Sports
October 1985 (Nintendo)
I have to remind myself that this was 1985. You might want to do that as well, because this game is odd at best.
There are 5 levels of difficulty. I played it on the easiest setting, high school. You start off getting the ball kicked off and catch it with your teammates circled around you. The idea is simple, get up the field and score. It’s not too hard of a concept to grasp. Except for the fact that you have 2 “30″ minute halves instead of quarters dividing up the game things so far are looking up.
This definitely isn’t Madden. There are no plays to call. The A button throws to your long receiver and the B button to a short receiver. If you want a running play you can either pass it quickly with B or just not pass the ball and run.
The first weird thing that I noticed was that you’re essentially playing a 2-D game of football. I tried to throw to my long receiver and had it intercepted. A lot. All but one of those where when the receiver was at least 5 yards further down the field than anyone else. Somehow my quarterback doesn’t know how to throw the ball on an arc. Annoying, but at least it does that for the computer quarterback as well.
If that was my biggest complaint I think I could live with it. After all, it’s a launch title. It’s 1985. It is allowed to have flaws. But the biggest one from me is that the line of scrimmage doesn’t really matter.
Yes, that’s right. I passed the ball, ran past the line of scrimmage, and passed the ball again. If it hadn’t been intercepted I would have tried again. The game doesn’t seem to know that you’re not allowed to do that.
Overall, it’s not something I’d want to invest a lot of time into. It’s fun for a while, but the shortcomings are just too much for me.
A sad attempt at some coders being asked to program a football game before anyone really knew how to on the 8-bit machine.