NFL 2K

NFL 2K

Developed by: Visual Concepts (SEGA Sports)
Published by: Sega

So your football team had a disappointing season, huh? Maybe it was that injury to the star wide receiver or a botched call. Well, Sega's NFL 2K, lets you have the season that should have been. With full NFL licenses, you get to play with your favorite players, well most of them at least. Some players receive generic names indicating their position, "49er WD or Rams RB" for example.

The ballcarrier loses yards

High quality visuals

Just to start, let me say that the visual impact of NFL 2K is amazing. There were times when I though I had mistakenly changed the channel and was watching a live broadcast. Not only is the detail responsible for this effect, but also the camera angles are taken right out of Monday Night Football. The way the players move is very lifelike. You can thank the many hours of motion capture used to build this game. They have also done two person motion captures to show the crunch or finesse of a NFL tackle. Sega claims over 1500 motion captured character animations (four times more than any other game on the market) from 16 professional players and actual referees.

Turning on the weather effects created a playing environment that was intensely realistic. The PowerVR has always been known for creating excellent fog effects, take a look at EA's World Cup 98 on the PowerVR and then on any other card. Games specifically programmed for the PowerVR architecture look great. The fog in NFL 2K removes a bit of the sharpness that you would never get with broadcast television (until HDTV arrives) making the game play even more enjoyable.

Is that a poor translation from Japanese?

Looks like a dime defense

There were no visual problems to detract from the game play. With PC games, you often have slight incompatibilities or misinterpretations of Direct3D calls, resulting in messed up mipmapping or corrupted textures. Since the programmers of NFL 2K knew their exact destination platform, they could be sure that the gamer experience is exactly like what they intended.