With the release of a new game last week, EA Sports’ “Madden” franchise, which first launched in 1988 with “John Madden Football,” is celebrating its 25th anniversary with “Madden 25.”

EA decided to bring back many of the popular elements that made the franchise so popular over the past decade and dropped some of the less popular ones.

To start, Connected Careers has been replaced with the more detail-oriented Connected Franchise mode. The mode keeps a lot of last year’s changes and tweaks the others in giving the “Owner” option, which brings back the task of setting ticket and concession prices that was made popular in Madden 2005.

The gameplay largely extends on the “Infinity” physics engine introduced in last year’s Madden 13 by fleshing out player movements and adding force impacts in EA’s new conveniently named “Infinity 2” engine. Player movements still seem awkward compared to past years’ more grounded player animation, but much of that is the new physics element being figured out.

Much of the talk this year was about the changes in running back motions and different options for breaking free. However, because of the new engine, they seem rather stunted because of the ragdoll-like existence the players have. Tackling becomes more of a challenge than in the past because of this, which, for me, used to consist of mashing the hit stick in the direction of the ballcarrier.

In all, this year’s edition of Madden does a lot of good in digging up past successes but comes up short in bringing the graphics forward. Perhaps they’ll do more graphically for next year’s game (Madden 15? 26?) with the next generation of consoles set to launch in the fall.