Michael Vick 2004 all the way for me. I spent so many hours with that, and it was 99.9% with the historic rosters. I made so many classic teams, and many many Ram teams from the past and replayed their famous games. I just loaded game plans and watched the computer play it out.
I made sure to use mostly 4-3 for the fearsome foursome and teams that used that, and the 3-4 for the '76 Raiders, '72 Dolphins and all who used it. I even created the 1951 Rams with their gold jerseys. Them and the Browns all had 1 bar facemasks (there was no non-masked helmets option) and hightop black shoes. I replayed a lot of classic games and even made some entire historic seasons. Also the classic USFL and some WFL too. I did so much research trying to get the skin color correct even for the lesser known players. I didn't want any black players be white and vice versa. So I downloaded all the team photos I could find from ebay and used my old game programs for player reference. It was a long huge project.
The custom team editor was awesome. I used all the custom faces to make all the players look like themselves. My favorites were Roman Gabriel, I used Gramatica's custom face with a different head shape, and for Joe Kapp's face I used some player with bigger eyebrows with a flat nose puff cheeks head shape and he looked just like Kapp. Both with their 1-bars. Even Youngblood looked a lot like himself. Carl Eller I used the meanest black face, I think it was Champ Bailey's, and used a different head shape and he was spot on. So many looked like themselves. OJ Simpson was TO's face, longer shaped head with that classic 2 bar facemask. Larry Csonka's face was some dude with a thick dark porn stache, looked like him too, using a flat nose head shape. Earl Campbell's face also looked like him wearing that classic Oilers helmet. I also made pro bowl teams from the 70s with those classic pro bowl helmets, I even used their actual pro bowl alt-jersey numbers when 2 players had the same number. Very much attention to detail.
I uploaded them all online and people were always thanking me profusely and some were asking me to make more teams, and I kept adding entire seasons. The entire 70s were covered. I had all the jersey numbers correct so they really looked authentic. I should've charged for them! Someone uploaded game highlights online from my rosters playing out a season. I think the vids are still around.
Sadly the later Madden versions took away some of the editing and the rosters weren't really compatible with later versions, faces would swap out, etc, but it was years of fun with 2004.
Spagnuolo!
