[#] Madden NFL 2004 (Electronic Arts, Game Boy Advance, 2003)

Up your prescription for this one, grandpa.

This to me screams the kind of game a kid would only resort to because they have nothing better to do, maybe on the longest car ride in history or something. Given how little I played it back then, I don't even think I ever got that bored! Realistically, I don't think anyone expected rugby for chess nerds to translate well to the Game Boy Advance, a handheld with two buttons, and I guess it isn't for lack of trying that it's not very good. It starts up to an impressive amount of blink-182's "Feeling This", one of the premier songs on the console versions' soundtrack. That's the high point of the experience.

This one suffers from the confines of the console. Backyard Football, as I reviewed last week, works because it majorly scales down football's many rules, extensive playbooks, and the number of guys on each side to a pleasant amount. Madden 2004 is full fat 11-to-a-side, all formations gridiron, and that's bad on a 240x160 screen. You're trying to discern plays you've never heard of through their busy-as-fuck diagrams, using B, A, and the right shoulder button to select the play. Calling plays is like playing Operation—bump the wrong formation? The left shoulder button goes back. Why we couldn't just mouse through simplified playbooks using the D-pad with B to go back, I don't know.

On the field, like how the DS Madden games borrow the engine of the later PS1 versions, it's decently similar to SNES Madden, just lower resolution, worse animation, and with a worse angle on the field. The fewer buttons on the GBA compared to the SNES and Genesis controllers don't help. Can you believe this is the single Madden game where Select doesn't call a timeout? (It actually does nothing.) Even when you do call a timeout through the pause menu, Miami still takes twenty seconds to run their play like they're running out the clock anyway! I'm normally pretty lenient with old, forgotten handheld football game ports, but even with three minute quarters, this was a headache in motion. Insert Jurassic Park quote here.