ABC Monday NIght Football

ABC Monday Night Football

1993

Data East/Season Ticket

Genre: Sports

I'm a pretty big fan of the Madden series. I think the last one I owned was Madden '08 for Gamecube, but nonetheless football games definitely tend to be my idea of fun, which was why I was excited to play this game for the first time, sadly the excitement was relatively short-lived.

Will you kindry notice the lack of real world teams, it looks like it's the New England Multicolored Brassieres VS the Detroit Flowers in this match. Real-world teams wouldn't make that big of a difference to me if the game was called "Super Action Football" or something, but if you call a game ABC Monday Night Football, then I'd rightfully expect to be able to play Patriots VS Lions if I choose. On the other hand, the Dallas team, rather than being the Cowboys were the Dallas 'Dollar Signs' which is pretty damn funny actually.

Yes I know, this picture could be the play selection screen from any 90s football game. One thing that bothered me was that these were the only eight plays that you could choose from, maybe I'm a bit spoiled from playing newer football games, but 8 plays just really didn't seem to cut it.

The game uses a rather confusing mode 7 system of showing the playing field. Notice that opposing players who are over 50 yards away look almost as large as the player. Due to this, the players tend to move around at astonishingly slow rates. It seriously is like something out of an Intellivision game (and I mean that in a bad way) the little legs are flying but the player seems to be running at about 2mph. These horrible controls are probably my biggest complaint about the game. It also seems to heavily use rubber band AI, even if you catch the ball 30 yards from the nearest opponent, you can soon see them barreling towards you literally at least 5 times a quickly as you're running.

After important plays, small videos show up of your fans, usually they're very upset.

But occasionally they will actually be happy. Graphically, as you can see, this game isn't the most beautiful thing in the world. I think it tries too hard to go for realism, which just isn't plausible on the SNES hardware. Probably the game speed would have been much better if they had gone with simpler/more clear sprites and nixed the unnecessary Mode 7 for the field. The game's audio suffered from similar problems, I was initially excited as the Monday Night Football theme played, but after that the game audio mostly consisted of garbled announcer's voices and that annoying bird sound (another similarity to Intellivision, perhaps Data East took a game from 1982, threw in some Mode 7 and some sprites that the SNES really couldn't handle and this was what they got) I really wanted to enjoy this game, and in some strange way I did like it (probably nostalgia for "Football" for Intellivision) but for the most part, the game mechanics were so slow and jumpy and that a large part of the fun was sucked out of this game.

4/10

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