Someone got paid for this?! It's barely a hundred words, and all it tells you is that Madden 2005 is out. Sheesh.

Here at Nerd Central we've decided to eschew the Madden franchise and throw in our lot with the relatively new line of ESPN-branded football videogames, developed by the same folks who ably handled sports-title duties for the Dreamcast. I enjoyed the Dreamcast's NFL 2002 a lot. It also helps that ESPN is undercutting Madden by $30 this year.

Why stray from our longstanding commitment to intellectual property theft? Well, you can only play online if you own the actual disc -- otherwise Microsoft catches on and you get banned.

Thing is, we've had the game for a while now, and I still haven't tried out the online features. Okay, it's kind of cool to have the league rosters updated weekly to reflect injuries and trades. But that isn't exactly a feature that justifies the purchase. Online multiplayer is the reason for getting the game, but I can't bring myself to try it out. I'm too scared.

The game is frightening in a lot of ways. The graphics are eerily realistic: while playing it I've had more than one person walking by ask whether it was a real televised game or not. It's creepy in more subtle ways, too: as you play your friends, the game silently records every move, creating a profile of how you play. In a few weeks' time if I want to play a game against Charles he won't have to be here. Heck, he wouldn't even have to be alive! It's all very HAL-9000. I suppose you could make the case that this functionality is something people might like to have. Okay. Did I mention the game comes with predefined profiles for celebrities like David Arquette and Jamie Kennedy? I'll leave you to decide whether this is a force for good or evil.

The most disturbing feature, though, is the franchise mode. You get to be the coach for your favorite team over the course of a season; you manage trades, set rosters and define a custom playbook. Fine. You also determine when each squad practices, how much time they spend viewing game film or in physical therapy, and whether you storm out of each week's team meeting or end with a team prayer. I quickly realized I wasn't up for this stuff, but I imagine at some point you have to choose what to say to the press when your star player gets pulled over for DUI.

I find all this more than a little horrifying. I don't ask much: I just want to throw some hail marys and run a fake on every single punt play. But somewhere out there are people who use every bit of this game, indulging their football ids to an extent that the human brain was clearly not designed to handle. The chance that I might hear their tortured ravings coming out of my TV speakers is a risk I'm not prepared to take.