On Monday, August 11th, gamers and football fans will line up at their local game stores, waiting for the clock to strike midnight. As soon as the day changes to August 12th, the 20th anniversary edition of Madden NFL gets released, and fans eager to play with the latest rosters and gameplay changes will be clamoring for their copy.

Every year, Madden NFL is consistently one of the highest selling games released, usually placing in the top ten (combining sales of all versions released will most likely push Madden to the top of the list). In 2007, Madden NFL sold 6.56 million copies across the United States, and that’s only in the last five months of the year.

With all the fans of the franchise, it must seem like they’re only making the games for the hardcore gamers who buy year after year, but the team at EA Sports (the developers of the game) have decided to push away from the stigma of difficulty and have decided to instead make the game more accessible to anybody who wants to play. When you start up the game, you actually go through a training session on different skills used in the game, including running and passing. After these are finished you’re given a “Madden IQ” for each of the areas, and the game will actually tailor itself to your playstyle. Not very good at running the ball? No problem; the game will actually ease up the defense.

So the game will change depending on how well you play, but what about when you mess up a play on your own? Using the new “BackTrack”, your plays will actually be dissected by Cris Collinsworth, breaking down what the you should have done, where you went wrong, and how you can fix it next time.

What if the controller is too intimidating? The Xbox 360 controller has 11 buttons, two analog joysticks, and one directional pad; not exactly the most friendly device. This year, EA Sports is also introducing what they call “EA Sports All Play” for the Nintendo Wii. All Play simplifies the control scheme to take advantage of the Wii Remote, so you don’t have to be a veteran gamer to be able to enjoy yourself this year.

Madden NFL 2009 is rated E for Everyone and will release Tuesday, August 12th for the Nintendo DS, Nintendo Wii, Sony Playstation 2, Sony Playstation 3, Playstation Portable, and the Microsoft Xbox 360.

Andy Keener is a Freelance Writer and a weekly contributor to GameSpite.net. He also works as an assistant manager at GameStop. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .