Two weekends ago, like many sports fans, I tuned in to watch the Steelers-Bengals playoff game. It was a pretty boring game in the beginning; the score was 6-0 Pittsburgh at halftime, and it wasn't until the fourth quarter that the game morphed into the WWE- type event as we now remember it, complete with the trash talking and questionable hits.
When the game really started to get interesting, though, was when this happened in the third quarter.
Martavis Bryant caught a touchdown between his legs while front-flipping out of bounds.
You wouldn't believe it if there wasn't video evidence, but that's what happened. And like somebody said, it wasn't even the strangest thing that happened that night.
But we aren't going to talk about the penalties or the dirty hits late in the game. We aren't even going to talk about if Bryant's catch was "really a catch" according to the rules, despite the fact that I'm a Cowboys fan and I may or may not still be bitter about Dez Bryant's catch in the playoffs last year.
No, this is about reviving an old video game franchise, and really a genre as a whole: unrealistic sports games.
I know a lot of people love NFL Blitz, but the NFL Street franchise was my favorite growing up. My friend Alan and I started playing them in middle school, and we were immediately hooked. Here's a video of the gameplay uploaded to YouTube by user SasukeUzumaki:
The video is a bit long, so here's a quick summary of what you can do in the game: jump off of walls, push opponents into walls and other scenery, make a catch behind your back just for fun, clothesline ballcarriers, and stiff arm defenders so hard that they fly backwards some fifteen feet or so. All of this with no injuries!
But the great thing about the game was that it wasn't bland. See, it wasn't just about scoring more touchdowns than the other team; you had to it with style.
You had to do something like, you know, legit. Like intercept a pass between your legs or flip over a defender into the endzone in order to earn style points. These points would accumulate throughout the game.
Martavis Bryant's catch reminded me of NFL Street because he definitely would have gotten enough style points for a "Game Breaker." A Game Breaker would make your team superhuman for about thirty seconds to a minute, and scoring was almost automatic as you could run through or jump over every defender on the other team if you wanted to.
This is only the tip of the iceberg as far as gameplay, because the customization and game modes were very in-depth and fun.
Sounds great right? Well sadly, the third and final installment of NFL Street was released almost a full decade ago. Additionally, its basketball counterpart NBA Street faded out. The final two remnants of these kind of games were FIFA Street 3 and NFL Blitz, both released in 2012.
There don't appear to be any plans to make more games like these, as EA and other companies seem to be more focused on making games more "realistic" and "more like real life."
But wait a minute. Isn't escaping the rules of reality one of the biggest reasons we play video games?
I think these companies are making a big mistake taking the reality approach, at least to such a far extent. People want to see something extraordinary, like Martavis Bryant's catch or Odell Beckham Jr.'s the year before. Social media was buzzing for weeks about those plays because we don't see stuff like that all of the time.
Imagine, then, the entertainment possibilities with a modern NFL Street game; all of the even crazier things your favorite world-class athletes could do if normal rules didn't apply. The more ridiculous, the better. Something with helicopters or motorcycles and skyscrapers, I don't know.
Of course, we even miss the simple things the old games used to give us. We want to see Darrelle Revis backflip off of a wall to intercept a deep pass. We want to see Andrew Luck throw a 60-yard touchdown from behind his back, without looking. Even better if we can see Marshawn Lynch stiff arm a linebacker so hard that he flies into the free safety and knocks him down too.
You can sit this one out, science. Thanks for energy and stuff.
Lastly, like most people, I'm not going to buy a new Madden game every season (or as I like to call them, glorified roster updates), because how much can you really improve a video game in one year?
EA, I know it's nice to have your little thing going where the number of the game in the series is the same as the year it's released. But you already messed that up when you released Madden NFL 25 in a year that was clearly not 2025. What are you going to do when 2025 really rolls around? No one would be mad if you cut your losses now and did Madden every other year with a Street or Blitz title in-between.
So do the right thing and give the people what we want. Give us back our ridiculous games so we can beat our friends with style again.
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