What's Good	What's Bad	3.5 out of 5.0
Great graphics and animation Fun taunts for multiplayer mode	No career mode Pure arcade game: armchair coaches will be disappointed

As is the case with virtually every game on the market today, the manufacturer’s recommended game system should seriously be taken as minimum requirements if you want to experience any semblance of what the programming crew intended when they created the game. Since it is a Microsoft sports game, a Microsoft Sidewinder Gamepad is something that is needed for seamless play.

If nothing else, the game looks like real football. Players gang tackle tough runners and leap in the air to pick off high passes. As a ballcarrier, you may execute eight separate moves, including jukes, spins, and even lateral passes. Did you just plow your opponent’s line through for a big sack on 3rd down and 10? Your star defensive end will mime shoveling a grave or point menacingly at the quarterback. The motion-captured player movement, as well as sounds taken directly from real life NFL games, separate this game from those that only pretend to provide the pro football experience.

The introductory screens, too, have a rugged look about them that help to define NFL Fever 2000 as a game of football, not "Ring Around The Rosey". From these screens, you may trade players between teams, view player abilities, or practice with your team before taking the field. If you feel up to it, you can choose to play a single game between teams of your choosing, a full season based on either the NFL schedule or a randomly generated one, or you can just skip to the playoffs. All 31 NFL teams are included, and although the rosters seem a little out-dated (the Seattle-Detroit game I played in featured the retired Barry Sanders and the hold-out Joey Galloway), Microsoft promises us that patches and roster updates are on the way.

However, don’t let the realistic graphics or the NFL-inspired playbook fool you. As much as this game attempts to be a game for the would-be football coach as well as the arcade gamer, NFL Fever 2000 falls far short on the strategy side. On any diffulty level except for "Rookie", developing a running game becomes so tough that you’ll find yourself passing every down. Additionally, letting the AI control all the players itself is a sure-fire recipe for disaster (the expansion Cleveland Browns beat my Seahawks 41-3 in an exhibition game; while I may not be a great coach, I'm surely not THAT bad).

This is a sore point for me as a gamer, because in my mind football is a chess game played with 300 pound pieces. A contest that requires as much thought to win as brute strength. Another aspect that diminished my enjoyment of the game was the lack of any career mode beyond that first season. Career mode is the current trend of sports games, and I found myself enjoying last year’s model of Madden football despite its arcade nature because of that mode. Perhaps Microsoft will add this in a later version; for now, it is a feature the game lacks. Football as a sport is a bit more violent than average, but NFL Fever is, if anything, less gory than its real-life counterpart. You won’t see any ankles twisting around 360 degrees in this game, and there are no teamwide kneeling vigils as an unconscious player is carted off the field. Overall, this game is okay for children if you, as a parent, don’t mind the violence of football in general.

Overall, I was sincerely hoping that NFL Fever 2000 would be a better coaching sim. However, its failure in this area should not stop you from giving the game a try if you enjoy playing sports games at an arcade level -- at which Microsoft has a winner in NFL Fever 2000.