NFL 2K5 Revisited

Originally posted by Brent

   I decided to play NFL 2K5 (PS2) for the first time in about 1.5 years last night and came away pretty impressed. For starters, this was the first time I tried the game on my widescreen HDTV with progressive scan enabled and it looked incredible. What surprised me the most is that Madden 07 is NOT that far behind and has (finally) started to catch up with number of player animations displayed in the NFL 2K series (two years later  though). 

My biggest - and only major - complaint with NFL 2K5 in the past was the ball physics. The passes just felt too "floaty" like the ball had no weight, but for some reason I did not get that feeling last night. The ball doesn't feel like it has as much "weight" as in Madden or NCAA, but the passes felt crisp and the deep balls didn't arch as much as they do in EA's football games. What's even better is that the short passing game and screen passes worked well (something Madden and NCAA have both had problems with until this year's games).

I have to spend more time with NFL 2K5 to refresh my memory on defensive line/linbacker shifts and see what can and can't be done pre-snap. I did remember how to call hot routes after a while and forgot that you could call more than one hot route per play .

I'm not ready to say that NFL 2K5 is a better game than Madden 07 and I did wind up playing an extremey fun game of Madden right after playing 2K5, but it's nice to know that I have an alternative that was paid for over 1.5 years ago and just sitting on my shelf.

PS: NHL 2K5 and NBA 2K5 are next on my list.