It's football season and I can smell it in the air
Franchise mode is what a Football fanatic would hope for. You can draft your own player’s make the best team you ever wanted. The only downside to it is that it takes up a whole Gamecube memory card and you might need to buy another memory card to play the other features like Create-a-Team. Many new additions have been added to Madden to make your experience better and the game play fun
In Madden 2002 you have Madden cards that you can either trade or use. Madden cards range from Cheerleaders for certain teams to old '78 teams and Cheat cards. You get to play the new expansion team the Houston Texans, and even a few European teams.
The controls are superb. The position of the buttons is close enough to each other so that you can do multiple tasks at once. For example, I can sprint with the A button and hurdle with the Y button all at once. The controls do have their downside, however. When you are wide open near the end zone and the nearest defender is 10 yards away you start to do a victory stride. The problem with that is my brother was able to catch up and make me fumble the ball at the 1-yard line. To avoid this, I had to run to the left or the right, which is a bit of an irritating work-around. Another problem has to do with tackling. Sometimes you will tackle someone straight on without them falling! It would almost take 3 to 4 people to tackle one person, which is a bit unrealistic.
When you perform some crazy stuff, you'll be happy to see Madden's replay mode. The game has a very cool replay system that can leave you and your friends in awe at both great plays and major bloopers.
I wouldn't say you would need a rocket scientist to know how to play the game. It's actually pretty intuitive. There are two modes of play: Easy Play and Exhibition Mode. In easy Play, every type of play is individually grouped for you. I would suggest playing easy mod first if you are a beginner. When you become more advanced you may want to switch to exhibition mode because easy play mode tells you what plays your opponent is picking. Moreso, Exhibition does not group plays, making for a more realistic game.
The A.I in the game is fairly smart. When running a play the A.I. usually catches the ball first then hands over the position to you. But for the more experienced Madden players (like myself), you can set it so you actually run the receiver to the ball. They do that because the computer can't think like a human, and so it's a great setting for people who know what they're doing. Most of the times the computer thinks the ball is too far out and let the ball go and risk an interception, but a human player would either dive for it or try to knock the ball out of the opponent’s hand. That’s why I don't trust the A.I. most of the time.