#34: Super Play Action Football (1992, SNES)

Interesting to think that whereas today it is considered appropriate to have separate football games for the professional and college games, at the SNES launch one was deemed sufficient. I'd dwell more on this if I had ever really touched the pro or college modes in Super Play Action Football, but I didn't. Why? Because in the High School Mode, I could name my own team and pick the colors of their uniforms, that's why.

When it comes to sports games, I'm pretty much completely a create-a-team junkie. Despite the fact that I follow professional sports extensively, I never feel compelled to control real players when playing sports games. There is just something about the fact that they are real players that turns me off - there is no room for me to invent characteristics, like playing style or role on the team, around someone that actually exists and for whom those traits are already in place. This has pretty much always been the case with me. On NBA Showdown, one of the first sports games I played extensively, I played most of a season using a Charlotte Hornets team after first swapping many of their starters with starters on other teams, then by promoting some of their bench players to the starting lineup (specifically Kenny Gattison). The result was that I was left with a squad with so little resemblance to anything real that I could then effectively call it my own. Thus Kenny Gattison averaged 38 ppg and Scott Skiles led the league in assists.

Now, while Super Play Action football may have sparked my love affair with creating my own team, unfortunately the game itself is somewhat... lacking. For starters, you have a very zoomed in perspective - fine unless you want to say, pass the football. This isn't a problem on easy mode (high school mode), but good luck spotting the open receiver in collegiate or pro modes. Yes, you have a nice little mini-map showing your targeted receiver and indicating if there are any other little dots near him - but to expect the player to be following this map while also looking for the rush is a bit much. Also, it is so zoomed in you can't even look at your receivers coming off the line to see if they've been picked up by a defender (unlike in say, Tecmo Bowl). The result is that, unless you want to see yourself get picked off a lot you'll be doing a lot of short passes, or a lot of keeping yourself exposed in the pocket. The harder difficulties also resulted in a pretty dramatic increase in the complexity of the playbooks - again, a good idea for a game that allows you to exploit these complex routes and schemes, not as good an idea in something that throws barriers in front of you on the most rudimentary gameplay levels.



Now, this isn't to say it wasn't fun to run up the score in easy mode - it was. But compared to say, the Tecmo Bowl series (of which I was unacquainted with at the time), these sorts of qualifiers aren't necessary.

Super Play Action Football
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Nintendo R&D 1
Released: August 1992
Obtained: Sometime in 1994

5.0/10

#110: Mario Tennis (2000, N64)

The Shining Force series was a fairly prolific tactical RPG series released across several Sega systems in the early to mid 1990s. The developer behind all of them was a Camelot Software Planning, they did do a sports game (Hot Shots Golf), but it still strikes me as odd that Nintendo would seek them out to head up their entire Mario-sports series, rather then handling them in house or something. Even more incredible is that Camelot would wind up doing a far better job then Nintendo themselves probably would have managed (well, there isn't much to back this up, since Nintendo has passes off all their sports games).

What's most remarkable is that Camelot, an RPG developer, understands perfectly the need for rock solid control in a game like this - as a result, Mario Tennis winds up being incredibly easy to pick up and play while remaining really precise, resulting in gameplay that can stand up to hours upon hours of playtime. Mario Tennis quickly became a N64 multiplayer staple, alongside greats like Bomberman 64, Mario Kart 64, GoldenEye 007/Perfect Dark, Super Smash Bros. and uh... I suppose that was the list (there really weren't a lot of games for it, you know).

I find there to be something ingenious about the swing mechanics here - A for topspin, B for slice, A+B for smash - with A then B for lob and B then A for a drop shot - or maybe I have those backwards - the point is, that is the list of shots, and basically then the extent to which you can actually do anything in the game. It is because of this simplicity that the games can then be more about things like movement and rhythm than an exercise in control - you can even survive pretty well just using the slice or the topspin, turning Mario Tennis into essentially a one button game.

