NFL Fever 2004
Published by: Jeff McCloy on 2004-05-15
Page Views: 2914
Rating: 5/10
Microsoft's NFL Fever 2004 is in a league of its own. Rather than competing against other football titles available on the Xbox, Fever, now in its third iteration, is simply trying to outdo itself, but not in the same way that EA Sports' Madden NFL franchise consistently tries to trump it's namesake predecessor from the year before. Where Madden continues to set the standard for football videogames with innovative features and improved authenticity year after year, Fever is, for the second year in a row, trying to correct glaring mistakes and patch up major weaknesses whilst trying to introduce Xbox-only features befitting of a first party flagship title. With Fever 2004, the Xbox-only features we're getting this time, in the form of the XSN Sports initiative, are impressive enough. But, like the digital football player themselves, Fever 2004 seems up to its neck in quicksand, sinking deeper and deeper into mediocrity the more it struggles to fix what's wrong.
The XSN Sports program --which allows your Xbox, Xbox Live account and your PC to communicate with each other-- will make your online experience with Fever feel like a fantasy football league where you and your buddies are in control of the action between the endzones instead of high priced, skilled athletes. Setting up leagues and tournaments, tracking statistics and habits of league members and eventually sending messages between general managers will be a piece of cake through your PC, but the magic is that all of the information on your custom XSN Sports is generated by you and your buddies playing Fever 2004 over Xbox Live. This is an innovation over simple Xbox Live head-to-head gameplay that we couldn't have guessed at when Microsoft first began discussing the possibilities of Xbox Live a few years back. While the full arsenal of features we'll have with XSN Sports will continue to grow, it's already one of the better innovations Microsoft has given the world of videogaming. The downside is that you end up wishing it was associated with a better football game when all is said and done.
One can't help but wonder what would've happened if the original NFL Fever, the one that launched the Xbox, had been a better game. We probably wouldn't be in the situation we're in now with Fever 2004 because, in terms of gameplay and just overall football authenticity, the franchise hasn't gotten much better. The short development cycle between the first and second editions of Fever (NFL Fever 2003 came out 10 months after Fever 2002) explains why we didn't see any major overhauls from one to the next. But the development team at Microsoft has had a full year to make Fever 2004 a legitimate football game and a worthy challenger to the offerings from Sega and Electronic Arts. Instead cool new gameplay innovations like Read and Lead passing end up being overshadowed by the same tuning and animation problems that have always hampered Fever.
Read and Lead passing allows the player as quarterback to select the receiver he wants to hit and then, using a new downfield targeting icon, simply throw to an area where that receiver is going to be. By tweaking a few options you can even make it so that the receiver will adjust his route on the fly and attempt to run towards wherever you've moved the targeting icon, thereby creating "freestyle" route-running. The target icon is even controlled on the right analog stick. It's the type of new gameplay gimmick that could become a staple of football games in years to come if done right, but Fever's uneven animation sequences where players move quickly, then slowly, then quickly again in the same passing or running or receiving routine makes Read and Lead passing difficult to master. All of a sudden route-running animations that were handled automatically with one button passing are controlled by the user and system has to adjust to your wishes on the fly and the herky jerky results can be frustrating.
The list of good things getting outweighed by the same bad things continues with Fever 2004. On the good side, defensive backs don't give up big plays like they used to and it's not through some cheap fix either. Corners and safeties actually cover receivers running fly/go/streak routes this time and you'll probably have to look beyond your first option in the passing game. When you're on defense you can focus on other things knowing that the AI controlled members of your D won't betray you with all kinds of blown coverage. The bad side however is that the whole game still feels like it's being played both underwater and in fast forward at the same time.
On a single play you'll see every player on the field go through sequences that begin like slo-mo underwater ballet, suddenly give way to rapid fire movement that looks like something from an old episode of Benny Hill and back again. You'll see your receiver jammed at the line "jostling" with the cornerback like they're both practicing Tai Chi for two seconds, before he breaks free and goes fast forwarding down the field at unforgivable speed almost as if the game is giving him super speed to get to where he should've been if hadn't been jammed. Your defensive end speeding in towards the helpless quarterback will be one step away before a late arriving tackle will get within range, thereby slowing down your DE, and begin a slow drawn out blocking sequence that makes the whole thing look like a ring out from a sumo match. Meanwhile the opposing quarterback is in hyperspeed because his slowed down animation sequence occurred when he took the snap from center and began his dropback. This uneven animation speed is as frustrating as it was two years ago. The fact that it hasn't been fixed is almost as insulting as the fact that you've got NFL quarterbacks doing five and seven step drops with the football held high and close to their earholes like they're still back in high school. The greenest NFL rookies know how to look cool when dropping back even if Fever 2004 doesn't.
