[Hooe]

Meh, if we're going to post thoughts about NFL 2K5, I might as well join the party.

Things I liked:

- The passing game. It was always a strength of the 2K football games, IMO.
- Gameplay in general. Power-Os, draw plays, designed shovel passes, tiered play calling, package substitutions... there was a lot to like.
- The shoulder barge ballcarrier move. I abused the hell out of this sometimes, lol. Madden didn't have an equivalent for this until right-stick moves were introduced in Madden 07.
- Presentation / commentary / etc. We all know about this. This is a staple strength of 2K Sports.
- Custom stadium sounds. Added to the atmosphere by allowing the user to make the atmosphere whatever he wanted.
- Virtual Identity Profile: the most underrated feature to ever see the light of day in a sports game. I remember out of curiosity setting up a game against the CPU controlling my V.I.P., and I'll be damned if it didn't do every last thing I liked to do, all the way from play calling to snap count to hot routes to ballcarrier move usage. It was scary. Very few times have I been outright wowed in a sports game; this was one of those times.
- The NFL Combine. IMO only this game and NFL Head Coach 09 have really done the pre-draft process any justice with respect to user gameplay mechanics and realism of said mechanics.

Things I didn't like:

- Weekly Prep. For me this was not an enjoyable video game mechanic to interact with; manipulating it was akin to managing an Excel spreadsheet. Further, to me it always felt like a guessing game as to how to actually consistently get good results out of it. I remember having to look up guides on this forum for it in an attempt to even vaguely understand it; these guides seemingly always ultimately boiled down to "plug in these options and it will mostly work". At some point I ended up ignoring Weekly Prep altogether.
- Player progression. To this day I have absolutely no clue how player progression in any NFL 2K game worked. I was particularly disenchanted after my young Pro-Bowl-making Super-Bowl-winning quarterback went down significantly in ratings after the offseason concluded with absolutely no feedback as to why this happened.
- CPU-CPU trade logic. It was improved over ESPN NFL Football 2K4 which I remember being shockingly bad in this regard, but I still remember wonkiness here. Granted, Madden didn't have CPU-CPU trading at all at the time, but I'd rather that than outright stupidity.
- Inability to play franchise games out of order on the weekly schedule. This lack of functionality on its own - which Madden 2005 had, by contrast - prevented me from ever running an offline franchise with friends, and given no XBOX Live (and I was the only person I knew with an XBOX, everyone else had PS2), online leagues were no object to me even though they existed in the game.
- The NFL Draft. The notorious first-round AI bug ruined a lot of the strategy and drama from this component; CPU teams would only ever draft QB, RB, OT, or DE in Round 1. For me this was the straw that broke the camel's back for NFL 2K5's franchise mode.
- Minor bugs. Again, I didn't have XBOX Live at the time, so these may have been patched at some point, but I remember issues with Clipping penalties subtracting from a ballcarrier's rushing total (the gain was cancelled and then 15 yards was subtracted from the runner's total), and there were issues with safeties in deep splits running in circles at times (which was a point of debate for roster makers, who kept toying around with the Aggression rating attempting to mitigate the issue, IIRC). These were more annoying than anything else, but worth noting for completeness.

I greatly preferred NFL 2K5 to Madden 2005 and NCAA 2005 with respect to how it played on the field. The core football gameplay of NFL 2K5 on its own still holds up to this day very well, IMO, as evidenced by All Pro Football 2K8 which refined it. Being a franchise mode guy, however, the issues I had with that component eventually shelved this game for me and I haven't really ever had the desire to pick it back up again on that accord. For me personally, I consider the more recent Madden games (M12 onward) as better on-the-whole games than NFL 2K5 when evaluating them holistically, and I honestly haven't really missed NFL 2K5 since Madden 10 was released.

It was a really fun game, don't get me wrong; I just have moved on.