EA Sports' Street is a series of sports games by Electronic Arts released under the EA Sports BIG brand, featuring a more arcade and less-realistic take on the sports with more emphasis on tricks than tactics when compared to the likes of their flagship Madden NFL and FIFA Soccer, but they still had the big sports stars that the two games had.
There are 3 series of these games, each developed by the same team that made the non-street version.:
- NBA Street (Basketball):
- NBA Street (2001 - Nintendo GameCube, PlayStation 2)
- NBA Street Vol. 2 (2003 - GameCube, PS2, Xbox)
- NBA Street V3 (2005 - GameCube, PS2, Xbox)
- NBA Street Showdown (2005 - PlayStation Portable)
- NBA Street Homecourt (2007 - PlayStation 3, Xbox 360)
- FIFA Street (Association Football/Soccer):
- FIFA Street (2005 - GameCube, PS2, Xbox)
- FIFA Street 2 (2006 - GameCube, PS2, Xbox, PSP, Nintendo DS)
- FIFA Street 3 (2008 - PS3, Xbox 360, DS)
- FIFA Street (2012 - PS3, Xbox 360)
- NFL Street (American Football):
- NFL Street (January 2004 - GameCube, PS2, Xbox)
- NFL Street 2 (December 2004 - GameCube, PS2, Xbox, PSP)
- NFL Street 3 (2006 - PS2, PSP)
The games provide examples of:
- As Himself: Multiple rappers appeared as playable characters in the NBA Street and NFL Street games, including Nelly, Xzibit, and the Beastie Boys. Xzibit is practically the star of NFL Street 2; not only does he have a spot on the cover and a song in the game, he also plays quarterback for a team named after himself stacked with an all-star roster of NFL players, narrates the tutorials, and gives your created character a primer on how to progress in Own the City mode.
- Camera Abuse: Ricky Williams pushes the camera over near the end of the trailer for the first NFL Street.
- Character Customization: Every single game, regardless of what sport, allows you to create a custom character and build their stats up until they're on par with the best players in the game. Most games also allow you to create an entire team and customize them to varying degrees.
- Crossover:
- In Def Jam Vendetta, a redesigned Drake from the original NBA Street turns up as one of the first opponents you fight in story mode.
- Stretch later appeared in EA's 2009 NBA Jam revival as part of a team representing NBA Street.
- Defeat Means Friendship: Every game's campaign mode has a mechanic where, after beating the other team, you can recruit a player to your created team. This tends to come into play for original characters who serve as bosses or for real-life players.
- Easy-Mode Mockery: Once you start winning consistently on Easy in the original NBA Street, the game gets pretty in your face with it. The announcer will berate you for playing on easy at the start AND end of each game. Eventually, the post-game tips will straight up tell you "Change the difficulty level. You're too good to be playing on Easy."
- Early-Bird Cameo: Peach's outfit in NBA Street V3 was the first appearance altogether of one of her recurring sports outfit, namely the one worn in its Mario series debut Mario Superstar Baseball (released a few months after V3) and its sequel Mario Super Sluggers, the summer installments of the Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games series, Mario Sports Mix and Mario Sports Superstars.
- Early Game Hell: The "NFL Challenge" mode in the first NFL Street starts your team off with piddling stats and pits you against the NFC West and AFC West. You will quickly learn that your teammates can barely do much of anything at this state, and that even the worst NFL teams will outperform you.
- Expy: All from the NBA Street series:
- Stretch is a pretty obvious one to Julius Erving, what with his Chuck Taylors, huge afro, and ungodly dunking prowess.
- If Takashi wasn't originally designed as one for Yao Ming, who was still playing in China at the time, then he definitely feels like one now, since, like Yao, Takashi is East Asian, absurdly tall, and great at blocking shots.
- Bonafide is a subtler one for Allen Iverson. He's from Philadelphia, where A.I. spent most of his pro career, is fairly short for a basketball player, and is great with handles and crossing up his opponents.
- Guest Fighter: Besides the rappers mentioned in As Himself above...
- In the first NBA Street, Moby and Zoe from SSX join with Tracy from Sled Storm to form the unlockable Team BIG. SSX would later return the favor in SSX 3, where Stretch appears as a secret skin for all characters.
- Mario, Luigi, and Peach appear as the Nintendo All-Stars team in the GameCube version of NBA Street V3.
- Jive Turkey: "Joe the Show" Jackson goes beyond Totally Radical and into this with his play-by-play. Possibly justified, since he looks older than most of the players, so he might just be using the slang from when he was a player, but he still habitually says things like this:
- MJ is in the house, baby! Ooooooo-wee!
- Made of Iron: The players on NFL Street. They hit and get hit as hard as your average American Football player while wearing little to no pads.
- Large-Ham Announcer: NBA Street revels in these, first with "Joe the Show" Jackson in the original, then with Bobbito Garcia in the games afterwards. The FIFA games' MCs were more subdued, and the NFL games ditched the announcer in favor of trash talk between the players.
- Limit Break: The aptly named "Gamebreaker"
- Mundane Made Awesome: All three games run on this, with players pulling off impossible dunks, shots, or tackles like it's no big deal. The basketball courts in V3: sure, Foss Park being dedicated to shooting victims or Rucker being the go-to playground for street gods is awesome, but you'd think they are the hallowed ground of the team's home turf by how much they are revered.
- Old Save Bonus: NFL Street 2 gives you 25,000 credits for each save file you have of certain EA gameslist. Also, when you complete Own the City mode, you unlock the ability to import the created character you used for it into Madden NFL 06's Superstar mode.
- Product Placement:
- NFL Street 2 gives Reebok (or Rbk, as they were branding themselves at the time) plenty of this, since Reebok was the NFL's jersey manufacturer at the time. You can purchase their shoes and branded NFL apparel, some of which gives you stat boosts when equipped, put their logo on your character's shirt or hat, or even unlock and play as the Rbk team, which features an all-star lineup of NFL players.
- NBA Street V3 gives both Reebok and Adidas this treatment, with several shoes from both brands that you can customize and then equip on your players, as well as a host of other non-customizable shoes you can purchase for your character.
- FIFA Street (2005) is more even-handed, putting branded clothes from Nike, Adidas, and Puma, among other brands, in the game for your players to wear. However, unlike the generic clothes, you can't customize them by changing the colors or adding logos.
- Rubber-Band A.I.: Like many EA titles, NFL Street has a catch-up mechanic. While it can be turned off for quick games and pickup games, it's permanently enabled for the already difficult NFL Challenge.
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Spiritual Successor: It's very clear the Street series, especially NBA Street, was heavily influenced by Midway Games' NBA Jam. This eventually came full circle, as EA Sports revived Jam in 2009, and included Stretch as an unlockable character.- It's also arguably a direct successor to EA's own NHL Rock the Rink on the original PlayStation in 2000, an arcade interpretation of hockey relative to NHL Hockey which was developed by the same studio that went on to make the NBA and FIFA street and non-street titles.
- Totally Radical: All of them, to some degree, but NFL Street gets hit with this the hardest thanks to the corny Trash Talk.
