NFL Hall of Fame Football

"Passable football sim, plus some multimedia goodies"

NFL Hall of Fame Football

Philips POV, for CD-i, requires digital-video card

PROS: Lush multimedia football history, enjoyable arcade-style football game-play

CONS: Point-click-and-wait in every screen, inadequate help

I'm writing this on April 23, when the sporting world's thoughts should be on the opening of the baseball season. But there is no baseball this year, and no Easter Bunny either! Bwah hah hah hah hahahahahaha!!!

Ah, that felt good.

So, anyways, what we have here as a replacement is the first arcade-style football game for the CD-i. (That's ''American football'' to our European readers -- the game that looks like rugby in armor)

Now all the signs are in place for a disastrous game. I was a little concerned about spending $50 on the disc, considering:

* The cover art features the New York Giants and... the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, possibly the overall worst franchise in sports history.

* The game has received extremely low ratings in Nick's CD-i poll from the three players who've sent in votes.

* CDi magazine's features focused on the multimedia sections and not on the game.

So it's a pleasant surprise to repeat that NFL Hall of Fame Football does not, repeat does not suck. In fact, in many ways, it's quite good.

The disc is basically two titles, a multimedia tour of the pro football hall of fame, and an action-oriented ''arcade'' football game.

Creating a good football game is tough -- a brief tour of the sport's history as video-game should attest to that fact. For every element designers get right, fans complain there's another they need to work on. The first home football games for Atari 2600, Odyssey, and Intellivision artificially cut the number of players on a team, and ignored such elements as blocking, controlling the clock, differences between players abilities (wide receivers and defensive linemen were equally quick), etc. Later games continued this tradition -- Taito's wretched arcade game ''10 Yard Fight'' was only about shaking off tacklers. On the other end of the spectrum, Atari Games' eminently playable ''Cyberball'' dropped human players in favor of eight-member robot teams... and also omitted the kicking game, penalties, first downs, and short yardage plays.

The last football game I owned was ''Gridiron'' for the Atari ST. In this hapless title, players were represented by circles, and your own downfield receivers would actually help tackle you once you passed the line of scrimmage (apparently, the programmers couldn't come up with AI code for blocking).

By comparison, the arcade portion of NFL Hall of Fame Football is quite successful. It's fast, exciting, and playable, yet it keeps most of the intricacies of football intact. Linemen can trap, halfbacks can run the option, audibles can be called, and you can pass to the sidelines to control the clock in the two-minute-drill. Unfortunately, your own lineman might flinch on a crucial third-and-two and get a false start penalty... a little too realistic in that case!

The game uses a direct-above perspective, breaking from the more recent tradition of an angled perspective behind the quarterback, most successfully realized in Electronic Arts' ''John Madden Football''. While the effect is somewhat less realistic, the trade-off increases playability. With the above perspective, it's easier to look at your receivers on offense -- when you press button two, a player's number appears above his head to indicate he's selected. If the receiver is off-screen, he appears in a window that appears at the top of the screen, to the right or left of the hashmarks. In Madden, all your receivers appear simultaneously in a row of three windows with that angled perspective -- easier to see man-to- man coverage, but harder to get a sense of relative location and zone coverage.

The controls are appropriately simple for arcade football, once you get the hang of them. Once you've started a play with button one, you can watch the CD-i play it out, or you can participate. In this mode, you use button one to lunge forward or button two to hand off / pitch (on running plays) or select receivers (passes). When passing, you hit button one to throw the pass. On defense, you use button one to select a player you want to control, and that button makes you dive for a tackle during the play.

The game will also run plays by itself if you don't press any controls after hiking the ball. This can be useful for practice, to see how tricky plays like the halfback option, double reverse, and flee flicker are supposed to work.

Like most arcade football games, this one favors the pass. Running plays are actually harder to control, since you have to make sure the quarterback is facing the running back without getting in his way -- in practice, you end up with your back facing the wrong direction after getting the handoff. So far, I've been letting the CD-i handle my running game.

It's particularly effective to use short- and medium-distance passes, where your intended receiver is still on screen when you look to him. Short passes that just get under the linebackers are no big thrill, but can collect 5-8 yards more often than not... enough to sustain long marches down the field. I've had particularly good results with this system using Dan Fouts at QB, Lance Allworth at WR, and Walter Payton as RB.

