Madden NFL '98
Reviewed by Dale Kulas
The game: The best 16-bit football game series on the
Genesis makes it's last run on the system with this last
game. Is it just another repeat of last year's game, or is
it something new? Either way, this is gonna be a major
Geneseis collectable.
Graphics: 7: Oddly, the character animation seems to be
better than the SNES version of the game, players bend and
taunt, and point before the snap. But unlike the SNES
version, there is no bleacher banners, also missing in
action is the team's logo in the end zone, just the team's
main color. All the player's look great and the field, and
even have more detail than the SNES players, but there tends
to be a lot of flickering during game play. All the menus
look fine and are easy to read and manage. A new animation
to this year's edition is when there's a penalty during a
play, a ref will appear at the bottom right corner of the
screen and will toss a flag onto the field which looks kinda cool.
Sound: 7: You got the FOX theme music here, even though it
sounds a tad annoying in midi form. All the sound effects
are all right, like tackles, the ref calling the penalties
and scores, and so on, you even hear a little shuffling of
cards type of sound to let you know that an injury happened
during a play. But the showcase of the Madden games are the
Maddenism's with Pat Summerall and Madden adding there
little own comments such as "I heard there heads collide
way up here!" and "He'll be having nightmare's for
weeks!" These can get annoying and repetitive for some, but
Thankfully you can turn the Maddenism's off.
Gameplay: 8: The Madden games for Genesis are simply the
best, and are the one's to beat. The game is just so fun to
play, you might just wanna take a break from the current
PSX, N64, and DC football games to play a game just for the
fun of it. Any ways, there are just so many different ways
to play this game, you can do an exhibition game and
customize quarter length, game weather, the game location,
and so on. You can create your own players, and sign them up
on teams, you can also trade players too, and make a team of
all-stars, but you gotta make sure to stay in the salary cap
range of your team. Season mode is great, and you can play a
whole season, all the way to the Super Bowl. The game keeps
track of all the stats and injuries during your season as
well. A new mode of play is the Super Bowl mode, where you
can replay the past 10 Super Bowls, with the rosters for all
the teams of that year, for example, you can play as Joe
Montana and see if you crush the Broncos by an even larger
margin than they did before in Super Bowl 24. The feature is
really fun, and a great plus to the game.
Replay Value: 7: The new Super Bowl mode is great, and up to
4 players can play the game for an all-out party! So these
feature can keep you playing this game for hours.
Overall: 7: A great final chapter of the Genesis era of
football, and if you don't own any Madden games for the
Geneseis yet, you may as well pick up this copy any ways,
but if you already own Madden '96 or '97, this game is about
90% the same as those titles, except with the updated
rosters and teams, and new Super Bowl mode, and a couple of
other additions like new animations and such, so if you
already own those, you're not missing out on nothing much here.
OR
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