There are plenty of David and Goliath stories in the history of the video game industry. In the past decade and a half, one of the best-known series among gamers and non-gamers alike is EA Sports’ Madden NFL. Many football games have tried to challenge Madden and failed, time and time again. Following the collapse of the Dreamcast, however, Sega and ESPN have teamed up to create a football game impressive enough to take on the big guy himself. This year, Sega decided to throw a Hail Mary and drop the price of all their sports games to a budget-friendly $20 in an attempt to overcome EA’s clear home field advantage. That, combined with a release date a full three weeks before Madden’s, gives ESPN NFL 2K5 every possible advantage against the mother of all sports games, but is that enough?
First things first: ESPN NFL 2K5 may be $20, but this is no fly-by-night, budget title. ESPN has all the features one would expect from a high-quality football title, including deep control, a franchise mode, and online play over Xbox Live. Furthermore, ESPN brings a few new and innovative features to the table, along with graphics and sound that one would expect from a game benefiting from a collaboration with ESPN.
One of the most prominent new features in ESPN NFL is the VIP system, which allows you to download online players’ playing styles and import them into your offline games, so that the computer player mimics the real player. The sheer number of details that are recorded is pretty impressive; the game tracks everything from how often you choose running plays versus passing plays down to how often you use each defensive line maneuver. This is an extremely useful tool to help improve your play, not only because you can go to the online leader board and download the best of the best to practice against, but also because it provides you an ability to see your own play tendencies in hard numbers, identify the shortfalls, and then concentrate on improving them. I’ve personally noticed my level of play improving significantly after only about a week of play.
In addition to the standard quick game, ESPN NFL provides a fairly deep Franchise mode, a Tournament mode, First Person Football (which makes a return from last year’s game), various practice and situation modes, and ESPN 25th Anniversary Mode, which allows players to recreate various classic moments from football history, like the ending of the infamous Heidi Bowl, or the last minute of a half of the Patriots’ first Super Bowl win, which required them to march down the field and complete a 48 yard field goal as time expired. All of these modes add quite a bit of replay to the game, and cater to players of very different taste; I personally don’t have the attention span for a Franchise mode, but some of the Anniversary situations can be quite a bit of fun. The only mode that I noticed is missing is the ability to play a full season outside of a Franchise mode, but that’s not a terribly big loss with all the other options available.
The gameplay is somewhat on the arcade end of the spectrum, which means that ESPN NFL 2K5 is extremely easy to pick up and play. That’s not to say that ESPN NFL doesn’t provide a full array of offensive and defensive options, including audibles, hot routes, defensive adjustments, and hurry-up offense, but rather that one can play without using (or even understanding) any of these features and still be able to enjoy ESPN NFL just fine. ESPN NFL also provides Maximum Passing, which was present in last year’s ESPN NFL Football, and Maximum Tackling, which is new this year. Maximum Passing allows the QB to lead the receiver with a flick of the left thumbstick after the pass, which allows more control over the passing game, while Maximum Tackling allows the offense and defense to hit the A button repeatedly in order to battle over the outcome of a wrap-up tackle.
The game’s AI is decent, but it tends to be too lenient on the medium difficulties. With only a few hours of Madden under my belt in terms of experience with football games, I was able to graduate from Pro within a week, and All-Pro (the second hardest difficulty level) provides a decent level of difficulty for me, but I would daresay that veterans of Madden and previous ESPN games will find nothing less than Legend acceptable after only a few practice games. One thing I have noticed about the referee AI on all the skill levels is that it is extremely inconsistent in calling pass interference; on one play I can take the opposing receiver’s head off and get no call, on the next I can simply look at him funny and get a flag on the play. Of course, there is ability to challenge, and it’s not just for show. I have challenged what I thought were questionable calls, and to my surprise, had the plays overturned.
Of course, why would you even bother playing against the AI when there are thousands of eager opponents waiting for you on Xbox Live? This is really what makes ESPN NFL shine; playing ESPN NFL 2K5 online is almost as good as having a friend sitting next to you on the couch. One of the biggest new improvements over last year’s ESPN sports games is that ESPN NFL 2K5 is Live-aware, which means that your buddies can tell when you’re ready to play when you’re not actually playing against somebody else. There are also extra online-only modes as well, including leagues and tournaments. These in particular are extremely cool, because you can sign on to ESPN Videogames’ site and follow the progress of your league as though you were checking it out on the real ESPN.com, along with play-by-play stats and standings. ESPN NFL 2K5 also supports Xbox Live 3.0, which allows for voice attachments with game invites, along with some other advanced features. The game also has its own proprietary messaging service where players can send text messages to one another outside of games.
Unfortunately, all that glitters is not gold, and there are some problems with ESPN’s Live support which are mostly due to the fact that they chose to run their own Live servers this year as opposed to running everything over the tried-and-true Xbox Live network. There were quite a few instances, especially in the first week or two, where the servers would go down all together, or the server would be up, but you could accept a game invite and not be able to connect, or you could play individual games but be unable to access the leagues. These problems seem to have been corrected, and the servers seem to be much more stable than they were initially.
However, there are some online configuration issues that cannot be fixed via a server patch that can make playing ESPN NFL online quite a bit more frustrating initially than it needs to be. The process of creating a game is more complicated than I’ve seen in most other Xbox Live games. The host must create a game, and then wait for the invited player to accept the invite and “challenge” the host, at which point the host must press X and accept the challenge before the game can start. Why this game couldn’t just have a lobby where people could join and play is beyond me. Also, there are some issues with voice that stem from the fact that “voice through speakers” (as opposed to through the headset) is the default. Since voice through speakers is mostly inaudible unless all the other game sound is off, it can seem as though one is not communicating when they clearly are. Finally, the messaging service has a weird yellow symbol that pops up on the screen when a message arrives, much like a friend request or game invite would, but there is no description, either in the game’s manual or the in-game documentation of what this symbol means; one simply needs to poke around the various options until he opens the menu option that makes the symbol disappear in order to figure out what it means. All of these difficulties can be overcome with the appropriate knowledge or game settings, but it simply shouldn’t need to be that way.
