Madden 2005 is one that often gets mentioned in the "Best Madden" conversation. I was inclined to think this as well, but after revisiting a handful of Madden games, it's missing some quality of life and gameplay features that keep it from the top tier.

As the story goes, offense was notably overpowered in Madden 2004, so Madden 2005 set out to make defense better and balance the game. Unfortunately, it was an overcorrection. Defense has never been particularly fun to play on PS2 Maddens, and now offense became seemingly more frustrating too with receivers struggling to shake their defenders.

Franchise mode does have some fun new additions, including the newspapers and the Tony Bruno Show (a radio show that plays in the background while you're going through menus). On the downside, part of the menu UI is done through the use of a palm pilot which almost sounds like a joke, but this was the technology in 2005.

So why is this game remembered as one of the best? Madden was extremely popular at this time and it's one of the most-played entries. By the time the PS2 series peaks a few years later with more finely-tuned gameplay, many gamers had already moved onto to next console generation.

My favorite Madden game. I put an egregious number of hours into this game back in high school - whether it be participating in Madden tournaments with my fellow teammates or with other friends, playing the incredibly fun mini-camp game modes, or sinking in a ridiculous amount of time into the game's addictive and feature-rich, Franchise mode.

Unfortunately, two things happened shortly after the release of this game that effectively killed Madden:
1. The NFL and EA exclusivity deal which prevented any competition from 2K sports.
2. Next-gen consoles - I remember that I was eagerly anticipating what games were going to look like and play like on the Xbox 360. The initial "gameplay" trailer that was released had me excited... but upon actually playing the demo, I found that it was absolutely false advertising.

At the time, I was thinking I was going to break my rule of only picking up a sports game every odd year, but my mood shifted after playing the demo a handful of times. What I noticed was the game was completely stripped barren. Gone were all the features and updates that were built upon in the 6th console generation.

This Madden has never been surpassed or improved upon damn near 20 years later (the older generation Madden titles they continued to ship alongside next-gen, were on par though). If anything, things are much, much worse off today, with the copy/paste gameplay, lack of improvements, microtransactions, Madden Ultimate Team, and lack of features. I haven't picked up a new Madden in over a decade, and would much rather pick up the old gen (PS2/Xbox/GameCube) Madden titles to get my football fix.