2014/1/9: Xbox: NFL Fever 2002, NFL Fever 2003, NFL Fever 2004

[VideoGameCritic]

Football fans take note!

[PSX1]

Nice reviews; and great line about that ridiculous Manning cover in 2003.  I remember thinking along the same lines when I first saw it years ago.

I never played the Fever series, but almost did... The original Xbox was the only system I ever bought at launch; maybe even the only system I ever bought in the first year of its life.  I was psyched about Halo, and surprised that Gamestop had Xboxes in stock at launch without needing a pre-order.  Of course, being the scam artists that they are, they required you to buy at least 2 games from them with your Xbox or they wouldn't sell it.  That was fine for me though, because I had already planned for months to buy Halo and an NFL game at launch.  Based on the previews in magazines and online, the game I was really looking forward to was NFL Fever.  But things didn't work out that way...  Once the reviews came out at launch, Madden was the top-rated series that year, beating out Fever by a decent margin (2K2 was not an Xbox launch game though, coming out a couple months later).  Fever was well received by critics, but they ranked it 3rd in line after Madden and 2K that year.  So I ended up going with Madden 2002 when I bought my Xbox.  And as your reviews point out, the Fever series went down rather than up, so I never ended up owning any of the Fever games.  Maybe I made the wrong choice...

But your reviews raise the question, looking back now for retro gamers, what's the best football series to play from the early 2000s?  I had the 2K games on the Dreamcast and loved them, and right now my PS2 is the only system I have hooked up (the rest are in storage), so I've been playing a lot of NFL 2K5 on the PS2 this fall, and it's still great.  I'd put my vote for the 2K series, but couldn't say for sure without trying Fever.  What do you think?  NFL Gameday was still around at the time too, but that had dropped off substantially by then, after being my favorite NFL series in the late '90s.  Quarterback Club was still hanging on too, but I don't remember that ever being a premier football series..maybe in the 16-bit era, if that.  I guess I'm not counting Blitz and similar arcade style games.  Any others I forgot?

[Jon1]

I was always interested to see how good these games were. When my brother was at college he played the first NFL Fever and really liked it. Wasn't there some headset that came as an extra where you could talk to your teammates or something?

[Sudz1]

[QUOTE=PSX]

But your reviews raise the question, looking back now for retro gamers, what's the best football series to play from the early 2000s?  I had the 2K games on the Dreamcast and loved them, and right now my PS2 is the only system I have hooked up (the rest are in storage), so I've been playing a lot of NFL 2K5 on the PS2 this fall, and it's still great.  [/QUOTE]

I think you've got the pinnacle - personally, I think the 2K series is the best NFL series out there, period.  It was better than Madden when both were competing with each other, and the 2K series was only $20 to the Madden's $50!  Even taking price out of the equation, I've always found the Dreamcast 2K games better all the way around.

[Greisha1]

One NFL series I don't see represented on the VGC website is the NFL Xtreme series. It's basically 989 Studio's answer to NFL Blitz. (Not sure why they bothered though ... it wasn't as good as either GameDay or Blitz. It met at the mediocre middle.)