It's remarkable how well suited for multiplayer tennis is, by the way. Both sides are always more or less equally involved in the proceedings - or more specifically, the time spent on 'defense' (waiting for the ball) is so short as to be unnoticeable - by the time you've seen your shot through, you get to set up for the next. Compare this to football where the defensive time can be interminable, or even to something like basketball where it is short but noticeable. And another big plus is that even when the score may be lopsided, the losing team never really feels out of it, especially in something like Mario Tennis where the learning curve is low enough that there will never be that huge of a gulf between the experienced and the novice.

The Mario Tennis series, because of its engaging simplicity are probably my favorite sports games out there in terms of actually enjoying the game itself (Tecmo Super Bowl notwithstanding) - I may enjoy the hell out of a Madden, but this is because of the things that I bring into the proceedings - my love of sports statistics and my desire to manipulate rosters - when I play Madden itself, I'm mostly concerned with wanting to put up crazy numbers with the roster of guys I've spent time assembling. With Mario Tennis, however, its a simple case of picking a character I like to play as (aka Yoshi) and playing.



Fun fact, this game is not called Mario Tennis 64 - shocking only because that makes it one of about maybe 10 games ever released on the N64 without the number '64' in the title. I also would be remiss to not mention how shockingly crisp the texturing is in this game - spend time with basically any other N64 game - texturing was not its strong suit.

Mario Tennis
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Camelot Software Planning
Released: 8/28/2000
Obtained: Fall 2000

9.0/10

#10: American Gladiators (1991, NES)

American Gladiators sucks (this game, not the wonderful show, of course). It's pretty much a perfect storm of bad graphics, terrible control, terrible design, and unbalanced difficulty. An American Gladiators game should be pretty easy to pull off. I would expect some 2-player alternating game built around some minigames inspired by events in the show. Such a game has been pulled off 'successfully' many times, like with Nickelodeon GUTS which, while far from good, at least wasn't this broken (well, it sort of was).

The whole structure is goofy - for being based on a competition show, there is very little competition here. Just a series of events set up like stages - imagine a basketball game where the score is kept, but instead you proceed to another court after every made basket. If you somehow manage to complete the game, you get a quick congratulations, then are sent off to repeat everything again on a harder difficulty. I could extend some sort of break on account of the NES being pretty rudimentary from a hardware perspective, but Tecmo managed to fit stat tracking and a 16 game NFL schedule into Tecmo Super Bowl around the same time and on the same hardware - the American Gladiator developers (all 4 of them) just didn't seem to care (not that I would blame them).

We haven't even touched on the gameplay, which can be pretty well summarized as broken. That may be slightly harsh, many of these games are functional, after all, but I have a hard time spotting where in them any sense of pleasure may be derived. Human Canonball is built exclusively on timing without giving the player opportunity to learn from his mistakes (short of dying and starting over) - bad design. The Wall is ludicrously unbalanced, expecting the player to navigate a maze while hitting a & b as fast as possible, but never so fast to be more than half as fast as the scores of gladiators swarming around you. Joust seems to do whatever it wants regardless of what buttons you press, provided you do so fast enough. Assault could have been ok, but like with most of the other events you are made to repeat the same act over and over, progressively harder, until you can't actually complete it (and it isn't fun). Why not use the more difficult mode unlocked on completing the game to unleash such horrors? Powerball is probably the closest things get to decent, owing mostly to it being the only event where you can't die, thus providing the means to learn and adapt to the everything going on. The Eliminator I've never seen, but I'm sure it sucks too.



Everything is built on the idea that the best way to extend game length is to make the player do everything in successively harder waves, which I thought had gone out of fashion by the time the Legend of Zelda came out, not something I would expect to see in a NES game released early in the 16-bit era. Granted, I'm maybe being a bit too hard on it, but seeing as it was my first exposure to a truly crappy game as a child, it's always held a special spot of contempt in my heart.