The high-risk ''Five Men Out'' play also pays dividends by splitting the defensive coverage -- if you're looking to throw the long bomb, look to your left-side receiver on this play.

The controls aren't without their frustrations. If you decide you want to go back to your first receiver, there usually isn't time to hit button-two enough times to cycle through your other receivers. It's also unrealistic to make the quarterback stop while scrambling, wind up, and throw the pass... particularly if your quarterback is Fran Tarkenton. Real quarterbacks can throw on the run. Suffice to say that under pressure, you need to find a blocker or run for the first down marker.

The game is customizable to the point of anal-retentivity. A ''quick play'' game selection from the title screen is the simplest option, getting things underway with a computer-assigned team and balanced playbook. If you pick ''exhibition game'', you select a team name, five hall-of-famers to anchor your team, a home/visitor preference (relevant only to the coin toss), an opposing team from the ''Hall of Champions'' (see below), offensive and defensive playbooks, and weather conditions that include temperature, wind, sunlight, and precipitation. Want snow? Set the temperature below 32 and turn on precipitation. Faster game? 55 degrees in sunlight with no wind. And this is all before the coin toss.

Then there's the ''league play'' option that allows you to have the CD-i play out a ''season'' in a league made up of historic NFL squads. You can either participate in the games, or have the CD-i play the games in a non- interactive ''simulation'' mode. Sound obsessive? The manual recommends switching off the TV and letting the game run overnight. Maybe it's a nice feature, I haven't tried it.

Your league standings can be saved in-progress in the CD-i player's memory, although a single league will take up 42% of the memory. 10 offensive and 10 defensive playbooks can also be saved, at a cost of about 9%, regardless of the actual number of playbooks saved.

A practice field is also available, and isn't as much help as it should be. For one thing, the on-screen coach tells you to ''look in your handbook'' to learn how to run, kick, or pass. Why? It would have been more in tune with multimedia ideals to show an on-screen CD-i controller next to a play in slo-mo, highlighting each button at the appropriate time to show you how to pick out receivers, hand off, etc. A really nice help system would also give context-sensitive advice after failed attempts, although that's asking for a lot. Also, you only get to run one play over and over -- if you want a different play, the disc will have to re-load the arcade game again (about 20 seconds).

Beyond that, the game has one major failing: the response time of the CD is terrible. Every screen, whether it's your playbook or the coin toss selection, takes about five seconds to fade up from black. If Burn:Cycle can switch from arcade shooter to a video sequence in a second, surely the transition from the end-of-the-play to the playbook can be accelerated.

While it's playable, I think football aficionados are also going to find the computer to be a less-than-satisfying opponent. It's not entirely realistic to be able to sack Joe Montana 15 times in a game, as I recently did against the '88 San Francisco 49'ers.

That 49'er squad is one of forty teams in the ''Hall of Champions'', one of two multimedia options available from the main screen. If you browse the Hall interactively, you'll see team photos and hear a description of the team's accomplishments. Long-time football fans will see some classic squads in here... along with some also-rans who must have been included for contractural reasons or sheer pity. How else to explain the inclusion of the 1979 Tampa Bay Buccaneeers, a 10-6 team?

The more vivid multimedia goodies are the members of the Hall of Fame chroncicled on the disc. They can be picked as players in the ''exhibition game'' mode, but some of them have digital-video clips that can only be seen in the multimedia mode. The footage is classic stuff from the NFL Films archives, Sammy Baugh to Dan Fouts (only inductees up to 1993 are included)

The announcer script that accompanies the video sometimes misses the forest for the trees. You hear an endless stream of numbers -- TD's, yardage, etc -- but no context. Franco Harris' kiosk shows that unforgettable film of ''The Immaculate Reception'', but doesn't tell you what happened and what it meant for the Steelers.

Many have praised the multimedia part of the CD-i disc, and with the apparent interest in football history displayed by the CD-i public (two NFL trivia games and the ''100 Greatest Touchdowns'' disc), that's not surprising. But the arcade game portion of the disc is a decent, playable game, if not quite the state-of-the art.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

(c) 1995 Chris Adamson

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 04/01/01, Updated 04/01/01