Tecmo Super Bowl

"Tecmo Super Bowl is a very rare example of a game being good despite horrible gameplay."

Tecmo Super Bowl is a football simulation game that takes the formula presented by the original Tecmo Bowl and expands upon it. In Tecmo Bowl, only half of the teams in the NFL were playable and you did not play a full season. You simply picked one team and played every other team in the league once in gauntlet style until you beat them all. Tecmo Super Bowl gets the series' act together and simulates an entire football season from start to finish.

The catch: the gameplay is pure garbage. In the beginning of the game, you have various play modes available to you, including Preseason, Regular Season, the Pro Bowl, or an Exhibition game. While playing a season, you play out the 1991 schedule. When your season ends and you feel like starting a new one, the schedule only resets to the 1991 schedule again. The game does a good job with keeping track of the NFL standings and the player statistics, so if you're into looking at that sort of thing, Tecmo Super Bowl has what you want.

However, the true gameplay issues come from within the games themselves. The games take place from a direct bird's eye view, and the field is on an East-West plane. Regardless of who the home or away teams are, the colors of the jerseys often don't line up correctly. Not that it would make a difference, given that you're always on the left side of the screen regardless of what quarter it is and that the end zone designs are not team logos, but a simple blue-pink color scheme in each end zone with a Tecmo advertisement in each.

On offense, you get a choice between eight plays --- four running and four passing, respectively --- and both offense and defense see the same playbook. If both sides pick the same play, the defense massively blitzes and you're likely to lose a ton of yardage. Controlling the players while they have the ball is very simple, as is passing. The problem is that the game's mechanics are complete garbage. When two players on opposing teams get close to one another, they begin grappling. If you yourself enter a grapple, you throw the other guy off of you by mashing A as fast as possible. This more or less makes the game less about skill and more about how fast you can mash A. The catch is that a second player can enter or tackle the grapple to down the opposing player instantly.

Tackling mechanics are pathetic. When a player dives at another player, they horribly telegraph a dive that hardly ever comes close to the guy with the ball. This allows guys like Bo Jackson and Barry Sanders to literally run circles around defensive players en route to 90 yard touchdown runs on a regular basis. Late in the season when the AI is souped up to insane levels, practically the only way to stop any running play is to use cheap tactics such as the nose guard glitch or running the nose guard backwards so as to pull the lead blocker away from the play. It's not uncommon for the AI to score a touchdown on every running play late in a season because of this.

Passing mechanics aren't a whole lot better, at least when you're the one throwing the ball. Passes to wide open receivers will oftentimes wind up being horribly off target even when no pressure is on you, and it actually gets worse late in a season for whatever reason. Unless you're using an elite quarterback such as Joe Montana, prepare for a ton of dropped passes from wide open receivers, horrible overthrows, embarrassing underthrows, balls going ten yards out of bounds and passes seemingly made to the other team on purpose. Random fumbles from very reliable hands will also be commonplace, especially late in a season. Even if you do manage to complete a pass, the odds are good that you'll fumble when touched and will have to resort to darting out of bounds at the first hint of contact.

Kicking? A joke. A small arrow appears on the ground when attempting a PAT or a field goal, and its position is random from kick to kick. Considering how fast the other team will show up to tackle the holder or block the kick, you have to either go on guesswork when kicking or be extremely skilled in the process.

However, despite all of this, Tecmo Super Bowl has a certain magical nostalgic quality to it that makes it an insanely fun game to play despite all of the faults. People go into the game fully aware of how terrible some parts of it are, yet they love it anyway. The graphics are cheesy. The music is cheesy and played over and over with every play, but inhumanly catchy. The post game stats don't even tell you anything other than the leading rusher/passer and how many yards they got. You won't even see touchdowns in the post game stats, and will have to dart over to the season stats to see what's going on. Yet despite all of this, Tecmo Super Bowl has a certain addictive quality to it that could very well cause you to go nuts enough to attempt a full season with the Phoenix Cardinals without using the nose guard sack glitch.

Above all else, the one deciding factor with any game is how fun it is to play. Tecmo Super Bowl, despite being the video game equivalent of driving a car with the emergency brake on, is extremely fun to play. That is all that matters in the end.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 07/25/05