“Rugby 06” EA Sports
$29.95
PS2/Xbox

If you know anyone at all like my roommate — someone who sits on a couch all day simulating season after season of Madden — you’re ready to rip the power cord out of the wall and strangle him or her to death.

All efforts to cease the constant playing of the played-out game are in vain. Well, do I have help for you!

EA Sports has released this year’s installment of a game most of you have never heard of, “Rugby 06.”

“Rugby” has been a long-running EA Sports game series since the launch of the PS2. Each year since the first, I have gotten to charge around the field playing as the New Zealand All Black, dominating every opponent.

Now I am going to make an assumption here, so bear with me. I guess that most of y’all have heard of the sport of rugby, but have no idea whatsoever how it is played. But guess what? I was that way once also, but the years of EA’s “Rugby” have taught me the finer points of the scrum.

One of the finer points of “Rugby 06” is, if you calm down and stop mashing buttons, it’s a relatively simple game to play. For all you football people, just think of it as running the ball down the field and all you can do is lateral the ball whenever you are about to get tackled. It’s that easy.

If you need more help there is a mandatory (or, at least, I think it should be) tutorial in which the game’s amazingly British announcers teach you the controls and basics of rugby. While playing one only needs to stop complaining and remember what the British announcer taught you, and you’ll see it’s your own fault that you keep losing scrum after scrum.

Being calm and knowing when to mash and when not to mash is the secret to dominating man and machine alike in “Rugby.” Mash the button one time too many and you fling the ball to no one, which often leads to a turnover.

There are three modes for this game, and all of you who have no idea what you’re doing, only need to know that “club” means easy. Don’t think about moving up in difficulty until you can play as the USA and beat New Zealand.

Since this is an EA Sports game, it’s packed with game modes and extras. You can play a season as one of the many world teams in their individual circuits, or work your way through the bowels of English rugby, and after a few years become the top of the game.

For all the Madden franchisers, the Guinness Premiership mode will leave you tossing out seasons of Madden games in the toilet.

This is what I would like to call the Cinderella story mode. Start out as Bristol and battle your way to supremacy, and keep your job as team manager.

The game’s soundtrack is subpar at best, since this isn’t one of EA’s hugely followed game series, no big names would ever agree to be put on the EA Jukebox. But sound effects and commentary are a pleasant relief for ears that have been wreaked thanks to Madden’s gibberish.

I’ve always loved playing EA’s “Rugby” series because it was something that most people didn’t care about. It was my own little secret, a game in which I could hand it to any self-proclaimed sports video game god six ways from Sunday.

I feel sad, yet compelled, to tell the masses that there are better sports games than “Madden” and the lesser “NBA Live.”

But the secret of “Rugby” has been told. I say go trade that over-played and overrated “Madden” in for some real fun.

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