I guess the greatest sign that I myself am, at present, prosperous is the fact I could afford to buy all three major football games within a day of their respective launches. In retrospect, though, I could have waited a week or 12 to get Madden NFL ought-eight. Not that it's a bad game per se, it's just that its arcade-like gameplay is as relevant to real football as Arch-Rivals was to real basketball. Fun to play, but something's not quite right. I guess the Madden champion (which must be a real social albatross around his neck) said it best when he doesn't play football, he plays Madden. I liken that to John Kruk's infamous line "I ain't an athlete, lady...*puffpuffpuff*...I'm a baseball player."
That all said, I came not to trash-talk the Maddenoids and overall EA fanboys. (Separate post, I guess, lulz.) I wanted to speak out against what appears to be overwhelming evidence that All-Pro Football 2K8 has done as well at rattling Madden's foundations as the USFL did to the NFL monolith 25 years ago. Sure, there's a litany of problems one could cite for the game's failure to attract a greater market share (difficult menus, blah music, Jeff Thomas, etc). Ultimately, it's all indicative of the mountain of entrenched market sentiment for Madden and the current NFL (both of which produce mediocre product which succeds on account of world-class hype machines), and one can hope that with future iterations, 2K Sports might try a little harder than trotting out their development team to wheeze on and on about this game.
Although...considering my displeasure with the NFL's obsession with image and style at the expense of substance and credibility, I guess it's just as well that 2K doesn't try harder to type this game. That is, along with the superior running game and pass blocking, and the slew of players I remember from a time when players weren't always preening for the ESPN cameras(where have you gone Karl Mecklenburg), the biggest thing this game has going for it is PRECISELY its lack of shine, of pizzazz, of hip. It's got the same imperfect feel as you see in Bob Lilly's facemask, for example. Its nearly total disregard for style points is what makes it real.
BTW...if you think this game to be a mere port of NFL 2K5, you should play around in replay mode some time. Take the camera up close and personal to player helmets and jerseys and faces, even the football itself is meticulously designed to show a brilliant amount of detail, even on my stan-def TV. Check it out.
Also, as much as people complain that this game is nothing more than NFL 2K5 with a handful of tweaks, it may well have occurred to the powers that be that 2K5 had developed such a following that the expectations for 2K8 were nearly imposssible to meet...kinda like the finale to Seinfeld or Episode I of Star Wars. The more I think of it, the more I wonder if they meant to counter the fanboys' overly romantic, if not downright reactionarynotions of 2K5 by giving them just that, plus a little extra. One can only hope that now that the 2K5-based expectations have been throughly tempered, 2K can move forward and put together an even better product for 2K9. All I ask is that they reintroduce the sound system editor they had with 2K5, even if it's an Xbox Live download like the reel-maker thingamabob. It was so much fun to celebrate TDs to"Weird Al" Yankovic's21-second salute to Harvey the Wonder Hamster.
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