Features: All the other random nonsense

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ESPN has its VIP profiles and first-person football, while Madden has its minigames and create-a-fan. Which should you actually care about?

Phillip Buchanon strikes a pose--just one of the many custom celebrations in ESPN NFL.

You can make some nutty looking characters with Madden's create-a-fan.

ESPN

At first glance, ESPN would seem to be the clear-cut winner in this category, simply due to how much extra stuff there is in the game. For starters, there's the new VIP profile system, which is just about the coolest thing ever put into a football game. Once you create your profile in the game, it immediately begins tracking exactly how you play. If you're a sad-sack loner, you can just play against your own profile and watch the game creepily emulate your style of play. Or, if you prefer the more social route, you can download other people's profiles online, and, in turn, they can do the same for you. This is an awesome feature if you're into the whole concept of scouting.

Other new features include a celebration editor that allows you to set up your own special touchdown celebrations and a stadium music editor for the Xbox that gives you the ability to make any music on your hard drive play in clips during specific scenarios. This is supercool. There's also a glorified situation mode called the ESPN 25th Anniversary mode, where you can play out unique scenarios from classic games, like the Immaculate Reception or the Heidi Bowl. It's a neat idea, but it's not particularly well executed, especially since you can't really play out the same kind of fantastic stuff that happened in those scenarios. Rather, you're presented with a fairly glib, generalized objective.

And then there's the old stuff that makes a return, like first-person football and the crib. Both features are as love-it-or-hate-it as they were last year--especially FPF, which has barely changed at all. The crib, at least, has more stuff to unlock now, though the inclusion of the whole "celebrity" feature--where you can challenge menial celebrities to games--is utterly stupid. Maybe if they'd included some classic coaches or players as profiles, we might be in business. But with a roster that looks like the reject list from The Late Late Show With Craig Kilborn, you're unlikely to be impressed by this feature.

Madden

There are really only two notable mode additions to Madden's basic package this year. The first is a minigame mode where you can play a couple of fun, little games called rushing attack and two-minute drill. Rushing attack is actually just the old rushing attack minicamp exercise but with two players and a score that's kept based on touchdowns scored and tackles made against your opponent. The two-minute drill puts you in the last two minutes of a game and instructs you to score as many times as possible before those two minutes are up. Then you switch to defense, where you must try to prevent your opponent from scoring. Both of these games are cool, though they're a tad unremarkable, because they aren't really anything more than a silly distraction.

The other addition made is the new create-a-fan mode, which is similarly juvenile but fun regardless. Ever wanted to create a complete psychopath to dress up in sophomoric team-color-themed outfits to root for your favorite squad? Now you can. There's a pretty nice wealth of ways to make your lunatic fans, and you can gussy them up pretty crazily. However, there isn't any way to program their animations or do anything neat with them in cutscenes, so, really, all they'll do is just play out the same couple of generic in-game cutscenes over and over again. This is kind of sad, actually, considering how much customization there is in the game already.

The PS2 version of Madden also contains some extra features in the special Collector's Edition, including a few classic Madden titles, some trivia, a bunch of random videos, and something similar to ESPN's 25th Anniversary mode that sucks just about as much as ESPN's mode. While these are nice features to have around, the PS2 Collector's Edition costs about 10 bucks more than the usual one, and none of its features are really worth the money. The classic games aren't worth more than a couple of plays, the trivia gets old, and, again, the classic situation mode is dumb.

That about sums up the Madden NFL 2005 other features list. There are obviously the returning aspects, like minicamp and all the Madden challenge stuff, but none of it has really changed at all.

Which is better?

The basic fact of the matter is that ESPN just has better, more-interesting side features. Yeah, first-person football is still kind of lame, and the crib isn't going to bring in any new fans, but the VIP profile system is just too cool to pass up, and the ability to create your own stadium music on the Xbox version is way cooler than it even seems like it should be. Madden's new features are nice, but they aren't nice enough to quite take the proverbial taco.

Winner: ESPN NFL 2K5