Feature By

Ben Hopper

My faith in the future of sports gaming has been somewhat renewed with the recent Dreamcast efforts of Sega Sports. Games like NHL2K and NFL 2K1 have proved that it's possible to wow gamers with graphics and still keep the gameplay and controls fun and easy to understand. However, after spending much time recently playing the latest PlayStation football games from EA Sports and 989 Sports, I was absolutely disgusted. I felt dirty and confused. The same question kept repeating itself in my mind: "Is this the direction videogame football is headed?"

Complicated controls, sloppy graphics, slow and incomprehensible gameplay—with a few exceptions, that's pretty much been the story of the sports games of the Saturn/PlayStation/
Nintendo 64 era. We've seen the promise and fun of the 8-bit and early 16-bit sports games deteriorate into the mess we see today. Thankfully, I still have my Calgon to take me away from the madness that engulfed me while playing the new GameDay and Madden games. That Calgon is Tecmo Super Bowl for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Tecmo Super Bowl was the successor to the original Tecmo Bowl, which was released for the NES in 1989. While not nearly as good as Super Bowl, the first game laid down the basic concepts, visuals and gameplay that would be used to full effect two years later. Tecmo Bowl featured 12 teams—all based on real NFL squads—but since the game didn't have an NFL license, they were identified by their respective cities only and were represented by bizarre logos made up by the Tecmo developers. Strangely enough, Tecmo Bowl did have an NFL Players Association (NFLPA) license, so the real players of the day were included in the game. Also included were very brief stat lines from the previous season for each player, which the game used as a guide to measure player abilities.

The first game's most important achievements were its functional graphics, which featured large and well-animated player sprites—18 on-screen at once with no slow down; and its simplistic and addicting gameplay, which focused on fast arcade action but took the time to accurately portray the fundamentals of the sport. Tecmo Super Bowl simply did what all good sequels must do—build upon the strengths of the original while improving the weaker parts at the same time.