The whole game's presented in Dolby Digital 5.1, if you've got the hardware to handle it, and sounds really superb pumped all the way up. The sounds of creaking pads, grunts, groans and shuffling feet are perfect, especially in first person mode, where they're coming from all around you, and the sound system is pumpin' when the music kicks in between plays.Custom soundtracks are supported in this title, and they're quite a bit of fun to select, crop, implement and enjoy. My only complaint in this area is that the crowd noise doesn't reflect that of a live pro football crowd. A successfully rowdy audience would've put the Surround Sound over the top, and quite possibly gone a ways toward amending the errors elsewhere in the game. Instead, we get ho hum cheers after a big play that quickly die away, a lot of white "mulling audience" noise and a noticeable lack of loud "DEE-FENSE" chants.
Sega and Visual Concepts were on the right track with this one, packing as much quality as they could into one disc, and it's painful to realize just how close to undeniable perfection they really were without realizing it in the end. With a few tweaks to the online mode, another couple of weeks in testing and a few very minor changes, this could have been more than just a twenty dollar discount title. It could've ranked among the greatest of all time, with a price that will never be beaten, but it got shot out to market too soon and the whole picture suffered as a result. Still a very fine game, and if you can live with a couple glitches it's absolutely worth a second look.
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