Over the last 15 years Electronic Arts has made itself the name in sports video games, mostly through the sheer dominance and near-authentic perfection of the "Madden NFL" series.
But the company can also let its hair down — make that up — with its "EA Big" series of games, highlighted by two volumes of "NBA Street" which dispel realism in favor of sky-high afros and gravity-defying dunks.
So the question raised by Electronic Arts with "NFL Street" is: Can they have their football cake and eat their cartoonish fun too?
The game never makes any allusions to being a football simulator, as even the basic set-up of the game indicates. The football games of "Street" cut the action down to seven-on-seven action (games either being decided by scoring touchdowns or trick points) with every team member playing on both sides of the ball. So if you ever — for some odd reason — dreamed of seeing Peyton Manning play defense, this game's for you.
And to fit the game's moniker, the contests are taken from the gridiron to the street and the beach as trash cans and beach balls comprise the game's first-down markers.
All of these little twists help "NFL Street" stand out visually and conceptually in the bloated football video game field, but when it tries to get fancy with the gameplay, things fall apart.
While "NBA Street" is chock-full of dizzying dribbles and dunks that all feel quite different and look fantastic, there's really not many special things you can do on the football field besides run, throw and tackle people. "NFL Street" does have a handful of special moves that involve taunting your opponent with the ball, but these moves aren't really functional at all and only serve to build up the "gamebreaker" meter.
And that "gamebreaker," well that really doesn't do much either. After a disturbing visual where one of your players vibrates and yells like he's becoming the Incredible Hulk, activating a gamebreaker simply lets you tackle harder (on defense) or become harder to tackle (on offense).
Despite the misguided extras on the gameplay, there are some encouraging features that add to the depth of the gameplay experience. Besides the single-game experience (which also allows for a game between two fantasy-drafted teams), there's an NFL challenge mode that opens the door to earning better players (including legends such as Lawrence Taylor and Barry Sanders), more skills and a horde of uniform, hair and logo options.
Having to beat 32 teams — both in actual games and objective-based challenges — and having limitless ways to customize your team does create a deeper and more prolonged game experience than "NBA Street" was able to.
Also to the game's credit "NFL Street" takes the helmets off the footballers. The biggest criticism of NFL marketing is that by keeping players underneath helmets prevents many NFLers from being marketable stars. But "NFL Street" goes a long way in making every player look close to his human self and maintains such personal features as Ricky Williams' flowing dreads and Donovan McNabb's pointy hair. The only drawback of the game's characters is the fact that most players are cartoonized a little and resemble Victor Frankenstein's monster more than an NFL star.
But at the end of the day, sports games come down to gameplay and being fun, and "NFL Street" gets stopped at the line on those counts. Gamers looking for the massive amounts of formation and strategies of "Madden 2004" will be disappointed with only about 30 plays to choose from on each side and a defensive strategy that relies mostly on praying for the other team to fumble or run into one of you tacklers.
And while "NFL Street" attempts to emulate the speed and arcade style of it's NBA counterpart, the football conventions of stopping to call plays and achieving first downs kills the game's momentum.
If you need a polygon pigskin fix before Super Sunday, stick with "Madden 2004" or the arcade-style "NFL Blitz" — whose gameplay style "NFL Street" borrows from heavily — instead of hitting the streets.
Grade: C,”Matthew T. Olson”
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