End of an Era: A Eulogy for 2k Football

By Vermouth

I saw today that Take 2 had merged the team that previously did the NFL 2k series into the team that does the NBA 2k series. The announcement can be seen here, for those who need a link for every story. This was the announcement I’d been hoping I’d never have to hear since Electronic Arts and the NFL signed their exclusivity pact. Visual Concepts, the developer of my beloved NFL 2kx/ESPN football games were throwing in the towel. Their was to be no Winning Eleven style unlicensed game from the better football game maker. Rather than just bitch about EA and how evil they are I thought I’d write something up today to pay my respects to one of the best brands of video games over the past 5 years by briefly talking about the games I played and the series as a whole.

Let’s get it started way back when the series started, in fact before I even played it. Before ANYONE played it early September 1999, the Dreamcast ads showcased the first game NFL 2k. I was so blown away, I nearly went out and bought a Dreamcast. In those days I didn’t play consoles as a rule and eventually settled in to playing Madden 2000 on the PC and went on. But I got the Dreamcast eventually and the game and it was actually something of a disappointment. On all but the hardest difficulty setting you could simply win by having your receivers go deep a whole lot and throwing the ball high in the air for a Randy Moss or Terrell Owens and have them catch it. Things were okay but they’d get better in a big hurry.

NFL 2k1 was a real improvement on the series. The running game was dramatically improved as was the Defense so it was actually a balanced football game. It was also dramatically better than Madden 2001 which on the PC turned out to be a disappointment. I didn’t get this game, like 2k till long after it was initially released as I
was a Madden man like any PC Sports gamer.

I never did play NFL 2k2 but it was the last year I’d be called a Madden gamer as I finally found myself getting very sick of the series. They were clearly treating PC gamers like crap, as our version of the game was a crappy port of Last year’s PS2 game. We weren’t even getting the current PS2 version of the game! I eventually did get Madden on the Gamecube but then picked up NFL 2k3 at Blockbuster for the PS2 one day. And holy crap what a challenge this game was the Defense felt nearly impregnable at times. Getting a first down was a significant accomplishment, getting a touchdown seemed like a once in a great while thing. I eventually practiced it and got really good at it, using the run to set up the pass, playing tough bend but don’t break D relying on pressure from 4 or 5 rather than the big bombs and blitzes that Madden builds itself on. This was football based on blocking and tackling I switched and while I still tried both Madden 2003-2005 they never really did live up to the ESPN series which had better fundamentals.

Year after that came the ESPN moniker; it was re-titled ESPN NFL football. This game didn’t really make dramatic improvements to the exceptional gameplay, but rather focused on presentation, although it had some nice tweaks the real improvements were how it really felt like a telecast. The game was totally imbued with ESPN graphics and sounds that made the game really feel like watching a game of football. This year was also the first time I played on Xbox Live and the persistent stat tracking was just getting started. It didn’t really start till you got to the final game in my List.

ESPN NFL 2k5 was the best game in the series. They reworked the graphics, improved the ESPN styling even further, tweaked the awesome gameplay a bit to make it a bit more big play friendly and improved the live play. The best thing was the VIP system which gave you all sorts of info on a perspective opponent so you can see what he likes to do in his games. For instance if he’s like me and runs a balanced offense you can tell, if he prefers to pass till he throws the cover off the ball you can see that too. Heck you could even download someone’s tendencies and practice against them in the single player game. And you got all of this for only 20 USD. Best deal in my memory when it comes to bargain games.

I may be the only serious sports gamer who comes here but I’m seriously going to miss this game every year. I may buy Madden for my PSP or Xbox 360 but I highly doubt we’ll see a better football game than NFL 2k5 on the Xbox and that’s just sad that someone can keep that away from me through a licensing deal. The only silver lining here is I don’t have any doubt that the NBA 2k series is going to raise the roof now that the NBA denied exclusivity to anyone. It’s one of the games I’m really making “Doe eyes” at among the Xbox 360 games as it should be insane. But even still I’ll be missing this game, one of the most consistently awesome of the last five years. C’est la vie mon amie.