After Madden 2007 was introduced, many considered it to be the best ever. We all expected Madden 2008 to be even better, and what do we get? One of the worst Madden games ever released. Madden 2008 was considered the biggest disappointment of all of the Madden games since the late 1990s. Also the problems were not that there weren't many new things, it was that some of the old things were either made much more complex, and some were just simply left out.

The biggest issue with this game that I found was the controls. Madden 2008 can only be played two ways. One way is with the Wii Remote only. This is easiest for beginners, because all you have to do is pick the plays, and on pass plays select the receiver you want to throw the ball to. The other way is to connect the nunchuk to the Wii Remote, giving you total control. Neither one of these are easy to use, and I found playing it on other systems much easier. Also, you are unable to use plain controllers, making it even a bigger pain. This also makes the passing drills in mini camps more difficult. The kicking is also worse than ever. You are supposed to swing the Wii remote up to kick. However, it almost never works, and it takes several swings, and the kick doesn't work out very well, making kicking a pain as well.

One of the first things I do when I get a new Sports games is trying it out in 'Play Now' mode to get used to it, then moving on the Franchise/Dynasty mode once I feel I have gotten down the concepts/controls. I also sometimes use my own created teams/players to play a season with. When I got to this stage in Madden 2008, I found it neither one of those options are there anymore. This really ticked me off. The only way to play as yourself is in NFL Superstar mode. There was no logical reason to take these options out of the game, and this probably did Madden 2008 in.
In conclusion, the new options in Madden 2008 weren't very good other than Online Mode (which is pretty self-explanatory), the controls were awful, and many of the old options such as creating teams/players were gone. It is for these reasons that I consider Madden NFL 2008 one of the worst Madden games ever released. Hopefully the 2009 version will be better, but if EA Sports was stupid enough to change the game that much from 2007, 2009 may be even a bigger disappointment.