| | Operation Sports:NFL Street 2: NFL Challenge and Own the City
By Shawn Drotar, Managing Editor, OperationSports.com
NFL Street 2 has a remarkable number of game modes for on and offline play, but two modes stand above the rest for their depth and fun factor: NFL Challenge and Own the City. These two modes combine team management, character design, and plenty of unlockables, and they'll likely take up most of your game in NFL Street 2. While they're similar in many ways, they're quite different in others, and we take a look at both of them here.
NFL Challenge will seem instantly familiar to veteran players of the game's premiere installment, but many new wrinkles have been added to the mix, giving you more challenges to face and much more control over the composition of your team.
Become king of the turf.
First, you create your team using NFL Street 2's surprisingly robust player creation tool. You have a pool of player development points to choose from, and you use them to give your players their initial attributes and size. In each player's Info section, you name them, assign their position and jersey number, and set their particular celebrations and Style moves. The Appearance section lets you design the player's face, and the Gear section lets you outfit him in pads, jerseys, and the like, many of which can be unlocked by earning Credits with great performances during gameplay, and then purchasing them within NFL Street 2's store. After you've created your seven-man squad, it's time to hit the playing fields!
You're allotted a span of days to train your team, and add real NFL players to your roster if you can. The city map—your home in the game—is broken up into four sections. Within each section are two or three different playing fields, and within those fields reside a large set of challenges that you may undertake. Each Challenge tells you what you must do—which can vary from scoring on your first play to winning entire games under special conditions—and what you earn for succeeding. Most often, Development Points are earned, which can be used to directly improve your team, but occasionally the reward is special gear or even the option to add an NFL player to your squad. As you can imagine, adding players like the Patriots' Tom Brady can make a huge impact on your team.
It won't be easy, though. Many challenges are locked until you succeed at simpler ones, and entire portions of the city are off limits until you've progressed far enough along in the game. Moreover, each of these challenges takes a set amount of days off of your allotted time to train, and you won't have time to complete them all. Thus, you need to be thinking ahead while selecting which challenges to undertake. To make things even more difficult, you're trying to complete these challenges against the NFL's biggest stars. If you succeed, however, you win a chance to enter the NFL Challenge tournament and test your team strong against the best the NFL has to offer.
Own the City mode builds upon the framework of the NFL Challenge and adds some special differences that make it a worthy addition to the NFL Street series.
You create a player as you would for NFL Challenge mode, with one major difference: You only create one. As you work your way through the city, you play in plenty of pickup games, where you draft players for the game like you did at recess in the old schoolyard. If you win the game, you can select these players to join your team. You also use your created players and some of your new teammates in challenges that incorporate NFL Street 2's other gameplay modes, such as Open Field Showdown, Jump Ball Battle, Crush the Carrier, and Quick Strike. Assuming you succeed, your newly assembled squad plays through a ladder of opposing teams. Win all the matches, and your team "claims" that part of the territory as its own, and moves on to the next one. If you're good enough to capture all the city's territories, then you can expect to face the city champ, NFL Street 2 cover boy and rap artist Xzibit and his team of All-Stars. If you can beat them, then you're a true football legend of the street.
So what's next for your street superstar? Why, the NFL, of course! Your created player is saved and can try to reach the Super Bowl when you import him into upcoming Madden NFL 2006.
If you've completed both NFL Challenge mode and Own the City, you're obviously one of very best NFL Street 2 gamers around. So, why not prove it to the world? With Xbox Live® your next challenge—the world—awaits!
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