SEGA Sports ESPN NFL Football

With a totally refined interface, Sega's highly acclaimed NFL 2K series finally receives a face lift and ESPN tie-ins.

	Version PS2 / Xbox	Developer Visual Concepts	Publisher SEGA	Genre Sports

By Joseph Jackson

Filled with many integrated ESPN tie-ins, including some pretty cool ESPN broadcasts, ESPN NFL Football brings about a great change to the 2K series and now hosts an exciting new presentation scheme along with plenty of enhanced new moves.

The visuals in ESPN NFL Football are quite dazzling, including some great close-ups of cheerleaders, sideline players, and crowd scenes among others.

The player models and new fields are very well represented with great models, sharp details and crisp textures. There's also over 1,000 new animations, some of which include gang tackles, double-team blocks, player celebrations and on-field disappointments.

With a new, easy-to-use play-calling system, ESPN Football plays as good as it looks. It comes complete with updated NFL team playbooks and online play that's supported via dial-up or broadband access, allowing players to download rosters, chat, and play fast head-to-head games against each other.

Other cool new features include a Challenge System that allows you to get a second opinion on what you may perceive as a bad call. A Multi-Player Franchise mode also makes the rounds in ESPN Football, allowing players to get together and pit their team management skills against each other in head-to-head competitions.

A very cool First Person football mode also finds its way into ESPN NFL Football and provides gamers with all of the excitement of the game from within a first person view mode. Sega has always been known to innovate and the First Person mode of ESPN Football is a great example of that as it is the first sports video game to contain such a feature.

New and exclusive to ESPN NFL Football will be feature called 'The Crib'. It sounds like a unique feature that allows players to unlock over 300 items they can use to furnish their pads with. All of these things serve as rewards for playing great out on the fields. The better you play out on the fields, the more stuff you get and the better you can deck out your palatial pad so it looks good enough to even appear on MTV Cribs (kidding).

The audio portions of ESPN Football are done quite well and features top-notch commentary by ESPN veteran, Chris Berman. Chris not only provides commentary but also does recaps that he reports from a recreated Sports Center studio during half-time, post-game, and pre-game shows.

Even though not all of us are die hard football fans or sports fans in general, myself especially, it didn't stop Sega's NFL 2K4, err ESPN NFL Football from looking quite beautiful!

The graphics boast great players and environments. The animation is like poetry in motion - they seem so life-like, you can almost feel every tackle as they happen. We even witnessed players walking away with bruises after playing a session.

Sega's ESPN NFL Football is out now in the US, and scheduled for release in Europe on October 31. Stay tuned for our verdict.