Oh boy here we go. Another topic grinding EA's game quality to the ground like it's fact. Here's for the naysayers since we want to put it up as fact:
1. Burnout is one of the highest rated racing games of all time. Burnout Paradise has an 89.1% gamerankings score. This means it's higher rated than Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, Mario Kart Wii and barely got edged out by Forza Motorsport 2. It also shares the same rating as Gran Turismo 4, so as a whole the only racing series to best Burnout is GT. In that case it's not so bad being second best.
2. Madden series has consistently scored between the high 70s and low 90s since forever. That's a pretty good feat considering they only get one year for each iteration. Madden 08 scored an 82.7% which is actually a pretty good score believe it or not. If you want to bitch about a new Madden every year then I hope you also bitch to Konami, Sony, and 2K Sports since every one of them is guilty of the same thing.
3. EA has put forth a very solid effort on the Wii. While most third party developers gave Nintendo a shrug of the shoulder, EA came in with open arms from day one. EA brought forth more than cash-ins by actually putting sufficient effort to make sure most releases used the Wii-mote uniquely. Tiger Woods, Madden, The Godfather, Medal of Honor Heroes 2 and the soon to be released Boom Blox shows actual time being put into the Wii. I don't see precious "quality" developers/publishers like Konami, Atlus, Ubisoft, THQ, and Activision giving the Wii much effort. You could count the quality Wii publishers on one hand and still not fill it but EA happens to be on that very short list of names.
4. EA consistently gets up near the top of publishers with the highest average of metacritic or gamerankings scores year after year. Is that a fluke? Hardly, but I'm sure everyone here loves to ignore that simple fact.
The bottom line is, you don't need to like EA's games. I tend to notice those that don't like them are those that don't play sports games anyways, which seems to be most on this site. If it were any different, there would be more topics concerning sports games on these forums and less about RPGs, first person shooters and adventure games. Outside of this little EA hate box, there's actually a world full or normal individuals that don't hate them, buy their games and enjoy them. There's also a ton of reviewers, the same ones that gave your Zeldas and Marios their high scores that believe EA makes quality software.