American Gladiators
Publisher: GameTek
Developer: Incredible Technologies
Released: October 1991
Obtained: Sometime from 1991-1992

2.5/10

#477: Tecmo Super NBA Basketball (1993, SNES)

Timing can be a tremendous influence on ones impressions of a videogame. Take for instance the competing early-gen SNES basketball games Tecmo Super NBA Basketball and NBA Showdown (by Tecmo and EA Sports, respectively). They are, on the margins, very similar - sporting the same perspective, the same general control schemes, and similar feature sets. One of these I received as a youth, spent significant time playing, and genuinely became very attached to, the other I bought used on a whim a couple years ago and was largely unimpressed by it for the short duration I spent playing it (before filing it away in my collection). I get the feeling - despite the fact that my opinion spouting the superiority of one to the other being very much genuine - that they could just as easy of swapped positions.

To be clear here, NBA Showdown was the title I spent hours playing in my youth (going to far as to get about 20 games into a season - playing 12 minute quarters), while Tecmo Super NBA Basketball is the one I got on a whim and haven't spent much time playing. Is NBA Showdown clearly better? I feel pretty strongly that it is, but I also have a very good feeling that this opinion comes largely from their roles in my gaming lifetime.

Even examining my reasons doesn't really help me - I like NBA Showdown's slower and more deliberate pace - or did playing NBA Showdown so much as a child train me to enjoy slower paced basketball? If NBA Jam had been my first basketball game, would I now find all basketball sims unbearable? (I'm kidding here, NBA Jam flat sucks) I also find NBA Showdown's menus straightforward and easy to navigate while Tecmo Super NBA Basketball's feel obtuse and outdated - despite being set up nigh-identical to Tecmo's other dozens of sports games I've played extensively. Is this because I'm used to NBA Showdown, or is it that, by 1993, the Tecmo method genuinely was obtuse and outdated? They did, after all, overhaul things for Tecmo Super Bowls 2 and 3 on the SNES.

There are still issues with it that I likely would have found even then - it, like Tecmo's other forays into the 16-bit sports world, felt too stagnant. Little is changed from Tecmo NBA Basketball for the NES - even in controls, despite having 4 more buttons to use (x,y,l,r) - forgivable if perhaps a SNES launch title, but unforgivable coming out in 1993. Granted, the NES Tecmo Basketball I managed to like quite a bit - but I give a much greater benefit of the doubt to 8-bit basketball games (of which there are few that are even passable) than I do to 16-bit basketball games (of which there are several that are excellent, specifically the NBA Live series). Also, things like Tecmo's patented cut-scenes went from charming, to surprisingly creepy (see the embedded video). Tecmo was also late to the party on many of the basic customization features that EA Sports had made standard by then, like, say, trades and customizable rosters.



I still get the feeling that if we had met in a different time, Tecmo Super NBA Basketball could have been really good friends but that I had become too set in my ways when we finally met for me to give it a proper chance.

Tecmo Super NBA Basketball
Publisher: Tecmo
Developer: Tecmo
Released: 1993
Obtained: October 2007 (Used)

6.0/10

#219: Bad News Baseball (1990, NES)

For whatever reason, I'm somewhat of a big fan of 8-bit baseball games - not in the sense that I particularly enjoy them, but more in the sense that it is interesting to see both 1) how similar they tend to be to each other, and 2) how small design decisions can have big effects on the overall playability of the given title. When they do achieve the proper feel - that is, the proper balance of good hitting, pitching, and fielding - they can then be quite fun to play. The problem then is that very few of them achieve this balance. Most can do pitching and hitting pretty well, but very, very few do fielding halfway tolerable. That Bad News Baseball actually does it pretty well sets it pretty far apart from the competition.

8-bit baseball fielding is a delicate beast. The hardware provides certain limitations, such as the fact that I can't think of a title that actually had the sense to put a target where the ball is going to land, and in forcing the perspective to typically be pretty pulled back. What does one do with control of the fielders - will they be controlled one at a time (depending on who the ball is headed to, probably the best solution) or all in tandem (which was used frequently)? It also needs to effectively balance the needs of the player on defense to be able to properly anticipate the trajectory of the ball and have a chance to field it with the desire of the batting player to see the sucker fly. The best entries ensure that the fielders move responsively enough and provide a good indication of ball trajectory so as to allow the player time to get under those hits they should be able to get. Throwing proves a less difficult issue, though also prone to mucking up (like base-running). For Bad News Baseball, it appears Tecmo learned good lessons from those titles that came before it, as it avoids many of these mistakes and proves itself amongst the best baseball entries on the NES.

