Madden makes its second appearance on XBOX with the 2003 edition. Rather than go through the game, as it’s pretty much identical to the great review done by Charlie, I’ll outline and review the features that are prevalent to the XBOX.

Upon first loading Madden 2003, the game detected that I had NCAA also. As a reward for owning another EA sports game you are given five Madden cards which can be used to unlock teams, stadiums or cheats. While not detrimental to the game, it’s nice to see EA reward you a little bit for owning another one of their products. It gives the user who wants to collect all cards a little jumpstart on the task.

The hard drive for the XBOX makes saving and loading games a lot easier and more convenient than using memory cards. With the massive amount of storage on the 8 GIG hard drive, you’ll have plenty of room to run multiple leagues and profiles without having to keep a few memory cards at hand. To me, this is one of the biggest reasons to get any EA Sports game on the XBOX.

Graphics are clean and crisp with some great player models and stadium renderings. The crowd really impressed me, as they don’t seem like flat cardboard cutouts in the stands anymore. They have a life of their own and really improve the atmosphere of the game. Texture wise, the game looks incredible. The clean textures help bring to life the realistically animated characters on screen along with providing a realistic look to the field and stadium. Whereas last year’s version has zombie eyes, this year’s eyes in the players look a lot less zoned out.

Naturally more animations are included in this year’s version producing a nice variety of action on the field. You’ll see tackles that weren’t in previous versions. One of the new actions allow you to face the ball and defend it rather than running around blindly and trying to jump around. There’s some gang tackling but it’s still not to a point where you see it in the NFL game. At most you’ll see two people taking down a ball carrier but it’s a start for the franchise to add this feature in. I hope they evolve this aspect in near year’s version to the next level and provide some true gang tackling....