Grade: A
Publisher/Developer: Sega/Visual Concepts
Year: 2004
Genre: Thanksgiving
We thought this year we’d get everyone into the holiday spirit by putting up an article related to Thanksgiving. This basically limits us to either writing about food, relatives, or football, and since there really aren’t any games about preparing a turkey or sitting at a table in awkward silence while Uncle Ed somehow turns a discussion about the weather into a rant about Obama and Socialism, we decided to write a football article. Specifically, we decided to write about NFL 2K5, because that’s all Stryker and I have been doing for the last few weeks. For your benefit, of course.
NFL 2K5, for those of you who want the history lesson, was the final entry in the NFL 2K series, which started off as THE reason to own a Dreamcast, and later, like the son of an alcoholic who can’t save his parent from self-destruction but refuses to die with him, survived the premature demise of the DC by moving on to other consoles. In doing so, it became the last real competition to Madden, but this was a short-lived arrangement. There was no NFL 2K6, because after 2K5’s release, the NFL figured out it could make a lot more money selling an exclusive license to one game company for an outrageous price instead of non-exclusive ones to a handful of publishers for more reasonable fees. EA won the subsequent bidding war, and as a result, the Madden series has spent the past 6 years as the only official football game on the market while NFL executives roll around in big piles of money.
Comparisons between NFL 2K5 and the latest Madden are inevitable, much the same way comparisons between the Carolina Panthers and Houston Texans would be if those were the only two teams in the league. At first glance, it might not seem fair to compare a 6 year old game versus the newest installment of a series that not everyone agreed it was better than even when both games were brand new. But this has been aided by Madden’s stubborn refusal to improve in any tangible way.
So how do the two series compare? Well, fans of each series will claim that their game is a better simulation, but it’s hard to say. Each one is unrealistic in it’s own unique way – if Madden’s realism is lacking is a certain way (for example, defensive players can’t play coverages properly), it tends to get cancelled out by some other inaccuracy (defensive players also have ESP to make up for their mistakes in coverage) that keeps the whole thing looking like a real football game as long as you don’t watch too closely. By contrast, NFL 2K5 usually just rolls with whatever shortcomings it has, and the result is a game that’s usually like real football, except with big plays happening a lot more frequently than in real life. It’s not Tecmo Super Bowl or anything, but you will see far more 80 yard touchdown passes, fantastic interceptions, or runs with multiple broken tackles than you would in either an actual NFL game or in Madden.
In terms of gameplay, NFL 2K5 is so much better than Madden it’s kind of like watching Super Bowl XXIV all over again (Hint for you non-football fans – by the way, why would you be reading this? – the final score of Super Bowl XXIV was 55-10). In the last ten years or so, Madden’s gotten to a point where it often feels like it’s playing itself while your players occasionally follow your suggestions. NFL 2K5 still feels like playing a game. The action is intense, the pace is fast, and the control is responsive. When you break off a long run, or complete a pass through tight coverage, you really feel like you did it.
There are obvious advantages to putting out a new football game every year (see: rolling around in big piles of money, as discussed earlier), but there is at least one advantage to having a series go into hiatus, in that it provides a static platform for the fanbase to work with. As a result, fans of the game have had time to create historically accurate rosters for many of the greatest teams in league history, as well as full NFL rosters for most of the past 30 years. Want to recreate the 1987 season? Go crazy. Just remember, even with the most accurate representations of the players from that era, it will still be up to you the blast “Livin’ on a Prayer” after every Jets touchdown.
By the way, here’s a link to a pretty nice site where you can download historic rosters. Getting them onto your console is a little tricky, and requires some extra equipment, but there are detailed instructions available, and it shouldn’t be too difficult for anyone with a little computer experience.
Oddly enough, this combination of historic rosters and NFL 2K5’s occasional lapses in realism actually complement each other rather well. When you think back to whatever the glory days of football were to you (for me, it’s 1991), you probably don’t remember the boring games, the 2 yard runs up the middle, or the incomplete passes on 2nd and 8. You remember things like L.T. annihilating a QB on a weak side blitz, Barry Sanders juking 7 defenders on a length of the field run, or Andre Reed splitting the gap between two safeties for a long touchdown catch. In other words, you tend to filter out the ordinary stuff and remember all the big plays, which is pretty much what NFL 2K5 does as well. It’s actually uncanny the way the flaws in the game’s realism line up so perfectly with a person’s nostalgia.
In other words, NFL 2K5 is a near perfect simulation of the way you remember old football games.
In a weird way, this means that NFL 2K5 has actually gotten better over time. This isn’t something that happens very often with games. Rather than fine wines that get better with as years go by, video games tend to age like, I don’t know, tuna fish sandwiches. (This is an analogy I feel 100% confident in saying, as anyone who thinks tuna fish sandwiches age well is certainly already dead from food poisoning). Sure, we’re all classic gaming enthusiasts here, but I’m not going to tell you that Shining Force is more fun now than it was in 1993. And this is an even rarer occurrence in sports games, which are usually made obsolete by a newer version within a year. How many “timeless” sports games can you think of? NHL ’95? Tecmo Super Bowl? Ok, sure. But are either of those actually more fun now than they were then? Probably not.