The ball still inexplicably floats, although not as bad as before, on even the most ferocious bullet passes. But for the most part, what we said in last year's review about the original version of Fever still applies:
The animations in Fever are well done from top to bottom, it's just that there are not enough of them to fully capture all of the action and intricacies of an NFL game. This leads to the same gameplay problems we saw in Fever 2002. Here's what we said in the review of that game:
For example if you've got Kurt Warner, Isaac Bruce wide open near the sideline and your eyes and veins are bulging at the chance to stick it to the defense, you're thinking "let me rifle this ball in there like a Randy Johnson heater." So you mash Bruce's button as hard as you can and Warner proceeds to lob a perfect spiral up into the stratosphere. You're thinking "$%(@$, why the hell did he do that?! It's gonna be picked off now!" The entire defensive backfield is converging on Bruce's position like honeybees to a Lifesaver as the ball takes what seems like 10 minutes to get there. Yet, even without you taking control of him, Bruce makes the catch with a crowd of defenders around him, and he's dropped to the turf immediately. A 33 yard gain with no yards after catch is good, but not what you had in mind.
Now that he's got a better chance of being around the receiver this year, making a play on the ball as the defender would be easier, you'd think. But Fever's momentum system, combined with the animations makes scenarios like the one above all too common in NFL Fever 2004. A big rig truck in the snow is more nimble and can turn around quicker than some of the defensive backs in Fever.
Fever 2004 doesn't exist in a vacuum. There are too many football titles on the market doing things that have become accepted practical standards for Microsoft's game to continue to have the same problems year after year. It's still a little too schizophrenic on the sim-arcade spectrum and no XSN Sports initiative or Read and Lead passing system is going to be enough to make up for the fact that Fever plays a frustrating brand of football because of it.
We've already covered the animation problems because they're a huge part of the gameplay's downfall. But lo and behold, it's 2003 and Fever 2004 probably isn't even the best looking Xbox football game either. The character models are more less identical to their Fever 2003 predecessors and the stadia look dated compared to the details found in Madden NFL 2004 and ESPN NFL Football, the game formerly known as NFL 2K4.
That wavy towel at the player's waist that was introduced in Fever 2003, might've been the last player model upgrade we'll ever see in this series. It's independently animated too reacting to the player's direction of momentum...even in instant replays. The models still look like high resolution copies of each other with unique big belly versions for offensive and defensive linemen and three different player heights.
Some little touches are there just to get noticed like little puffs of dust kicking up off the grass field even when players are just walking around. The players also have the same "bloom" lighting/hazy effect we're going to see in Project Gotham 2 and WWE Raw 2 during replays.
The cheerleaders, security guards and photographers hanging around the outskirts of the playing field are still a nice touch. The crowds, however look flatter and even more lifeless now that Sega is giving us close cutaway shots of fans wearing team gear and Madden's crowds cheer their heads off.
Kevin Colabro and Ron Pitts are back again as your in-game announcers and do as good a job in Fever 2004 as they did in Fever 2003. The game never comes off sounding like a television broadcast since these two sound more like two guys --albeit trained broadcasters-- talking about a football videogame and not a televised NFL contest. Pitts' observations about the game taking place are no more or less insightful than John Madden's.
More player and team specific commentary would've been nice as well. In the future, Microsoft Game Studios has suggested that, through the magic of downloadable content and XSN, that the game announcers will be able to talk specifically about moves you've made in Franchise mode for example or current NFL storylines like a surprise rookie sensation or injured superstar. Some of that magic would've been handy right now.
The surround sound is well done with rising and falling crowd noise and on the field chatter. The fans even quiet down noticeably when you pause the game for extended periods. We wanted more bass in the biggest, most devastating tackles but didn't get it.
Xbox owners have too many choices among football videogames for NFL Fever 2004 to have this many potholes three years into the franchise. Besides the XSN functionality and the Read and Lead passing --which should still be considered experimental like First Person Football-- there's nothing Fever does that other football games out there don't do at least as well and with more polish.
There needed to be a quantum leap in quality from last year's version of Fever to this year's and it simply didn't happen. Like all team sports games --including Madden, World Series Baseball and NHL Hitz-- that come out every 12 months on schedule, NFL Fever 2004 has a higher standard to live up to among videogames because it's asking consumers to drop another pile of cash on what is essentially the same game. If you're not going to have a boatload of fancy new features, then you'd better have some solid gameplay to begin with. At this point, fixing everything that's wrong and getting Fever on par with football games from two years ago would be worthwhile. Unfortunately it loses ground to its competitors yet again.
Like it's pedigreed cover boy, NFL Fever 2004 has a ton of potential but three years into this thing and it's still too unproven to be considered a legitimate contender.
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