Seriously, NFL Fever 2002 has good controls and excellent graphics, and uses a straightforward interface to a deep playbook. The fun factor is good. There are 400 offensive plays, against 100 defenses. You’re trying to outguess, matching your opponent’s call. Audibles are allowed, although the time clock keeps ticking.

Once the play starts, standard football rules generally apply and control reverts either to your quarterback or a star defender. Blitzing all the time doesn’t work against a decent running game. A standard West Coast offense featuring a short passing attack does well, as it should. I even found the Raiders connecting a few times going long. That hasn’t happened much for them since the days of Cliff Branch and Warren Wells.

You have to be nimble with the NFL Fever 2002 controller, that’s for sure. As a quarterback you need to learn timing for the throw, and as a runner you have to dodge. You will find a good variety of moves to master, thanks to all those buttons, including a stiff-arm, lateral, hurdle, juke and shoulder push. If those get you near the end zone, you’ve also got the showboat.

The resulting game play is quite good. Not spectacular, but better than I expected. Parts are almost dazzling given the quality of the graphics. The realism is at a new level; players move their eyes, breathe, steady themselves…epic.

Additional evergreen tactics include extra features locked away, such as playing in the Roman Coliseum against invented teams.

There was certainly enough Silver and Black to satisfy my needs in an NFL title. All 29 stadiums in the NFL are selectable for your game, and I thought the Oakland Coliseum looked nice and clean in this rendition. But I missed the cheerleaders and the Darth Raider costumes, there’s definitely more work to be done there.

I particularly liked the practice simulator, so I could have the Raiders line up their offense against their defense and provide a double-dose of the team colors. While the passing drills are almost mesmerizing — they make it look so easy! — the tackling drill is even better.

In game situations the pace definitely cranks up, with the crowd noise and fine music pumping up the pulse. Public Enemy and N.E.R.D. are good selections for the music. Play calling and announcing comes from the voices of Dick Stockton, Ron Pitts and Randy Rowland. They do fine at first, grow repetitive over time and then should be muted.

One-player mode is decent, two-player mode is excellent and there’s a four-player option as well. I especially had fun playing my son, who is not wise to the ways of the Silver and Black and was susceptible to a short passing attack and off-tackle dives.

One minus — I didn’t like the kicking game at all. It involved far too much hand-eye coordination for my tastes. You have to aim and then time the release, more like baseball or golf controls. I’d rather just see the punt subject to the usual chaos variable and leave it alone. It was bad enough to make me consider going for two points.

Not all players are identified, but good ones are. In the case of the Raiders, you can have Jerry Rice and Tim Brown roaming free all game long, hauling in pass after pass from Rich Gannon. Knowing a team’s strengths helps quite a bit when playing, because the AI is good. It’s a strength of the game, actually, how well the play simulates what it could be like to go against another coach.

NFL Fever 2002 has little cartoon-ish violence, no WWF stuff like a dropped elbow or the overhead twirl ‘n toss found in Sega’s NFL Blitz. There’s too much concentration on realism for pile drivers to work here. The trash talking was fairly tame, also. Truth be told, I do kinda miss the mayhem angle, because without it I sort of get the impression of a sterile "neutral field."

As a reviewer, the game intrigued me more for the ideas it provided for how such a title might evolve. I can imagine an NFL football computer game synched up so closely with an update service that you would continually download news and status reports from the team’s web site for the whole team. You might even track injury reports and weather influences, so that you could better predict the outcome of disasters like that ill-fated Raiders loss in a New England snowstorm.

NFL Fever 2002 has an option so that you can guide a player through a career and into the Hall of Fame. The General Manager option has a 25-year dynasty option. Both give the game extended playability, and there is also a Fantasy Challenge, but I’m wondering if they’re extraneous features for most users.

In fact, I’d be curious how many players found the extra options more complex than they really are. My first impression of the GM interface was one of terror and I quickly backed out.

I’m not really sold on adding peripheral features like seasons and leagues, however. This should be a game that concentrates on the quality of the football, the ability to out-coach the opponent in play-calling and rewards skill at manipulating the action. It already does well at that, and I’d prefer to see more investment in deepening the play-calling realism, or adding an editor to design trick plays.

In Commissioner mode, you can assemble your own players, naming them and choosing their mix of attributes. It’s not as wacky as the old game called Designasaurus, where you created a crazy looking tri-stego-dactyl rex or other bizarre reptile form and pitted it against the elements. But it’s an interesting touch, trying to assemble the perfect football player and see how he holds up game in, game out. If you could create and train a quarterback with the arm of John Elway and the heart of Joe Montana, you could maybe auction him off to the highest bidder. Just a thought.

Meanwhile, I vote against loading this game down with business simulators. Let the general manager angle be a whole ‘nuther title, with shady agents and philandering megastars to manage. Adding Cameron Diaz would be a plus…

Basically, I’d like to see even more depth for the parts are already pretty good. The game identifies some of the player roster for each franchise, but it doesn’t even try to do them all. I see that as a better direction to go in — make it so accurate, every guy on the 45-man squad is listed. It would give more dudes the chance to say, "Look Mom, I’m in a computer game!"

Once you have every player in the league in the game, right down to special teams, you now have an interesting simulator. You can take that one step further and envision officially-sanctioned, registration-only websites where all teams would report each player’s status 24 hours before kickoff, so that faithful fans could follow along at home with a quick download and simulate the outcome before kickoff. If they had to turn in their list of plays, so much the better!

Which begs another question: Could this title evolve into a game simulator that lets you recreate, say, Super Bowl XVIII, where the Raiders beat Washington 38-9? If you can rehash Napoleon’s Waterloo, you should certainly be able to recapture Marcus Allen’s Super Bowl MVP day.

But, I digress. I’ve said enough about what this game isn’t. Would I be ashamed to have this game at a Super Bowl party? Not at all. Would I put it up against whatever’s reigning on a PS/2? Sure. NFL Fever 2002 has great eye candy that will make heads turn. It’s actually fun to watch others play. And that Silver and Black Raider logo on a big HDTV screen is definitely impressive. While your friends are spilling beer on the sofa, you can show off your new toy, tossing bullets to Jerry Rice on one side, Tim Brown on the other. Two Hall of Famers ready to run as many routes as you tell them to, never tiring. For Raider Fan, that’s good.