NFL Fever 2002

"Game Time!!!!!!! Step Up To The Scrimmage Line!!!!!"

It's that time again!!!!! Blow the whistle and count your yards!!! Football gaming is back for another long hard year. And this time Madden as usual, is facing off against NFL2K AND Microsoft's newbie to the series NFL Fever. At first glance it might appear that NFL Fever is all looks and no play. Read here to learn why absolutely none of that is true. Me and my buddies, have always been madden fanatics, and we weren't gonna go anywhere else right down to the core. Who cares if the graphics sucked or were bad!!!! We'd been with Madden since the genesis days!!!! And all these fanboys come sayin well NFL Fever looks way better!!!! Wow how!!! And looks ain't everything ya know. But we distinguished that there were two different breeds of casual gamers now in the world, and kinda had to face the facts. The first breed was us, who had been around the longest, and got our bang for our dollar on the playstation, and others still got it on the saturn. The second breed, was all the newbies, just getting ready for gaming and entering a new frontier. These guys were graphics whores, didn't care what anything played like only how beautiful it looked. They all swarmed to NFL Fever like a pack of wolves!!! And at first, we all thought those dudes were crazy.

GRAPHICS: 10/10. But then reality kinda struck a chord. We said, ''well alright lets settle this once and for all. we'll rent xbox on day 1 of release and get both madden and fever. we'll then find out what's the story, get me???'' That would have been perfect except none of us were gonna agree with the buddy of ours who had been completely disillusioned by FEVER'S incredible graphics. We figured the guy had sprung a fever. Literally. Day of XBox came. We got to play it. NFL Fever's graphics blew US AWAY. It blew ME AWAY right out of the room. The way the characters looked, the fields, the incredible lighting, REAL FLESH AND VEINS!! I was like ''OMG!!! I'm like at the football stadium now!!!!' This was just too real to be a sim!!!! And you could see everyone in the crowd, right down to their incredible looking shirts, and sweat dripping down!!!! Literally!!!! The faces on the players you could see the freckles, all the way down to the small details we have in real life!!!!!!! OMFG!!!!! And by this time we had bought XBox, forget the rental part. Hell we kinda blotted that part out after our initial impressions. Real skeletal systems were used in the modeling, and we could see big ole Brett Farve's muscles really ripple and he'd tackle, move, and PLAY just like in real life!!!!!! This was all too much!!! Someone said it and out came those famila words again, ''Games Will Never Be The Same''. WTF?! Rick did u watch the tokyo game show?!? He nodded jokingly. Sure seems to me he was in love with Bill Gates. Ok well we forgot about that weird glare in his eyes for a minute, and really started playin this thing. After all graphics don't make everything. *right after shutting everyones gaping jaws shut*

STORY: 10/10. Football games with a story!?!? What the heck!?? Me n my buddies were kinda shocked by this one. Were we playing football, or some kind of RPG GAME?!?! If we want to play RPGs we'll get dragon warrior or somethin else, but none of us that big on those RPGs. This is silly though, why football with RPG?!?!?! Well we found this one out on our own. It's all about strategies boys. You wanna win the world, you gotta develop the best teams, best players, best places for them to live and nurture them kinda like pokemon. Weird?!?! We thought so, at first. But then it got so damn addictive, and by Dynasty mode we were like ''ok whos got the receiver with the best arm now, I made someone who can do 50-100 yards with no defensive back tackle, but long and high jumping ability'' And we suddenly realized what this whole RPG thing was about. We play a new rookie, some guy who's never done football before or knows what it is!!! It is your job to train them, mold them, and get them to what it takes to compete in the NFL. You are that guy, and you are the star!!!! The better your player succeeds, the more contracts you get, the more contracts, the more money you make, the more money, the more STUFF you get!!! It's so cool!!!! Kinda like a fun version of tamagotchi!!!!

CONTROL: 9.9/10. Ok that woulda been swel had brent not made his invincable apocalyptic character. Luckily they force us to balance the guys abilities in SOME ways!!!!!! And well wearing a tutu on a football player....lol.  The control scheme was new, fresh, and just.....new. We played touch and go with some normal players before opening dynasty mode. And we got the hang of it pretty fast!!!! We discovered why this games nothing like madden- it ain't trying to be a straight SIM!!!!! This is an RPG game, with a whole bunch of fast action elements that intermix, taking the best of blitz, while letting you keep control!!!! For instance, depending on the balance of my 4 ft 5 qb (lol yes he was named jimmy the lepprocaun) i could squeeze straight through the defense's legs, shoot off a perfect pass, and get it to the tall lanky guy in the endzone. Impossible!?!? Not in NFL Fever baby!!!! And once you pull off a play like that, u'll never wanna see Madden again!!!! Which was weird. But all the same, every guy had limitations. And you couldn't pull off the plays you wanted to, depending on how you built your character as in an RPG. If you had a really fast guy, he could waste farve on the passes. If you had a really tall, stout guy he could open up the defense, allowing the ol 123 play. It all depended on how you raised your guys!!!!!!

FUN FACTOR: 10/10. Proud to say that, at the end, through it all, we ended up raising the best pack of brat strapping lads to ever grace NFL fame!!!!! And they came back with the gold cup, after of which we all huddled together, picking up the XBox with one stride, like a huge trophy, and brought it all the way outside, touting it to the world!!!!! LOL!!!!! Yes we still like Madden. Yes we still play Madden. Sometimes. FEVER's just....too different. To unlike Madden for us to have it any other way. And finally after reaching in the sky, and the glorious ending of Dynasty, we felt like we had come some where new. The bar had been raised and.....''Games Will Never Be The Same''

SOUND: 10/10. Basically the commentary was like real life down to a tee, sometimes characters in the booth might crack jokes, and it could get pretty downright funny while playing a pass and play. But that never annoyed us, we'd just mute em if they got too out of hand. On the other side, the superior DTS5.1 had us all drooling buckets full and wishing this game had come out alot earlier...like 5 years!!!!!!  So all in all the sharp noises and music made us want to get up and cheer, for the last standing champions of the NFL, and hold up our well deserved trophy in awe. But when reality set in, the game had delivered its promise. It was fun as anything. And nothing could make us think of what is going to come next.  A Basketball game that mixes Jet Grind Radio & Dance Dance Revolution!?!?!?!! Anything's possible!!!!!!!

And that golden sign raised out above our city where people could tell what was going on...........enjoy NFL Fever and ''Welcome To The Next Level''

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 11/19/01, Updated 11/19/01