The same game EA Sports released in 2001 with a few new gimmicks.
GRAPHICS: The same graphics fundamentally speaking as used in the 2001 version of the game. The animations, crowd sounds, even the Michaels/Madden comentary is the SAME STUFF they've been using for years and years.
They've added a few insignificant gimmicks, such as the ability to choose a TD celebration from a menu, but hardly groundbreaking stuff.
PLAYABILITY: All kinds of problems. The SLOWDOWN on the PS 2 is horrid, and it's amazing that EA has never done anything to improve this. It started about three years ago, and it's still there. After a play etc. instead of the game smoothly moving into new animation the game stalls, and just sits there paralyzed. Then all of a sudden it catches up and the game continues. When you add all of this together over the course of an evening, a lot of time is spent just sitting there waiting for the software to figure out what it wants to do next. Pathetic.
Also, the game continues to be quite cheap. By that, I mean if you're playing skillfully and defeating the computer opponent, all of a sudden your receivers, running backs and kick returners start fumbling the ball on a regular basis. Of course, the computer recovers the ball, runs for a TD etc. You get the point.
REPLAY VALUE: Another problem is the amount of space this game takes on a memory card. This is a major problem, especially considering the fact that Madden 07 permanently damaged one of my memory cards with a corrupted file (caused by a pretty well known flaw) that even Sony said can't be fixed. If you want to play all game modes, you'll be shelling out for a memory card just for this game. That is unacceptable. Things like that happened in the PS 1 era, and shouldn't be happening now. There's no excuse for it.
OVERALL: The game receives 3 out of 10 on the strength of the basic quality of the football simulation.