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Tasty Online Additions
By Alex McLain
The ESPN series of sports titles has embraced XboxLive™ from the get go. Consequently, they’ve nailed all the basics of online play and then some. And, this year, ESPN NFL 2K5 brings several bigger and juicier features to satiate our every football-playing whim! There’s plenty to cover, so let’s get straight to it …
Tournaments and Seasons
The good folks at SEGA Sports have taken a page out of the XSN Sports book this year. They’ve created virtual tournaments and seasons to be played and organized online via the Leagues option. Tournaments are standard elimination fare, whereas seasons will actually take you through a predetermined (by the season creator) number of games and end with a round of playoffs for the best teams. It’s just like playing a season in single-player mode, except you’ll be testing your grid-iron skills against real folks. 
Now that’s a catch.
Of course, we gamers are fickle and demanding folk, so for both tournament and season play, we require plenty of customizing options to fit our particular needs. Don’t want injuries to tip the balance of a season? No problem. Do you figure five-minute quarters aren’t long enough, or you think challenges are silly? It’s all up to you to increase the time or toggle on or off any options you please. Contacting Your Fellow Players
Coordinating with buddies or fairly random folks on your Friends List can be—and often is—tough to do. ESPN NFL 2K5 offers two major features to help ease the burden of getting a game together with a friend of yours. - You can send them a game invite, and courtesy of XboxLive’s latest update, you can now add a voice message to that invite. Feel like talking a little smack or goading your buddy to take you on? Now’s your chance to do just that.
- ESPN Messaging: This nugget of functionality allows you to actually type and send messages to your friends. Want to leave your next opponent in online season mode a note about when you’ll be available? You now have that opportunity. This feature is also especially nice when you send a message to someone using XboxLive Aware during the single-player experience. He’ll then see an icon pop up while he’s in the game and can check and respond to your message at his leisure.
Let me go!
User Card
I love this feature. When you’re looking at joining a game online, but you want to see what sort of track record your opponents have, you can look up their user cards. Their cards will show you nearly everything you’d want to know about their playing practices. It gives you their overall win and loss percentage, how many times they’ve quit or dropped out of a game, and (when there is enough information) it categorized their play style as well.
Beyond that, it also gives a more detailed breakdown of how they perform in a game. You can check out what their pass-to-rush ratio is, what they’re pass-completion percentage is, how they do in the red zone, their turnover ratio, third- and forth-down conversion percentages, and more. It’s like having an instant scouting report on your competition. Brilliant stuff! 
Taunting the competition
You can also download their V.I.P file to play against in the future, thanks to the V.I.P System™. A players V.I.P file is a virtual representation of their play style. The game actually examines their tendencies, their play-calling, the way they run the plays they call, what they do in pressure situations … everything! Playing against another’s V.I.P file is perfect practice for a budding rivalry.
The added features to this year’s online experience are exceptional and enormously helpful. It’s the overall package, though, that’s so impressive. Everything runs smoothly and as it should. Whether it’s finding a game appropriate to your skill level or your exacting specifications, the tools are there for you to use toward your own ends. When in a game, the performance online is swift and furious, just like the offline experience. Simply put, the experience online is brimming with the same quality of play and features as the offline game, and that’s saying something. Hope to see you online!
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