All of us here at Digital Dads love video games. Some of us are more hard core gamers (Clarence) then the casual type (me). But, one game we all love and grew up playing is Madden Football from EA Sports.

So yesterday when the demo version of Madden 11 came out for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 we had to download it immediately.

I still think that every August, there should be a holiday dedicated to the release of the newest Madden. But, for some reason the Government hasn’t stepped up and made that a reality yet. *grin*

As I fired up the demo and saw that familiar “EA Sports…It’s in the game” logo and voice come up I couldn’t contain my excitement. It did feel a little weird playing alone since my son is at camp this week and he usually would be right there playing against me, but I couldn’t wait a week.

One warning for the die hard NFL fan though. Depending on who you are a fan of (I’m a life long, die hard, Miami Dolphins fan) this demo may cause you conflict. It only allows you to choose between the Jets or the Colts to play with. This gave me great pause because I’m not a fan of either, but had to go with the Colts since there is no way I could play as the Jets unless I wanted to just let the quarterback get sacked over and over and laugh the whole time. (sorry Gary…)

The look and feel of the game is very similar to last year. I’ve held a belief of buying the game every other year when the big changes get made. Madden 10’s graphics were a huge jump in awesome and this year looks a lot the same. Sure, they’ve added a lot more B-Roll footage for each stadium including tailgaters and angry fans leaving in droves if you start to whip the home team.

Game play has some great new features. My favorite being the double stick control of runners. Now the left stick controls your direction and the right stick controls upper body movement making it a lot more effective to juke and shift directions better than you ever have been able to. There is also a new feature that allows you to see who from your friend list is online and instantly set up multiplayer games. They actually show a screen shot of playing 3-on-3 and while I’m not quite sure how this would work, I am looking forward to trying it out.

While I usually turned off the commentators after the first few games, I did miss hearing John Madden’s voice in the game. Gus Johnson Cris Collinsworth provide a realistic feel, but it still doesn’t feel right not to have him as part of it.

Some other new features that I’m excited to dive more into include:

• Full game playbook design that allows you to fully customize what plays you want to choose from so that you don’t have to scroll endlessly looking for your favorites.
• Game times are cut down to roughly 30 minutes for a full game instead of 60.
• GameFlow, the new play calling system that automatically selects the best play for your team based on situational, authentic NFL game plans.
• Seeing all the customizations (including chants, music, etc) that they’ve put into each stadium.

Overall the demo does just what it should: Make you want to run out and pre order a copy today so that you can play the full thing on August 10th when it comes out.

If you get the game, let us know your gamer tag in the comments below and perhaps we can get some good multiplayer action going between the Digital Dads community.