Acclaim's N64 version of NFL Quarterback Club 2000 suffered from a terribly low frame rate that often left you unable to figure out what was happening on the screen. While the Dreamcast version fixes the choppy frame rate, it is plagued by a ton of other problems that make playing the game just as frustrating and unenjoyable, if not more so.
Sure, the game has lots of defensive and offensive plays, real teams, players, team-management options, high-resolution graphics, and the rest of the usual features and game modes. But none of it matters if you can't get through a game, much less a five-minute quarter, without some weird, quirky problem interfering.
Most of the items on the laundry list of problems that ruin QBC 2000 stem from the most important aspects of a sports game: artificial intelligence, gameplay, and control. First off is the largest problem: When passing, your computer opponent will often stop its cornerbacks dead in their tracks moments after the play begins. This is a problem for several reasons, the biggest being that your receivers aren't smart enough to run around the motionless defender. Instead they just keep running in place while pressed up against the defender. If you decide to throw the ball to one of these dimwitted receivers, most of the time the ball will go sailing past both players, and pass interference won't be called. This happens quite frequently, and while you can call a quick out pass to prevent this silly scenario from happening, it's still totally inexcusable and makes the game completely unplayable.
The control is another dramatic issue with QBC 2000. Let's say you want to just ease up to the line with a linebacker, but you get a little too close and turn him around to back away from the line. If you aren't careful, he'll just bolt through the line and get called for encroachment. Overall the control feels very sticky, and the difference between having a player turn around and run facing in the direction you wish him to and having him simply backpedal seems arbitrary and even completely backward at times. If you run a safety down the field and want him to turn around to face the rest of the players, you literally have to do a wide circle with the analog stick; otherwise he'll just run backward. While at first it may seem like a quirky control scheme that you'll eventually get used to, within a week the control alone will make you want to break the controller in half.
Visually Quarterback Club 2000 isn't all that impressive. Sure the players look very detailed with eye blacking, nasal strips, and even actual faces mapped onto their polygonal heads, but the only time you can really appreciate it is during the replays and post-play close-ups. The camera angle during the actual game, while extensively adjustable, is too far away to see any of the detail. Instead, all you see are motion- captured animations with terrible, terrible transitions. On top of that, many of the same animations appear quite frequently. When players break from a huddle, all of them clap their hands at the same time, at exactly the same speed, because it's exactly the same animation. Even in the audio department QBC 2000 fails. The PA announcer sounds like he's announcing inside a tin can, and the color commentary and play- by-play calls by Mike Patrick and Randy Cross are repetitive and dull. Overall, Quarterback Club 2000 is a buggy, problem-ridden football game that should be avoided by all football video game fans, even if you, like me, liked previous installments in the QBC series. The game isn't even close to the level of quality that Sega's own NFL 2K achieves.