One other major feature of ESPN NFL that returns with a vengeance is The Crib, which is the game’s repository of trophies and other earned doodads. In addition to purchasing furniture and mini-games, celebrities such as David Arquette, Carmen Electra, and Jackass’s Steve-O will challenge you to games via the Crib’s Celebrity Phone. This is an interesting concept, but having to listen to the celebrity opponent’s inane outbursts following every play made this particular mode less than palatable for me. Should you be able to both beat them (each celebrity has an all-star caliber team, so there is certainly no guarantee of winning a match with them) and suffer through their comments to the end of the game, you’ll get extra Crib points with which to buy more swag.
Speaking of Crib points, the system is much improved, as it no longer relies solely on one-time Milestones, such as returning a 50-yard kickoff or shutting out an opponent. In addition to these points, there are also fantasy points, which are awarded based on the player’s performance for a given game in various areas such as passing yards, sacks, fumble recoveries, etc. This does a lot to motivate the player to finish any given offline game, win or lose, whereas he otherwise might be tempted to turn off the Xbox after the game starts to go south. (That said, it would be nice to have an ability to save a game in progress, given that each particular game can last in excess of thirty minutes, and it sucks to have to shut off a game you’ve invested time in when something unexpected pops up.)
The control scheme might take a bit of getting used to for Madden veterans, as it is substantially different than the controls in that game, but they do mostly work well. The biggest difference is that B is used to change players in ESPN NFL, and A is the speed burst button. One new feature is that the A button can either be tapped repeatedly to make the player run faster, or held to perform The Charge, which increases the effectiveness of the ball carrier moves, like stiff-arms and spins, at the expense of speed. This certainly adds a new element of strategy to the game, but The Charge often takes too long to build up, so by the time it’s ready to use, the defense is often already on top of you. Also, having to tap the speed burst button puts you at a disadvantage against computer-controlled players, since the computer can speed burst a lot faster than most humans can mash the A button, a fact that became brutally clear upon my tenth consecutive failure of the speed burst tutorial. Hopefully, Sega will be able to refine this system for next year’s version, but for right now, it’s too convoluted to be effective.
Otherwise, the control scheme is what one would expect from a modern football game. There are controls that are set up to do everything from faking audibles to adjusting coverage and everything in between. The game even goes so far as to provide the ability to individually adjust any particular defensive player’s strategy, double team receivers, tighten or loosen coverage, etc. Again, this is all more or less optional; for the casual gamer, these features might never be used (or even acknowledged), but for the hardcore, you have the power to play the game exactly as you see fit.
Graphically, ESPN NFL is extremely impressive. Just about every player is realistically modeled, as are on-screen versions of ESPN commentators Chris “Boomer” Berman and Suzy Kolber. The game performs excellently, with nary a hint of slowdown or clipping. The only graphical glitch that I noticed was that linemen would occasionally stutter back and forth before a play, but that happens very infrequently. Other than that, only complaint I have graphically is, again, a configuration issue; ESPN NFL provides the ability to set the camera to zoom out on passing plays, but has it set off by default and there is no way to save it like every other setting in the game, so one must pause the game and turn that option on at the beginning of each session. It’s certainly more minor than not providing the ability at all, but a more intelligent default setting would have averted the situation altogether.
One really cool graphical feature is that, not only are you shown instant replays at a frequency of your choosing, but key plays are saved off and replayed during the halftime and post game reports, along with appropriate commentary from Boomer himself. While I often skip these types of displays in most sports games, I find myself watching the halftime and post game shows in their entirety, admiring the plays I was most proud of (and shielding my eyes when it plays back my fifteenth interception of the game).
The audio is very impressive as well. The commentary of Dan Stevens and Peter O’Keefe, while occasionally repetitive (I must have heard one particular comment comparing a punt return to tearing a single page out of War and Peace at least fifty times), is generally entertaining and accurate. There are some inexplicable player name omissions (the game refers to Donovan McNabb of the Eagles simply as “#5”), but those are the exception rather than the rule, and the commentary is good enough that I never once found myself annoyed or ready to turn off the sound.
Worth noting is that ESPN NFL 2K5 is one of the few third-party games to take advantage of the Xbox’s custom soundtracks, and it even goes a step further by allowing the player to set up Stadium Music that plays at certain points in a game, such as when the home team scores a touchdown or forces an interception. The interface is extremely simple, and it allows the player to create an even more realistic experience by taking the songs that play after touchdowns at their stadium of choice. (I personally set up Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll Part 2”, otherwise known as “The Hey! Song”, as my touchdown clip, because that is what plays at Gillette Stadium when the Patriots score.) This is an extremely nice touch that, to my knowledge, has not been attempted in any console sports game previously.
ESPN NFL 2K5 may not convert the Madden faithful, but for the rest of us, it provides a comprehensive football experience that is engaging enough to keep any football fan glued to his seat for quite a while. Sure, there are some glitches and hiccups here and there, but none are severe enough to spoil the overall experience, and the whole package would be worth purchasing at any price. Given the budget-friendly list price of $20, there is absolutely no reason for anyone with more than a passing interest in football to pass up ESPN NFL 2K5. It may not have the name recognition of Madden, but ESPN NFL 2K5 makes its presence known where it counts: On the field.
