NFL GameDay 2003

Written by John Scalzo  on October 09, 2002

Review: It keeps going and going and going...

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Welcome boys and girls to another episode of PlayStation Confessions. I'm your host John Scalzo and once again I have another confession to make. This week I am going to admit that I have never played any edition of NFL GameDay in my life. Gasp all you like, but I have never felt the joy of playing a single minute of the most hated football series in the entire video game world. And with all that baggage to go along with me, I dove right in to NFL GameDay 2003.

Now, word around the controller is that GameDay hasn't changed since the 99 edition. Every game in the series since then has just been one really expensive roster update. I guess I'm the wrong guy to be making claims like that, but it's what I heard. On an internet message board. So it must be true. But even still, the inclusion of the Texans' real roster is a monumental event. Because let's face it, they're a team from Texas, named the Texans. They deserve any help they can get with an uncreative name like that.

Loading up the game for the first time gave me a glimpse of a football game much like many others on the market today. There were the usual Exhibition, Season, and Franchise (here known as General Manager) modes. There was also the choice of Simulation or Arcade game styles. Even though there is very little, if any, noticeable difference between the two. Finally, a Play Editor mode And in a move that I think was unique to GameDay were the cheerleader hi-ho babes appearing during the load times. Yes, it's cleavagey JPEG goodness, the only way to sell a four-year-old game.

So I finally booted up my first Exhibition game of the most hated football franchise there is and I have to say, it wasn't that bad. It was even a little fun in an arcadey kinda way. GameDay lacks the precision and polish of all of the next-gen football series', but in this raw form it's actually a little fun. I've wanted a football game that was simpler to play for awhile now and in that sense GameDay 2003 fits the bill perfectly. It was only after that first game did some of its quirks start appearing.

It's all these little glitches together that make you want to pull your hair out after a few games. Accidentally starting a General Manager session with less than adequate memory card space (15 blocks actually) will result in the game freezing up with a reset as your only option. Passes will go errant or appear blocked for no reason at all. Sometimes the nearest defender can be ten yards away and a pass will be completely blocked, it makes no sense. The referee's are much too quick with a roughing the passer penalty. It's ridiculous and this rarely works in the favor of anyone but a computer controlled team. Penalties are actually used to keep a game close if a defense appears too much for the other team. There's the fact that opposing defenses can rip through your offensive line as if it were water. Then the animations are inconsistent in their timing so when a defender does break through your line the time it takes to get off a pass is much longer than the time it takes a defender to run 5-10 yards. That's just wrong.

In fact, this inconsistent sense of speed is GameDay 2003's biggest flaw. Slowdown is very apparent as occasionally you're able to move like the wind and other times it appears you're dragging ten tons of weight. Passes move much too fast, but moving the quarterback feels much too sluggish. When the running back can move at a decent frame rate, running is fast and easy. When the frame rate refuses to cooperate, it's not quite that easy. For all it's other flaws, if these speed and timing issues had been resolved I bet GameDay could have actually been a serious contender.

Graphically, NFL GameDay 2003 features short, stubby players with many jagged edges. Actually, everything seems to have a jagged edge: the players, the field, the referees, and the player highlight circles. I realize this is the inferior PSone hardware doing it's best but come on; these graphics were outdated years ago. I expect slightly better from a system nearing the end of its lifecycle. Interestingly, if played on a PS2 with texture smoothing turned on, many of these graphical flaws go away completely. I'm not quite sure who would buy this game to play on their PS2, but the graphical improvement is definitely noticeable.

For audio the GameDay crew gives us Dan Fouts and Dick Enberg as announcers. They do a fair enough job but occasionally some of their soundbites will skip and other times they won't say anything for long stretches at a time. Crowd noise is decent, no real special touches, but little to complain about. On the field sounds are good and then there's this overpowering guitar solo that pops up every other time a play is picked. I could have done without that.

A few decent extras round out the package including a play editor that allows you to mix and match pre-built formations and routes into your own plays. A little more customization would have been nice, but a decent feature anyway. And in a really nice touch is using X as a hurry button in-between plays. Making hurrying as easy as it is really helps that sense of speed that when it's working right make GameDay a truly enjoyable experience.