#20: John Madden's Football

Madden! Madden!

Last week we had the fourth installment in possibly the most popular jRPG series of all time. Today we have the second installment in what is almost certainly the most popular sports franchise, at least in North America. (I think the FIFA series does pretty well also, but that's neither here nor there.)

HEY! I PLAYED A SUPER NES GAME!

I read some of the backstory behind the franchise and it's pretty interesting. A guy at EA wanted to make a football game in 1984 and went to John Madden for help. Madden insisted the game be awesome and wouldn't put his name on a title for 4 years until they came out with something he thought was realistic enough. It's nice to see someone's name in the title and actually find out they put in hard work and fought for having the game be good. (Unlike, say, Bill Laimbeer and his combat basketball.)

EA didn't have an NFL or NFLPA license for this game. And yet when I set up a game between San Francisco and Detroit I was told that San Fran has the best quarterback of all time. Also, Detroit loves to run the ball with their awesome running back. Hmm... Joe Montana and Barry Sanders? In the game there were no numbers or names or anything but it still seems like they were treading on the NFL's toes...

Touchdown!

At any rate, I set about playing the game using the overpowered San Fran team against the truly terrible Detroit team. I found the game to be pretty hard because I couldn't figure out how to properly catch the stupid football. Kick-offs would sail over my head. Passes would appear to pass right through my players. I think I completed all of one pass in the first half, but it went for a touchdown because Jerry Rice is better than everyone on the Lions' defense put together.

Barry Sanders for -22 yards? Suck on that!

On defense I took my standard plan of 'call a blitz, control a guy not in the blitz and make him blitz too' and just charged at the quarterback. I got a safety out of it in the first half and forced a lot of negative yardage runs. I also gave up two passing plays for 136 yards total, but those are the chances you take. You'll notice all of the Lions points came in chunks of 6. 2 field goals? No. I blocked every extra point. The Lions blockers suck!

This game was missing tons of features I expect to exist in a football game now. No onside kick. No 2-point conversion. No way to catch the damn ball. (Ok, that's probably me being bad.) But compared to other games around the time this game is fantastic. Actually having a good playbook to call from is pretty sweet. You can call audibles. There's instant replay. There's a play-off mode. This game actually feels like coaching football. People can complain all they want about how the Madden franchise just sells the same game every year but they started out with a pretty good game and each iteration has made some marginal improvements. This game, without most of those improvements, is still an impressively good game.

Rating: A-