ESPN NFL Football
Ever wonder what EA forgot to include in this year’s Madden? Look no further.
Tags: ESPN NFL Football Categories: PS2 Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Craig "American Idle" Hansen on Sep 30th, 2003
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| ESPN NFL Football (title page) | |||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Action | No | ||
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So, does the ESPN-rebranding of Sega’s annual football outing finally mark the year that Sega bypasses Madden as the best NFL football game on the market? No. But a lot of great changes have been made in this year’s offering developed by Visual Concepts, changes that move the franchise closer than ever to being on equal footing with the oldest franchise in videogame gridiron.
Let’s start with the strong points.
First, the use of the ESPN license, a real Achilles heel last year, has really been expanded this time out. Not only does Chris Berman offer great pre-game introductions, but at the end of each week’s worth of games, you get a simulated ESPN NFL Prime Time broadcast that captures the highlights of all those games you DIDN’T play yourself. This really does increase the realism and the only thing missing is some screen-time by Boomer himself.
Another oversight is the lack of ESPN-style analysis of draft day in the off-season mode. Rather than having a bunch of picks fly by so fast you don’t even know who was drafted, it’d be a bit fun to have Berman relate each pick with one or two witticisms. A note for next year! But overall, the use of Berman and the ESPN crew is well ahead of Madden, which for too long has been relying on adding a couple dozen new lines from The Big Man and leaving it at that. You’d think EA would want to take advantage of Madden’s new broadcast partner, Al Michael, and his new home on ABC’s Monday Night Football, but so far the changes have been minimal: advantage Sega/ESPN.
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Another cool new feature is The Crib, a place where you get to collect memorabilia from your favorite players and team as you hit certain gameplay benchmarks. It’s a much more visual idea than EA’s “collect football cards” concept; both ideas are fun, but The Crib is a breath of fresh air, a new idea. As you log in hours of gameplay and break franchise and NFL records, more goodies get unlocked and soon The Crib becomes a minigame all its own. This “think outside the box” approach is a trademark of the Sega/Visual Concepts franchise, and a welcome one.
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Also intriguing is Sega’s First-Person Football initiative; it’s obvious that, outside of integrating the ESPN license, this is where developers spent the majority of their time. It’s disorienting the first time you play from a “player’s eye view” and if you’re like me, you’ll stick to running plays in the early going. A lot of care has been put in to making the realism of this new camera angle work; the view bounces with the strides of a player, goes wonky when tackled and really makes you appreciate the advantage of a 6’5” or so QB like Daunte Culpepper of the Minnesota Vikings, compared to a 5’10” or so QB like, oh, Doug Flutie, formerly of the San Diego Chargers, for lack of a better example springing to mind.
Yet in the end, First Person Football is little more than a camera, sound and Dual Shock trick that is usually going to be too disorienting to use it to play though an entire season or franchise mode. While it’s fun to play with, the serious videogamer will return to a more standard camera mode when the going gets serious.
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Finally, Sega/ESPN is far less of a memory hog on your 8 MB card; in EA’s college game, a dynasty save is a heft 2.5 MB. In their NFL game, it’s 1.5 MB. Yet in ESPN NFL Football 2K4, a season save will cost you only about 780K. Now THAT’s efficiency!
Now for the weaknesses.
First, and most obviously, there is no ESPN College Football 2K4 for gamers to pair with the NFL game. This cedes a HUGE advantage to EA in the realm of sim-style detailing. One of the real obsessions most sports gamers have developed over the years is to play a college game through a season, export your seniors into the NFL game’s draft, and if you’re lucky with your draft picks, continue to follow those players through their NFL stint. Fun stuff, but without a college game this year, it’s something you CAN’T do in Sega/ESPN. That’s a deadly oversight, though Visual Concepts would probably argue it’s better to skip a year on the college game than do a crappy one, which begs the question, how then to they explain Sega Sports NCAA College Football 2K3 last year?
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In ESPN NFL Football 2K4, the franchise mode is about the same as last year, with the majority of owner duties consisting of signing players and staying under the salary cap. Scouting new talent, like EA’s college game, exists almost exclusively as an off-season mini-game. That’s when you’ll do the most in terms of scouting draft-eligible rookies. And there’s virtually none of the attention to detail EA added this year with managing a stadium budget, ticket prices, concessions and parking, advertising and loads of new owner’s mode details. Sure, EA lifted many of their ideas from the PC game they marketed for a couple years from the independent Solecismic Software, Front Office Football. But at least the added something new. While many aspects of ESPN/Sega’s off-season mode has better AI and detail that EA’s, EA’s owner mode really raised the bar this year while Sega was content to tread water and add a new first-person camera mode.
When it comes right down to it, ESPN made a lot of great moves in terms of integrating ESPN licensed-content and Chris Berman into the mix. But aside from that, The Crib and the first-person mode, the game remains shockingly close to last year’s offering. Add in the fact that Sega’s instruction booklet is minimalist and is available only in the game, and there’s a fair amount of disappointment to this year’s game, and while not enough to make it a bad game, it’s certainly a couple steps behind EA’s pace in terms of advancements.
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Sega’s ESPN NFL Football 2K4 feels more like a mid-season revision, not a completely new game. Maybe it’d be better to call it ESPN NFL Football 2K3.5. Here’s hoping that Visual Concepts will hit the showers, re-evaluate their gameplan and next season come back with a game that’s not only improved in a couple, three areas, but a marked improvement overall, in every aspect of gameplay. With no answer for EA’s owner’s mode, EA Sports Bio for brand loyalists, or playmaker controls, Visual Concepts needs not only to answer EA’s challenge from this year, but anticipate what EA might come up with next year to REALLY take the lead. And for God’s sake, get a DECENT college game next year, not just one that runs on THIS YEAR’s ESPN engine!
Final call: Madden is still king.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
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-- The use of the ESPN license and Chris Berman is light-years ahead of Madden. -- First Person Football really works for getting across a “from the player’s eye’s” point of view. -- A roster limit that matches the NFL’s. -- Fun off-season mode. -- Solid documentation within game. |
8.2 |
| What Doesn't | |
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-- Aside from the First Person Football camera mode, the graphics – even the front-office interface – are nearly unchanged from last year’s outing. -- Lack of a companion college game hurts the sim-appeal, a Sega strong point. -- Really bad paper game manual gives game cheap, bargain-ware feel. |
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| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| Lack of a college game companion mars the big step up Sega has taken, but all the pieces are in place for next year’s ESPN NFL Football to really make Madden lose ground. | |
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Tags: ESPN NFL Football
Posted by Craig "American Idle" Hansen on Sep 30th, 2003 and is filed under PS2 Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
