For my entire life, sports games have lived under the shadow of a particular criticism: “same game, different year.” It was never literally true, of course, but has often reasonably captured the sentiments of millions of players who jump into annualized sports sims year after year. EA’s NFL sim Madden may be the most common target of this flavor of feedback. There have been years when I, too, was very disappointed with Madden. It was taking the sport I love…