Backyard Football

"Too many gimmicks, too little fun"

Backyard Football, coming one year after Humongous Games's delightful Backyard Soccer, features less spontaneous games, too much rigidity in how plays turn out, and fewer critical options. Although most children might find watching a soccer game tougher than watching a football game I seriously doubt that any of them will prefer the computerized version of football between these two. It's easy enough to get into and get the hang of, but I barely had the patience to sit through a full fourteen-game season, and not because I was doing poorly. With the exception of listing a schedule with scores, team stats, and league leaders, the game repeatedly accomplishes subtraction by addition, and aesthetic improvements such as adding all NFL teams to the usual backyard batch or a young Brett Favre or Jerry Rice to the player draft can't make up for fundamental flaws.

The game did well to include slick playbooks--four pages of four plays each, with mirror images, position substitutions and quick adjustments before the snap allowed--in this game, where you draft seven people and play five-a-side(quarterback, two wide receivers, center, running back.) There are still three levels of difficulty but now there's a choice, or randomization, of weather conditions. You can even use your favorite players from Backyard Soccer, with young professional sports players thrown in and even a mystery construct-your-own kid. There are also trick power plays that should give you a boost, and you can position defenders before the play starts. But with all these options, some basic stuff got pushed into the background.

In the meantime I should mention that it's usually either pretty obvious where you need to go or blatantly clear your ball-carrier is going to get hit soon, so pointing and clicking your character to where he should go or throw the ball is not too complex, with rounding corners and throwing ahead of the receiver being the only things you need to learn. One problem is that if you click ahead of the line of scrimmage you may throw a halfback option when you don't want to, i.e. on a draw play; given how quickly you need to move and read a play there should be some leeway if no-one is close to the ball. Not that throwing the ball when you want is terribly welcoming. You have to wait and turn to throw the ball, and the players do come in rather quickly for a sack. For younger players this may be very frustrating especially given the long pauses before. It's hard enough to react but to do so after the indefinite pause of lining up a play is worse. Nevertheless once you get the hang of hitting a receiver in stride, the game becomes trivial.

Trick plays don't even help as they are too laboriously designed, even if the ideas for those on both sides make them entertaining; they appear randomly and using them at the right moment is key in a tight game. People get superhuman jumping powers or receivers dig a hole and come out twenty yards later, and on defense a sonic boom knocks down opponents, 'cough drop' causes a fumble, or everyone wears the same color uniform. I'm vaguely curious about what happens if trick plays are used on each side, and maybe a whole game based on this could get good. As it is the tricks interrupt the flow of the game just as you have a good system going.

The only reasonable game strategies are 1. to get a play where you run down the sidelines, which is not very interesting or realistic as carrying a ball slows a receiver down more than in the game, or 2. to play ball control, which requires a lot of fiddling, although it can be interesting to waste a quarter or more with one possession; I do this unintentionally with roll-outs where I give up on passing and can usually make the twenty yards required before fourth down, but it still doesn't seem as time-inefficient as much time as kickoffs; there, you lose three seconds(big in a one-minute quarter) before anyone receives the ball. Once I had two offensive plays in one quarter. In either case you get a dull game. Even if it's high scoring, the plays to get there aren't exciting. Also for a football game the kicking aspect sure is worthless. Punts tend to go forty yards unless you have the super kick, and even then they like to bounce ten or more yards backwards(even more annoying and prevalent than a deflected pass.) It's almost better to go for it on fourth down. Field goal kicking is similarly useless, and once you find the right play, a two-point conversion proposes minimal extra difficulty. The computer, however, fails to recognize this. While it's cute to have kids running around playing sports, the opponent's coaching elicits an entirely different form of laughter. Still, defense is fun once you learn how to stop your impatience from yielding long runs. You get to roam among players, bopping into opponents' receivers and backs until the quarterback gets tackled by little Pablo Sanchez. And if he was standing on his own one and gets pushed into the end zone, enjoy the fast and loose rule interpretation and extra two points.

There's a slight upgrade from the plain backgrounds of Backyard Soccer where no-one is in the stands and it's always sunny. Parents wear ponchos or coats and cheer their children on. Also you have two-tone color coding that even allows you to overhaul an NFL team's colors; there are some funny combinations although unfortunately there's no light blue to make the Chargers' great retro uniforms. But kids, without the name halo, are too indistinguishable after you choose them unless you sit through the celebration screen--you need to hit escape twice as often to skip through them now. The helmets guard their faces and uniforms don't have numbers, and you are left relying on memorizing who's in which formation position to differentiate them. It's a bit tough for a young kid and not as smooth as the usual Humongous fare even if you do get to see your opponents' name. Kicking is also vague; you have many different ramshackle goalposts, but in some of the more exotic ones you have to wait for the referee's decision to see if the kick was good. The exaggerations also don't work as well as in Backyard Soccer. Although it's cute to watch a tot heft a football half his size without slowing up, having people six yards tall running around is too much of a stretch. The long breaks forced on you as they emote on the Jumbotron after every play are not relief but more the Backyard Football League's equivalent of the NFL's sillier commercials.

Sunny Day is back on play-by-play, dressing for the changing weather, but here is where the problems kick in. As color commentator Chuck Downfield has the late Harry Caray's insights and none of his bizarre charm but makes up for it with a knack for producing awkward silence. If you start the game with sound, you're forced to sit through all of his demonstrations, reacting to every good and bad play, which get as repetitive as the announcers' often inaccurate comments, which ramble on even after the play; 'I tell ya, he's got a big hole there' is an example of covering both bases. There's less variety than soccer, and given that there are harder to describe events and more named set plays in football than soccer, the announcers' describing what already happened becomes that much more annoying; not that they get it right(oh, kids these days, they try hard to understand!) They don't even get the yard line right in the blood curdling '30! 20! 10!' and their combinations here ('No one's gonna catch him!') feel unfair. Hearing this or 'Whammo Bammo!' your dubious reward for tackling the computer for a loss, gets annoying even when you're up 30-0. It took me a while to figure how to turn the sound off. The option was more buried than in Soccer, and being able to get rid of Chuck alone if you'd like just didn't cut it. I suspect kids won't be able to turn it off; I sat through the playoff games with the sound on to hear special quotes. Chuck's silly commentaries dwarfed the nuisance Sunny's score announcing, which reminded me of the automated voice that tells you your bank account.

Humongous always brings cute details to the game such as the Super Colossal Cereal Bowl between the Backyard and Frontyard Football Leagues at the end of the season. There were many things it was good they did not add: injuries, personal fouls and some of the more perplexing penalties(illegal motion) that you see at higher levels of the game. I suspect I will finish a season one day. It's reasonably easy to get through choosing plays and so forth. But with full sound I could only take a game or two at a time. Then, when I won the first season with a huge late-night burst, eventually scoring over fifty and then sixty points in a game, I enjoyed the festivities, but my mind was on managing many of these same kids in baseball.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 07/10/02, Updated 07/20/02