Day Two: Mediocre Madden 2007

I know I called Madden 2007 for the Wii “mediocre”, I know its rude. It’s also not 100% accurate. Madden 2007 like its predecessors is a very deep game that football fans the world over will love, but that doesn’t save it from a beat down in the “Wii Workout Week” article series. I like Madden 2007 on the Wii, my friends like Madden, rumor has it Santa Claus likes Madden, but there just isn’t much in the way of exercise I can extract from it. Remember, the point of this article series is to run some popular games through their paces to determine if we can fit a workout in around the game. Madden 2007 flops in this department.

Fitness:

Madden 2007 has some great control schemes that get you flinging your limbs around when you need to, unfortunately, you just don’t have the opportunity often enough or with enough force. Here’s a quick incomplete rundown of the common Wiimote movements you can perform:

• Push both controllers forward to do a power tackle
• Waggle the nunchuk to the left or right to juke
• Move the Wiimote left or right to stiff arm an opponent
• Pump both controllers up and down to break out of a tackle
• Swing both controllers up to catch
• Swing the Wiimote down to swat

The controls are a great addition to the game, but aren’t used with enough frequency to get your heart rate up at all. As anyone would know from being at a football game, a lot of the game is tactics and strategy, broken up by short aggressive plays. This is the main reason I’m rating Madden 2007 as a 1 tick, because I can’t work anything interesting in amongst the game play, and the already mentioned control scheme doesn’t get me working hard.

You can still do a few things like I suggested in “Get Soccer Slim with Mario Strikers” such as bouncing, and some isometric squats. However, due to the fact that the down time in this game is when you need to be thinking about what plays to implement, you can’t weave a workout into your game like yesterday’s game.

Fun:

I think I’ve said enough about how good this game is. If you like football, you’ll love Madden 2007 on the Wii. The control inputs add something extra the previous games haven’t seen, and make the experience just a bit more gratifying.

Multiplayer is great fun for Madden too, it seems the Wii is the master of the group experience- I think its something about needing to actually move around a bit to make things happen, it just excites people.

Motivation:

The full season mode will get you immersed in Madden 2007 for a long, long time. The career mode has an ocean of options for the beginner right through to people that have been playing Madden since its first appearance (I’ve no idea when that was… yearrrrs ago though). However, given this isn’t a game I’d recommend you’d play for fitness, the motivation rating here suffers as a result. 5 ticks if you just want to play football, 2 if you’re deluded enough to consider it part of your exercise routine.

While I don’t recommend you purchase Madden 2007 for your workouts, Madden 07 is almost a year old now, so you can pick it up pretty cheap at Amazon.

Look out for Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, tomorrow.