This week it's back to sports games, though we're going to go in a different direction this time.
It's been a while since I've covered an arcade style sports game, but I came across this one and I remember this one getting quite a bit of hype back in the day. In the early aughts, EA sports released a series of "street" sports titles under their EA Sports: BIG brand. The gaming juggernaut used this subdivision to release titles it felt were to EXTREME for its standard brand, like the SSX series and Def Jam Vendetta. In all, 21 games were released under the BIG label, the majority of which ended up being the street sports games. They released various versions of NBA, NFL and FIFA Street games, keeping the professional players while replacing the stadiums and arenas with beaches and alleyways. For this week, we will focus on the first NFL entry.
The playbooks are incredibly simple, offense is broken down into run, pass and trick plays while defense is broken down to stop the run, stop the pass and blitz. The playbook is fairly large, though it isn't unique to each team. The first NFL Street came out in 2004, so the rosters are from the 2003 season. All of the big name players of the era are there and it's almost comical to watch them try and make some of these guys fit the whole "street" vibe. There is absolutely nothing "street" about Kurt Warner, Kerry Collins or Jeff Garcia, whether they are wearing backwards hats or not. It's probably good they didn't have the rosters from 2004, they would have had to include someone who's so "street" it would have broken the game. You know exactly who I'm talking about, the coolest of the cool, baddest of the bad, OG-est of the OGs, this guy right here:
The game plays kind of like a middle ground between NFL Blitz and Madden, though it's closer to the former. It features crazy tackling animations, absurd tip drill physics and impossible diving catches. You get bonus points for performing fancy jukes and taunting your opponents as you carry the ball, which help build up the gamebreaker meter. Once full, this will allow you to send one of your players into overdrive and essentially make them unstoppable for a drive. Activating this basically guarantees a touchdown or a turnover, so it's really important to build your meter more quickly. On one hand, it's kind of cool and makes it stand out a little bit from Madden. On the other, games are sort of warped around this feature and winning and losing often depends on activating it at the right time. Overall, the gameplay is solid, if unspectacular, and anyone who has experience with either arcade or simulation football games will be able to pick it up quickly. That was the point of the whole thing, right?
I found offense to be generally pretty fun. Receivers run routes the way they are supposed to, blockers actually block and the computer isn't overly suffocating. You can do crazy stuff like multiple laterals or behind the back passes that you would never see in an actual NFL game. I did have a few sketchy interceptions, but that is way more acceptable here than it is in a more simulation style experience. The only time I would ever have issues is if I was playing people out of position, which is understandable. It's something you will most certainly have to do, as the 7 on 7 nature kind of necessitates it but I think it adds a little bit more to the challenge and it leads to some fun situations. Even though it is understandable, it can still be frustrating at times. I get that defensive backs can't catch as well as receivers, but they should be able to pull in at least some of what is thrown their way. I had then-Giants safety Shaun Williams drop four straight passes when he was wide open. I wouldn't expect him to be a good receiver (to be honest, he wasn't a particularly good safety either) but he should have made at least one of those wide open catches.
Defense was a little bit more of a chore, though it almost feels like that was by design. Line play is okay, this is the one area where NFL Street is probably closer to Madden than Blitz. But once a ball carrier gets going, they are damn near impossible to stop and it almost feels like a waste of time to even try to switch to one of your linebackers. Tackling as a whole is a chore and you have to get really close to the opposing player to even try as the range on the tackle button is very small. While this can be annoying, it also feels like its by design as the game skews more heavily toward offense. It's also mitigated by the fact that it's fair, computer opponents have as tough a time tackling as human opponents. I think it was a bit of a balance issue, they really should have made the linebackers faster and the DBs better tacklers. I have to give them credit for making the player ratings actually matter, they don't always in games like this, they just needed to balance how they distributed the ratings more.
I had way more fun than I should have putting together weird combinations of players. It's difficult to win without a balanced team, but it sure is fun to try. Want to put Michael Vick at defensive tackle? Go ahead. Michael Strahan at running back? Sure. I went full Jerry Reese and tried to make a team consisting entirely of defensive ends and it was a blast to play. I didn't win, its kind of hard to do when you don't have someone on your team who can throw, but it was still awesome. I should note there is also a career mode where you can create a team and pit them against the NFL teams, unlocking new stuff along the way. I played this mode a little bit and it was fine, but I really found the game at its best just playing one off contests. That's weird for me, I usually stick to franchise or career modes in sports games.
I guess I will talk a little bit about the graphics, though they were nothing to write home about. Not the best, but not bad by any means. The player portraits look a little ridiculous, but the in-game models are solid. Everyone is ludicrously large and jacked, which wasn't surprising in an arcade style game like this. The animation is pretty smooth and the backgrounds are varied and interesting. The sound is great and the soundtrack is pretty good, as was to be expected from an EA game from this time. There's tons of licensed music, most of it is rap and hip-hop but there are a few rock tunes in there. It seems like they used some artists that were a little more underground, though that could just be me as my hip-hop knowledge doesn't go that deep. It's a good soundtrack and its very fitting, though it's not quite up there with some of its EA sports contemporaries.
At the end of the day, NFL Street was a good solid offering from a company that knew exactly what they were doing. It was a good, fun distraction and a nice throwback to the NFL I largely grew up with. There wasn't anything great or revolutionary, but it was a nice change of pace. This would never replace Madden in my regular rotation, but I might bust it out from time to time and its definitely something I would play with other football fans who are non-gamers. NFL Street would produce two more entries before dying out and the EA Sports: BIG brand would soon follow suit. Perhaps it was a bit too EXTREME for this world. Maybe the developers finally ran out of Mountain Dew. Could it just be that the whole "EVERYTHING IS EXTREME" deal stopped being "cool" in like 2008? Either way, they managed to produce some pretty fun sports games, even if they weren't the deepest or most innovative.
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