It also has the good sense of being goofy as all hell. Your umpires are all rabbits (a bunny being Tecmo's mascot at the time), and matches feature a bevy of cartoon cut-scenes during close calls at bases, following homeruns, and between innings - a technique frequently used in Tecmo sports games of the time. But no other Tecmo titles featured cut-scenes approaching this level of, well, cartooniness (save for maybe Tsuppari Oozumou) - most evident in the inclusion of a Mr. T character in the line of players giving high-fives after certain runs are scored. Customization is also rather excellent (as was par for the course for baseball games at the time), featuring full roster control. Also available was a 'girls-mode' - holding down a button combination when turning on the system would allow players to play as, well, girls.



Tecmo really were wizards of the 8-bit sports scene. Everyone knows about the Tecmo Bowl series, which I will wax poetically on when its turn comes, but Tecmo had strong entries into pretty much every sport out there - even sumo, nearly always being at least amongst the top entries for a given sport, if not the outright best available.

Bad News Baseball
Publisher: Tecmo
Developer: Tecmo
Released: 1990
Obtained: February 2004 (Used)

8.5/10

#374: Wii Sports (2006, Wii)

As I waited those 10 hours in line at Wal-Mart to get my Wii, Wii Sports was pretty far down the list of reasons I was excited. Twilight Princess was the big reason I was there on launch day, and as we went to my friends house afterward to play I figured we'd do a round or two of tennis before we put in Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz and had the real multiplayer sessions. Wrong. Wrong.

Wii Sports is incredible for how deceptive it is. No one really anticipated 1) how quickly it would seize the general consciousness and 2) how much value it would hold for people. I count myself amongst those who underestimated it. I went on record to my friends when the Wii came out that, having heard that it would be relatively well supplied (relative to the PS Triple, at least), that the Wii would be outright easy to find that holiday season. I assumed that the Wii would take a DS style trajectory, failing to really catch on (catch on beyond the Nintendo fan subset, like myself) until it saw software that really captured what the system was capable of. For the DS this came in the form of things like Kirby: Canvas Curse and Nintendogs. I simply didn't realize that the Wii would have its existence rationalizing title packed into the box. So where I figured the Wii would be relatively easy to find until it later exploded (when, say, Mario Galaxy came out) it exploded right out of the gate. In fact, you still can't find them that easily - I actually saw one on a retail shelf for the first time ever within the last few months - some 16 months after release.

Also unanticipated was the level of staying power Wii Sports has had. I assumed that, while it was sure to be fun, that the lack of features (baseball is 3 innings, golf is 9 holes, etc) would harm its long term value, but I guess I didn't realize quite how much fun it would be. Now, yes, I've mostly moved onto other titles, but I'm also a big time gamer here - even if Wii Sports had 5 fully featured sports games I'd be moving on eventually. It does remain, however, high in the rotation of good party games - joining the ranks of classics like Bomberman 64 and TimeSplitters 2 as something of a defauly source of fun for the entire console generation. For those not as 'hardcore' as myself (I really despise that term, but it is useful) Wii Sports has also been something of a touchstone. In my time at work only three games have come up in conversations - Guitar Hero/Rock Band, that 'Wii driving game' (Mario Kart Wii), and Wii Sports. This is a degree of permeation that games typically don't achieve.

