Madden NFL 06 for Game Boy Adv Reviews & Ratings by IGN

As long as you put yourself in the mentality that the Game Boy Advance could never, ever offer the same Madden experience as the current generation consoles, you'll be fine picking up the latest iteration of the series on the handheld. Madden NFL 2006 is a minor update to last year's version, which in turn was a major upgrade to the three versions prior on the handheld system. If you've already scored Madden NFL 2005 last year all that's really here is a tweaked graphics engine, updated rosters to match the past football season, and a GBA version of the Mini Camp feature that was sorely missing in last year's game. All together it makes for a decent on-the-go football design that works with the strengths its got on the GBA platform. It's not going to make a huge impact in the genre, but the game is still a fun pick up sports title on a system that sorely lacks them.

So what we get in Madden NFL 06 is pretty much the same game as we got last year. Exient, the team that took the brand away from Budcat Creations for the fourth GBA iteration and built a brand new engine instead of building upon the aging 16-bit Genesis/SNES port a fourth time. But for Exient's second turn on the franchise for the GBA, the team only tweaked the game instead of reworking it. That's not necessarily a bad thing, considering that the recreated engine for Madden NFL 2005 was a significant and necessary improvement to the portable franchise.

But it's clear that there's only so much you can do to improve a sprite-based football game, as the actual matchups themselves haven't really changed much from last year. Similar AI, collision handling, character and field graphics. The frame rate did get a bit of a tweak this year, so there's much less "choppiness" when the screen has to display so much. But everything about last year's game, right down to the extremely basic and almost unnecessary commentary from John Madden, remains the same in the move from Madden 2005 to Madden 06. The additions to the franchise on the console, like the Vision Cone, don't make the move to the GBA, but the limited controls of the handheld wouldn't make them such a viable inclusion anyway.

That's not to say that this is merely a reissue. Exient did listen to our complaints last year, and went in to add the one Madden feature that was missing from the GBA game: Mini Camp. This collection of mini-games puts the Madden skills to work in high score challenges. There are four different arcade-style challenges, including passing, running, tackling, and field goal kicking; it's almost a training mode of sorts, but with a score attached to them. Passing, for example, requires quarterback positioning, throw timing and height, since the challenge is to hit the receiver while tossing the ball through one of the floating rings on the field. These Mini Camp mini-games are pretty fun and offer a bit more than the standard team vs. team match-ups.

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