STAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAND UP AND GET CRUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUNNNNKK!
The unmistakable shouting and massive bass lines of early 2000s ATL hip-hop fires out of your speakers as a scrawled mural of Randy Moss (and Matt Birk) stand grimacing at the player as if to say, “Nah, y’all ain’t ready” in the Hall of Famer’s signature West Virginia drawl.
This is the football that we all imagined that we played in the backyard and on the black top. This is the great peak of arcade sports games that arrived in that golden video game year of 2004.
This is NFL Street 2.
Now, before we dive in, I don’t want to spend this entire review poking at the priorities of the modern sports game hellscape. There is so much anger directed at the modern versions of the mainline simulation franchises like Madden and NBA 2K, and I believe this vitriol is born at the crisis of priorities we see manifested in their finished products. Is this a game about realism? Or representing the league partner and its players well? Or about fun-ifying microtransactions? Or making a competitive eSport? Or…
It is truly an impossible situation for the human beings creating games at the center of such confusion.
By contrast, the Street franchise from the fabled EA Sports BIG label shows what talented game developers can do when given one directive: make a fun game. At every turn, the game is overflowing with style–dare I say street panache–and buzzes with the hubris and chaotic energy of a Deestroying Youtube video. You feel thrown into an actual game of pick up football played on a random patch of just-big-enough grass in any town or city in the world.
The animations are over the top. The player models are bursting with color, muscles, and upturned visors and baseball caps.
Showboating is rewarded, if not required. The traditional moves of the football field are best performed as complex orchestrations of tricks, laterals, and misdirections. The trick play catalog is bigger than the selection of run plays. Gamebreakers allow for absurd power-ups that can shift the momentum or even decide the outcome of any game.
And there is much to do here. While many loyalists consider the original NFL Street to be the standard for the whole series, NFL Street 2 shines because of its breadth of game modes.
They are:
- Build a team to compete in various events (first to reach 3 forced turnovers, first to 100,000 style points, etc.)
- Gauntlet-style mode where you work through defeating all the current and historic squads
- Mini-games of different football skills
There can be a bit of a grind in the 1st mode, with certain challenges feeling decided by luck rather than player skill, but that also feels appropriate for the wild atmosphere of the entire title. You are also rewarded with skill points and clothing to apply to your growing cadre of ballers.
The legends woven throughout the gauntlet mode are a highlight too, and they represent the top tier of talent in the game. Using the likes of Ronnie Lot or Lawrence Taylor makes you feel even more powerful than the already over-the-top action often allows you to feel.
The mini-games are such a fun time. Highlights include Crush the Carrier, where several players vie to see who can hold onto the ball for the longest cumulative time as everyone attempts to tackle the ball carrier, and Jump Ball Battle, where a group of receivers chase down a limited number of passes to make the highest number of receptions. These competitions are simple, but they do a great job of distilling the most fun parts of the game into bite-sized portions.
But that concept is really representative of the game’s overall design priorities: take the game of football, remove the boring parts, and turn the exciting parts up to 4000% of their typical energy level. YOU, the player, are given control over the players that YOU have seen as larger than life for so long. And then, you get to see them at their absolute superhuman best. It is the imagination of every young football fan set loose onto a Nintendo GameCube console.
This is truly one of the signature arcade sports games ever made, and it firmly retains its replay value over two decades after release. Just look at the number of content creators STILL bringing this game back onto their channels: linky link.
So what’s bad?
Not much, honestly. It was given great reviews at the time by most critics, and the gameplay has not aged a bit. The wall mechanics (where players can often use the walls to evade oncoming defenders or potential sacks) can feel a bit gimmicky and OP for the offensive side of the ball, but they become a huge factor in your strategy from play to play, ensure differences between the different fields of plays (where there are either A LOT of walls or hardly any to use), and add to the overall sense of verticality that really benefits the entire game. The trash talk is cheesy, but what do you expect? It was 2004. This is how I spoke to my friends when we played pick-up. The GOAT Xzibit would have been proud of me, I like to think.
Overall, this is one of the can’t-miss titles of sports game history, and it is worth a revisit any time by any casual sports gamer.
Verdict: Genre Definer
