NFL Football

"It could be fun, but..."

NFL Football is an unique NES game in the fact that it is actually officially endorsed by the NFL (hence the title), or well, it was. When you start it you see a cool vertical view of a football field and a field goal, and then a football player kicks a football up to the NFL logo. Then...it goes right to a menu, with no title or anything. Strange. You can play 1p or 2p, with handicaps or no handicaps. The team select is standard NFL teams, they're all just the same sprites with different colors. The menu system is AWFUL, the whole screen blinks when you move from one upgrade to another, and the music slows for a bit too. They could have definitely done this better. Well, the game is the interesting part. You start out with a coin toss, which I have no idea how to run. I don't know if you're going for heads, tails, or what. When you start to play, it's sidescrolling, your basic football technique, and here are the ratings:

GAMEPLAY
5/10 - The game is fairly accurate to NFL rules. There are quarterback sacks, yard penalities, field goals, etc. It's fun although it goes kind of slow, it takes you forever just to run, say 5 yards, and it's too easy to get tackled, and the controls, well...

CONTROLS
4/10 - The controls are HORRIBLE. The best part is passing because it actually works with no frills, but then again you can't be moving when you engage pass mode. I'm still not sure how to catch and I know you can't even press the Control Pad when you're catching. You can jam on the left/right key as hard as you want but you'll run slower then molasses. On the screen you get after you make a gain, or loss, you just press random keys to get out of it. It makes absolutely no sense. Maybe if I had the manual, but still...

SOUND
5/10 - The sound is OK. The crowd noise is basically quiet static with some little whistles that go up and down, not great but this is an 8 bit system. Whenever you go to the screen after your gain/loss, it plays the same dumb music, which is pointless because you usually stay on that screen for about 2 seconds. The kick, catch, tackle sounds are ok. The best part is the ref whistling because it actually SOUNDS like a ref whistling.

GRAPHICS
6/10 - Graphics could be better, but they are still good enough. Each team has the same players with different colors. The worst part: when you are about to catch a ball, the screen zooms in to show a close up view, which is kind of cool but it's almost impossible to catch the ball. The players look pretty bad too. And when you're catching in the end zone and it zooms in, it still shows you on green turf. Uh, what happened to the red endzone?...

IN CONCLUSION
If you're a diehard NFL fan and all you have is a NES, you should get this game. If you're a casual footaball fan and all you have is an NES, think about this game. Otherwise forget it, because it would be a lot more fun but things like clunky controls, dumb graphics and players running like a yard a minute just dumb it down.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 12/27/99, Updated 12/27/99