Madden Madness!!!

It's that time of year again, the annual rolling out of the latest iteration of EA Sports Madden Football series. Last year's sold 6,500,000 copies, this year's who knows, with 2 new systems to hit the market before Christmas (and a likely XBox360 price drop), there's a lot of Christmas trees with a spot reserved for a copy of this game this year (plus plenty of folks are going to rush out and buy this game this week, seems there's been some play tweaks again to try and convince folks they are getting some value for buying the same game over and over and over again).

As I don't have a functioning console at the moment, and don't plan on getting one until sometime next year (Oui, Oui, Wii, Wii, hopefully after some killer games are made available next summer), I'm not going to be rushing out and buying a copy (though I do have a computer and graphics card sufficiently speedy to handle Madden '07, I'll wait).

The madness of Madden-ness has become a true phenomenon with a large swathe of men in their teens to their thirties. Having mad skillz (that's right, I spelled it with a 'z') at Madden is a prominent measure of virility.

I remember playing Madden '04 with my friend's eight year old son and the process of him learning proper play calling was fascinating. In one night he went from not knowing a 3-4 defense from a 4-3, to understanding which down and distances were best to break out the blitz packages on. I don't know if that newly gained knowledge gleaned playing Madden helped make watching real NFL football more interesting for him or not, but I bet it did.

Great play calling with the right team on defense can beat great 'twitch' skills on offense every time.

Then there's the curse (which was the subject of one of the questions in Ken Jennings weekly trivia challenge). If the curse holds, take the under on Seattle for this season's win total, cause Shaun Alexander may not be as good as he normally is, this year.

In other EA Sports news, I don't think anyone a few years ago would have expected Kobe would be back to being on the cover after all that happened since last time he graced the cover of their NBA series, but he's been announced as being cover material again.