Submission #6768: Lobsterzelda's GC NFL Street 2 "NFL Challenge" in 22:07.10

NFL Street 2 is a game made by EA Sports and released on the GameCube, Xbox, and PS2. The game has many move options to style and taunt your opponent, and there are also options to juke, dive, spin, and stiff-arm opposing players. The game also contains other features not found in real NFL play, such as being allowed to shove opposing players into a brick wall! (in case you’re wondering, you’re still in-bounds after slamming into the brick wall, provided you don’t fall down). All told, these changes make the game noticeably different from its main competitor, the Madden series. While all of the above features are present in NFL Street 1, NFL Street 2 adds in new features, such as the ability to climb up walls to make passes, the ability to make catches off of walls, and the ability to dive into the endzone off walls. Additionally, there are posters known as hotspots on walls in each stadium in the game, where if you make a wall-play off of the hotspot, you get an additional 20,000 style points! In this TAS, I complete the NFL Challenge mode of NFL Street 2, which is the main singleplayer mode of the game. This TAS uses the GameCube version of the game, since there are no emulators accepted for this site which can play PS2 or Xbox games (and Dolphin is the 3D emulator I’m most familiar with anyways, so it all works out well).

This TAS is an inspirational story about a team of scrappy players from the street(s?). Through sheer luck, this team of nobodies is able to beat the Cincinnati Bengals (which in this game are one of the worst teams in the league). In fact, this team is eventually able to beat the Bengals so many times that they literally become the Bengals – absorbing all of the players on the team into their team.

With newfound skill and a quest to prove the power of random chance, the Adders (as the game oddly names them by default) beat 5 other NFL teams and the Gridiron Legends by calling the same set of plays on every down. Once again, random chance always wins. Think about it like this: If you throw a ball at a wall enough times, there is some non-zero probability that the ball will go through the wall (even if it takes more than Graham’s Number total millenia to happen). Likewise, there is some non-zero probability that by chance a team of nobodies will beat a professional NFL team. Watch and marvel, as random chance becomes reality, and the nearly impossible is proven completely possible! Watch and be amazed!

In the NFL Challenge mode of NFL Street 2, you are given a team of weak players to start off with. By random chance, your team has been chosen to replace one of the 32 NFL teams in an upcoming tournament of all NFL teams that is happening in 150 days. Whoever wins this tournament gets to play a championship game against the Gridiron Legends, which is a team of all-time great NFL players.

While you wait for the tournament to start, you can improve your team by doing challenges. However, each challenge takes up a certain number of days to do. Once you have 5 or less days left, you can start the tournament. As such, the fastest strategy in the TAS is to choose the combination of challenges that gets you to 5 or less days left as fast as possible, and then win the tournament as fast as possible.

The currently-published TAS of this category played on the normal difficulty mode. On this mode, there is a challenge which takes up 17 days, where you have to get 3 wall-passes and 3 wall-diving touchdowns in a game to 24. On hard mode, this challenge is replaced by a challenge which takes 17 days where you have to get 2 wall-passes and 2 wall-diving touchdowns in a game to 24. These games end when you get the right number of wall-passes and wall-diving touchdowns done, even if you don’t have 24 points. As such, I’m able to save about 3 minutes over the currently-published TAS by playing through singleplayer on hard mode. Another side effect of playing on hard mode is that the CPU makes much fewer mistakes, is much faster, and a couple of challenges that involve reaching a specific number of style points have lower requirements for how many style points you need to get.

Each challenge in the game takes place in a certain neighborhood, and each neighborhood is located in a certain district. Below, I will write which challenges I did in the format District – Neighborhood – Challenge_Name – Description – Days. Note that the challenge named Player Challenge takes 17 days, and is played 8 times in a row for a grand total of 136 days, which explains the syntax below.

After all of these challenges, I have stolen most of the players from the Bengals, and have only 5 days left. As such, I can go and start the tournament from here. Using RNG manipulation (moving in different directions, styling, diving, selecting different players, scoring on a different frame, etc.), I make each play the CPU calls in the tournament be one that I can easily create a turnover from, which allows me to quickly score (this is done by re-doing 2 point conversions many times until the next play that the CPU calls is a play that I like). Additionally, RNG manipulation is also used to ensure that none of the post-touchdown celebration cutscenes play, which each take about 2 seconds, and have a random chance of playing after you score a touchdown.

In order, the teams that I play in the tournament are the Patriots, the Broncos, the Browns, the Bills, the Rams, and the Gridiron Legends.

Before every play, the CPU will randomly decide to wait either 5, 6, or 7 seconds before hiking the ball. For most of the TAS, I just manipulated the CPU to call a quick option play at the start of each play. However, at a certain point in the Bills game in the tournament, I spent an hour and a half not being able to get a quick option to occur. Eventually, out of boredom I decided to try getting a turnover after a 5-second hike, and I then realized to my surprise that this was noticeably faster than just trying to get the quick option. By this point, the TAS was almost done, so I didn’t go back to add this strategy throughout the TAS. However, In the game against the Rams (which starts at 18:43 in the encode provided below), I manipulated each play with the CPU on offense to wait only 5 seconds. Additionally, I forced turnovers and scored as fast as possible. As a result of this, this game pretty much represents the fastest possible way that an NFL Street game to 36 points could be completed, which finished with a final in-game time of 1:18. A future TAS of this game could manipulate all games to take about 1:18 to win, although most of this timesave isn’t noticeable to the viewer, since it occurs as a delay in the cpu hiking the ball rather than through slow or sloppy movement. As an aside, the currently published NFL Street 1 TAS could probably be improved by 2-3 minutes as well using this strategy.

After a bit of effort, the tournament is won, and the Adders are crowned NFL champions. And to think – some people say that miracles don’t happen! Ha!

I don’t like to leave TASes published on TASVideos which were submitted by me and can be easily obsoleted by several minutes just by using a harder difficulty setting. As such, this TAS aims to ensure that the TAS of NFL Street 2 on TASVideos is up to my optimization standards. Maybe someday in the future I'll go back and make a new version of this TAS where the computer always hikes the ball after 5 seconds, but for now, I feel content with the level of optimization seen here. I hope you enjoy watching this TAS!

slamo: The optimization was pretty good again, despite the new strategy discovered later in the run. We prefer that the hardest difficulty is used, and it's a nice bonus that this actually makes the run faster.

The movie got some good feedback, but the ratings on the current publication are inconclusive, and it's still too repetitive for me to upgrade the tier. Accepting to Vault as an improvement to the previous movie.

feos: Pub.