spleen - Since you asked, and I have a few spare moments here at the end of my work day, why don't we take a look at my #27 game? This is sure to get comments and comparisons to Kodos, but I don't care, because is really is good enough to chart.
27. Madden '99
N64
EA Sports
1998
GameSpot Review - 8.8
Sports - Football
This little game got me hooked in video football games. I played it non stop in franchise mode for several months straight. Later versions would also be played by me for several months.
I played Madden 98 a bit after getting into Madden 99, and it felt much worse. Madden 99 was a huge step forward in playability, realism, AI, and strategy. To my mind, Madden 99 is the definitive Madden.
Maybe on a website like this, I won;t need to expound upon Madden, but I will, never the less.
Madden was beautiful because of the great amount of detail. The large playbook was easy to maneuver and thus easy to find the right play. The controls gave you tons of options while never requiring you to become an elite joystick jockey in order to defeat an opponent (like more modern versions of Madden have required). You could win simply by calling the right plays and executing them.
The sheer realism of the game when you actually played the game brought me back to sports games. I hadn't played sports games for a long time because they were broken (Techmo Bowl) and could be defeated by the same play or same player every time. In fact, up until Madden 99, if you had asked me what the best football game ever was, I would have said IntelliVision's NFL Football from 1978.
Not so with Madden 99. There weren't the problems of broken players or broken plays. In fact, the game was so realistic and engrossing, that I remember playing on a big screen TV in the main lounge at our residence hall and having people walk by thinking there was an actual football game on. I found that to be quite impressive.
What really sold me on the game, however, was the detailed franchise mode. Contracts, salary cap, and roster oversight was all done with a great deal of detail, to my mind, at least.
For me, Madden would ultimately be a gateway drug, getting me into the sports sim world. I loved Madden and its franchise mode so much that I posted some ideas for expanding it at MaddenMania and someone said it sounded like Front Office Football. The rest is, as they say, history.
In fact, I enjoyed Madden 99 so much that I bought an N64 so I could play it. It was system seller to me.
From the franchise mode to a detailed and highly entertaining game against humans or the computer, the game was great. To this day, I'd put Madden 99 up against the best sports games ever made in any genre, sim or otherwise.
-Anxiety