players' helmets would sometimes disappear. My friend was playing the game by himself one day and I saw that his team, the 49ers, all had completely gold helmets. No red and white stripe, no 49ers logo. This happened more than once.
Basically, the game was poorly made. It's only selling point, the graphics, are not even secondary in importance in this genre of games. Give Solitaire the most amazing graphics ever seen, and it still gets boring and tedious. Same with Madden 2002.
New and factory sealed mini box (jewel case). Five modes of gameplay--Great Games, Multiplayer, Exhibition, Season, and Franchise All 31 current NFL t...More at eBay
Motion-capture animation new modes real NFL teams awesome graphics hour-player action, Platforms: Game Boy Advance, ESRB Rating: EveryoneMore at Amazon Marketplace
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