I love football. I love video games. I also love "THEM TWINS!!!". Madden Football has been the industry standard as far as video game football goes. Unfortunately, Electronic Arts has basically chosen one aspect of the game to "tweak" every year and release basically the same game over and over because like suckers, we all still buy it. And boy have there been some competitors, NFL Fever, NFL Blitz, etc.
Things changed in 2004. Visual Concepts, a subsidiary of Sega, had been releasing multi-platform sports titles for the next gen systems aka The Ps2, the xbox, and the gamecube since Sega's Dreamcast was rudely awakened. The NFL 2k series had been getting better and better with each version. 2k5 was the perfect storm of sorts. VC smoothed out their football engine, widly improved their graphics, and included some groundbreaking integration of the ESPN license and put out ESPN NFL 2k5 for 20 bucks to stick it to Madden. The game was as close to perfect as you can get. It had its issues in the internet arena, and the lack of a proper qb spy function really hurt play, but it was just the best damn game on the market.
In response, EA bought the exclusive rights to the NFL, signed a new 15 year deal with ESPN, and basically killed the 2k series so they could continue to release mediocre Madden games. Anyway, we are getting close to the release of Madden 2007 for the Xbox 360 and while it looks good, it still seems to be the same old Madden. To make myself feel better, I spent a couple hours painstakingly updating as much of the NFL roster as I could, and creating the pertinent rookies. I have been replaying NFL 2k5 and you know what, the game is still the best damn football game out there. The running game is umpteen times better than Madden's (even this ridiculous idea of controlling your lead blocker probably wont solve its horrible collision issues, and poor between the tackles animation), the passing game was very refined and required a working knowledge of the play (vs. audibling everything into some sort of deep bomb and tossing passes to your best reciever in Madden), the right stick juke moves were amazingly deep allowing you to combo spins, stutter steps, jukes into highlight reels (which Madden has now totally ripped off), and finally the presentation of your own personal highlights at halftime and at the end of the game commentated by Chris Berman is still one of the funnest things to watch (Madden still hasn't done this, but apparently believes that recording Peyton Manning's actual voice yelling out numbers and words will help players feel more "in the game").
It really is sad that the NFL 2k series was not allowed to continue because it was clearly on a path of assasination akin to Conan's quest to lop off the head of Thulsa Doom (By Crom!!!).
NFL 2k5 can be picked up for less than 20 dollars anywhere. Get it for the Xbox (the hard drive is what allows the game to replay your highlights to you during halftime), you won't regret it.
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