Playstation 2
Released in 2001 by EA Sports
Grade: A-
This is a rock solid football sim with great controls, strong AI, well-tuned game logic, tons of plays, and effective graphics. It’s a few tweaks, a few additional features, and a few pixels away from the greatness to come later in the series.
Where it falls in the series
It’s the second of the fantastic PS2/Xbox run of the Madden series. Madden 2001 laid the foundation, and its good qualities are thankfully retained in Madden 2002. The differences between the two may seem minor, but all in all 2002 is a strong update to 2001.
Praises and gripes
The already solid control is tweaked a bit tighter, just the tiniest bit tighter. Running is more fluid, which is especially helpful on defense.
Playing quarterback is even more intuitive. The concept of “tap the button to throw a rainbow, hold it down to throw a bullet” isn’t new, but it’s applied perfectly here.
Tackling is much improved from 2001. If you run into the ball-carrier, even without hitting the dive button, your player will wrap the guy up and take him down. This is kind of an important thing to get right to make the gameplay feel fair and realistic. It also takes away the visual blemish of watching clueless defenders run next to a guy without tackling him.
The variance in player skills are apparent, and different teams clearly have different strengths. Playing against the defensive juggernaut Buccaneers is a much different experience from playing against the “Greatest Show on Turf” Rams squad.
The animations look slightly better and they keep up with the gameplay well. The player models are more textured, but actually look a bit worse. My loser roommate walked by and said, “This looks like Nintendo to me!”
The running control is still slightly stiff. And in a control oddity, there’s a bad delay on spin moves, making them almost useless. (My theory is that game testers were regularly breaking off 80-yard runs with spin moves, and this was their way of fixing it in a rush.)
The collision detection is occasionally buggy still. You’ll see ball-carriers running in place behind a gang of other players before anyone falls down, cornerbacks awkwardly bumping into receivers on pass plays, and tackles that have a hiccup to them.
Defensive adjustments at the line of scrimmage are lacking, which gives the offense a distinct edge in human vs. human games. You still can’t see defensive assignments before the snap. You can’t even zoom out and see your cornerbacks, which sucks. On offense, you’ve still got to manually tilt the camera before every play to get a view of the whole field. Hot routes are still limited to a fly, curl, in, or out.
The four difficulty levels are nice (this game ain’t easy on All-Madden), but the CPU is predictable and makes some lame decisions in crunch time.
The sound and presentation are still great. I like the basic Pat Summerall + John Madden commentary, but they needlessly added a sideline reporter to the mix.
Top teams
This came after the Ravens beat up the Giants in the 2001 Super Bowl, but neither team is too special in this game. The Ravens and Bucs are defensively loaded, but it’s the Titans, Rams, Raiders, and Vikings that light up the screen with star offensive players. In the 2002 Super Bowl, Tom Brady led his Patriots to a huge upset of the Rams. The Rams were 14-point favorites! It’s worth noting Tom Brady isn’t even in this game. What a world, huh?