Review: 'Madden NFL 11' Not Perfect, Still Best

The 22-year-old Madden NFL video game franchise returns with another championship-caliber effort, capturing the Vince Lombardi trophy but falling short of the cherished undefeated season. EA Sports, which is owned by Electronic Arts Inc., once again finds a way to up the series' incredible visuals and Sunday experience, and developers have made running fun again while adding a great new play-calling mode to speed up the time it takes to get through a game.

But "Madden NFL 11" ($59.99; Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3) is held back a bit by disjointed play-by-play announcing that is hard to ignore. Football teams are most effective when they can establish the run, and EA Sports comes through here. The game scraps the long-used sprint button (why would you not want to go fast?) in favor of a dual-stick control that makes juking and spinning toward the goal line more intuitive and enjoyable.

For two decades, my impatience for video game yardage has prompted me to call an inordinate number of pass plays. This control adjustment has fixed that. Another welcome improvement is GameFlow, which allows gamers to play a football game while leaving the coaching to others. It's far superior than the previous "Ask Madden" method.  Just click a single button and a suitable play for the situation is called. A coach calls the strategy into your helmet's headset (the main speakers or your Xbox 360 headset) and you just run the play.

Sure, the artificial intelligence play callers are going to make some puzzling decisions, but so do real-life offensive and defensive coordinators. And gamers who really want control are going to pick their own plays. Even with GameFlow, you can always opt to select from the full playbook or call an audible at the line, and more extensive pre-game adjustments can be made in the Game Planning menu. Just bump and drop the popularity of certain plays in particular situations in a process like rating songs for a customized online radio station.