Madden NFL 06 Updated Hands-On

If there's one mobile product that Electronic Arts absolutely cannot afford to mess up, it's Madden NFL 2006. After all, John Madden's grinning, digitized face and folksy football observations account for an important fraction of EA's past and present success. Madden football energized the EA Sports brand, which the company eventually parlayed into an industry-dominating renaissance. In other words, Madden games have to be as close to a sure thing as EA can possibly make them, especially when the huge publisher transitions to a new gaming platform, as it's doing now. The near-complete version of the game we saw today indicates that EA knows exactly what's at stake, and that it has been doing its homework.

Since mobile games have been cooking along by themselves for years without much attention from the console space, there are already several strong mobile football franchises in play, courtesy of companies like Jamdat, Glu Mobile, and THQ Wireless. Several of these games already have NFL licensing agreements, 11 players on each side, and other console-style accoutrements. What they don't have is a close association with one of the best-selling sports game of all time--an advantage that EA has highlighted throughout Madden 2006's design. We played the Verizon V Cast version of the game on an Audiovox CDM8940, which has enough memory to support Madden's absurdly large 3MB footprint. That amount of space has allowed EA to put clips of digitized voice from John Madden and Al Michaels into the game, as well as the reassuringly familiar Madden menu system, which has been adapted for mobile. When you assign teams to players or the CPU, for instance, phones take the place of the usual controller icons. The especially lazy will even be able set up CPU demo matches.

This version also displayed full, customizable rosters for all 32 teams, so you could trade Terrell Owens back to the 49ers and make him return punts if you wanted to. True to console form, each team is rated in 10 categories using a checkmark system, so you can quickly compare teams before a game. Weather conditions are included, but they don't adjust dynamically. Reproducing the Ice Bowl, therefore, requires you to change the weather to "snowing" in the pregame options screen, which also lets you choose between one-minute and three-minute quarters, as well as five-minute quarters. Wind direction also plays a factor. Other options include two difficulty levels--Pro and All-Madden--as well as the ability to set up three offensive and three defensive audible plays.

That's right, you can call audibles in Madden 2006, which is the most complex sports game--as well as the most faithful console adaptation--we've seen on mobile phones. You can also substitute players on either a global or per-play basis and put them into motion at the line of scrimmage. Depending on the version of the game, you'll have somewhere between 50 and 70 distinct plays from nine formations to choose from on both sides of the ball. If you get confused and can't pick a play in time, you'll get dinged five yards for delay of game, too, and there's no "Ask Madden" feature to help here. The core gameplay is mostly the same as other mobile football games, with a few exceptions: on defense, you'll have a diving tackle and a power tackle in addition to the regular tackle, and you'll change the go-to receiver with a toggle button on offense.

There are several different ways to play Madden 2006 on mobile. You can set up a one-off game between any two teams, or play a season using any team's actual 2006 NFL schedule. There's also a playoff mode that covers the race to the Super Bowl. You can simulate any number of games on the schedule, or checkmark the ones you want to play, just like in the console game. Injuries will rear their ugly head, although there's no apparent way to access individual players' stats, like their toughness quotient. Still, there is a very comprehensive stat-keeping system that tracks per-game and season performances on your handset.

Madden 2006's presentation looks like it will be worthy of the franchise's name, at least on the CDM8940. The pseudo-3D player sprites look pretty good against the field textures. The camera also follows the action nicely from a behind-the-ball perspective, bobbing realistically when a running back makes a sharp cut. The bits of voice and crowd noise sound fine, but there's not much in-game sound from the field. According to the game's producer, older phones will be quite capable of running Madden 2006, although the smaller versions of the game will be missing some textures and roster functionality.

We're very, very excited to see that Electronic Arts has put some of its weight behind Madden 2006 on mobile. It's abundantly clear that it's taking mobile seriously, and that fact alone holds dizzying prospects for the future of the platform. We'll have the full review for Madden NFL 2006 on August 9, right after the launch of the entire Madden product suite, so stay tuned.