Madden's in a slump. He was the king of football up until NFL Gameday in 1995 but now he's been taking second seat. NFL Gameday '98 took video game football to its limit. Madden '98, while better than Madden '97 (Thank God!), is really just repeating what was done before.

Madden '97 was so plagued by money plays that you could cruise through a season 16-0 without any trouble. Shutout games were common and the only thing to do to give the computer a fair fight was not pick the many impossible to defend against plays. But people are only human. Telling people to just not pick those plays is about as low as Nintendo telling people to just not look in the Zelda hint guide given with The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Well in the past year or so EA really went to the limit on this artificial intelligence. Finally a computer that can keep up (still no match for another human though!). But this Liquid AI is really just good AI. Although this AI is nice, the gameplay is too old and outdated. EA the wave of the future of sports games in the third dimension.

The control is on par with most football games. Tight control will end all of those slippery player complaints of the past. The graphics are still sprites which isn't a good thing. While the sprites look good they just don't offer the intense realistic football that came out of NFL Gameday '98's. Of course all the millions of lines of stats are there.

While other companies seem to be exploring new worlds within sports games (Sony, Konami, and Acclaim among others) EA Sports seems content with its policy of tweaking games instead of making great new addition. It has worked before guys, but it's not gonna hold up anymore.

Overall: 3.8