Some time should be spent talking about what's included in the package here. Of the 5 sports available - boxing, baseball, tennis, bowling, and golf - boxing can be tossed out pretty much immediately, it simply proves too tiring for extended sessions and too imprecise to be actually fun in the first place. Tennis and baseball are decent enough ideas but are harmed by a seeming lack of 'to do'. Tennis is overly simplified - I'm not even referring to the fact that you don't move your character, but rather to the fact that your shot angle is pretty much entirely defendant on timing and not on, say, method of swing. With baseball it simply is too hard to balance hitting and pitching - either you're going to be going scoreless due to being unable to hit or you're going to be racking up runs because you got your timing down. That the game is 3 innings further harms things, especially when you can't hit, as the game ends before you've begun to feel comfortable with the timing of your swing. Golf is nearly a winner - I quite enjoy it, at least, though I know others have trouble with the consistency required to swing. If one can achieve this consistency, however, it becomes a very fun and rewarding mode. Bowling is the real winner of the package - pretty perfectly capturing the feeling of the game (barring getting used to holding down b when back-swinging, or however that mechanic works) and not feeling as if the sport has been truncated in its incarnation here.



The power of parts coming together to form a whole is on strong display here - none of these titles would, individually, stand well on their own - even if free pack-ins, but taken together they prove a resounding success. Also, as simple as they may seem to do it is worth noting that no other collection for the Wii has yet matched Wii Sports in quality or accessibility - witness things like Deca Sports or Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games - even Nintendo's own terrible Wii Play.

Wii Sports
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Nintendo EAD
Released: 11/19/2006
Obtained: November 2006

9.0/10

#56: NBA Jam: Tournament Edition (1994, SNES)

Someday I'll be able to tell the lovely story of the time I asked for Final Fantasy II (since renamed Final Fantasy IV) for Christmas and was mildly disappointed to instead receive a brand new copy of Final Fantasy III (a.k.a. Final Fantasy VI) instead - it being a title I had never really heard of but which would soon blow me away and vaunt itself to the top of my favorite games list for quite some time. Instead I get to tell you about the time I got NBA Jam: Tournament Edition when I had asked for regular-ass NBA Jam instead. At the time I figured, well, this is just as well. It even had more players (including my favorite at the time, Scott Skiles) and the ability to choose your on-court roster at any given moment. Really a fantastic idea. But it turns out, whereas adding substitutions to something like Tecmo Super Bowl served only to enhance an already excellent experience, here it seemed only to ruin it.

How such a thing could occur really boils down to what the developers hoped to gain through the addition. For Tecmo, it would at least seem the addition was done simply as a way of flexing their technical know-how (since your better players are almost always going to be starting anyway - unless you're the Pats with Steve Grogan) and adding the ability to include injuries in the proceedings. How they didn't muck it up lies in the fact that this is the extent of what it added to the game. Granted, condition was new as well - meaning sometimes, if a player wasn't 'feeling' well his backup may prove to be better - but these conditions never changed during the game itself, in fact if you weren't doing a season you'd never experience this effect at all. So ultimately, while this wrinkle may effect pre-game planning, it never got in the way of the (excellent) core gameplay.

The creators of NBA Jam: Tournament Edition, however, thought it would be a simply splendid idea to, in addition to allowing players to select their on-court lineups, to add stamina to the original NBA Jam. This was really a terrible, terrible idea, because it rather directly interferes with what made NBA Jam fun in the first place.

I can absolutely imagine hardcore NBA Jam fans welcoming adding this layer of strategy over the original product - they mastered what was already available, so all the more wrinkles the better. For the rest of us, however, who simply enjoyed NBA Jam for the arcadey title that it was, this layer is simply off-puting. I'm going to want to play with LJ and Zo for 4 fucking quarters, and I should be able to, ass-holes. Don't make me sub in Hersey Hawkins. I'm also sure as hell am not going to want to worry about being attacked during the game itself (as this saps stamina), or being attacked while attacking to steal the ball. The whole whack-a-mole strategy certainly could work if the brawling were fun (look at the success of Smash Bros.) - but it isn't such a brilliant idea when your brawling is so overly simplistic.



All of these are reasons NBA Jam: T.E. can't stand up to NBA Jam, combine that with the fact that NBA Jam wasn't that good to begin with (which will be discussed when we get to NBA Jam), and you're left with something simply better avoided, even with Scott Skiles.

NBA Jam: Tournament Edition
Publisher: Acclaim
Developer: Iguana (port), Midway (arcade)
Released: 1994
Obtained: Christmas 1995 (Gift)

4.5/10