Where would NFL games be right now if the Madden franchise hadn't acquired official rights to the NFL players?

Well, we might have a chance at playing a halfway decent game of football, that's what! Or... where... we would be...!

Seriously. I've been craving some new PC football for quite some time now, but EA gave up on their PC version of Madden altogether. I guess it was for the better; I mean, if they weren't willing to port over their spiffy new engine to the PC( a task that seems like it could take all of days to accomplish, given the similiar hardware), then they shouldn't be making new games based off that old, last-gen console styled engine that was so worn it looks almost exactly the same from 2002 to 2008!

But I could suck it up. I could stand one more use of that engine, if they were really going to be so lazy as to refuse that port, and buy one last game if it meant that every little feature they had ever released, then cut for no apparent reason, was to be thrown altogether (along with a stable, tried-and-true codebase) to create the perfect game of football. Hell, at that rate all EA would have to do to support the game would be to supply us with yearly roster updates and we'd be somewhat content. But that's asking too much of a company that has cut some of the most important features from their yearly increments of games that are *supposed* to be only getting better with each release.

Key in this feature list, for me, at least, was the drop of co-op play after Madden '05. You see, the only time I ever play a football video game is when my brother is up for some reason or another. We've been playing franchise after franchise since Madden 2000; almost religiously finishing an average of perhaps 2 seasons a year until recently.  Throughout the years, one thing has never changed: we always play on the same team. It's just more fun that way. So basically, we're stuck playing Madden '05 until the end of time, because the only way to unlock co-op in the later years is to use some sort of funky hack to enable it. Which would be okay, I suppose, but I never *bought* any of those later games because I knew that co-op wasn't supported (also because the list of new features grew shorter and stupider each year).

Although, when all is said and done, I would probably be sticking with 2005 anyway, because we now have a solid franchise going on its 4th or 5th year now. I'm not sure if franchise import features were ever included in the later games or not, but it wouldn't matter anyway, since the PC version of Madden has passed away.

But to bring it all back to my original topic, I sure do wish that EA would have their franchise deal with the NFL cut, or for people to realize that Tiburon hasn't had a good idea since this little lockup started, and that they would use their power of money and just not buy their games. NFL videogames have such great potential to be something better. I look at the Euphoria engine, and just wish that it would be tweaked and re-purposed for Madden so that we can finally be done with all of this canned animation crap that is so prone to glitches and "wtf" moments. I look at Madden, a game that dropped the very man the franchise is named after; whose almost comedically funny (accidentally) commentary is one of the reasons I loved the game so much, and just wish they would be put in their place so they could realize that you can't just release what is essentially a roster update and a stupid, detracting feature each year and charge another $60 for it, and still expect people buy it year after year.