Are you ready for some Madden NFL 08?

A fresh Madden comes out every year at this time, and people who like football games go out and buy it even though the one they already have is only 11 months old. It is a super great business model. Whether it is also good gaming kind of depends on your perspective.
Football is a game. Madden is a game, too, and it is a game closely based on football, but it is not football. To play football, we, and 21 or 23 of our friends, dress up in armour and spandex and run around on a field crashing into each other. To play Madden, we sit alone in our basement, moving only our thumbs (or, sometimes, our arms).
Football is a game of endurance and strategy, of learning a book full of plays and then adapting those plays in real time as the other team puts its own plays into motion. Madden is a game of repetition and memory, of learning how the computer behaves when pressed, in finding those gaps in its algorithms that are big enough to let us pick up a few yards.
In this, Madden is like any other video game. But because it is based on football, it does not play like other games. There is no gentle warmup, no abilities held in reserve for the higher levels. The other team does not take it easy on us during our first few hours. Happily for its publishers, initiates love it enough to buy it every year. But there is an effort to bring newcomers in, as the distinctions between the Xbox 360 and Wii editions make clear (see chart).