Original Release: Tecmo, 1991, NES
Other Releases: SNES / Genesis (1993)
The “super” sequel added NFL teams and players, and tightened up the little issues with the prequel to make one of the classic football games of all time.
Tecmo Super Bowl (NES, Tecmo, 1991)
Where to Buy: Amazon
How to Emulate: coming soon!
Review by: C. M0use
There are numerous downsides to EA’s monopolistic chokehold on the NFL license, but arguably the biggest one is that we now have zero chance of ever seeing a Tecmo Super Bowl revival (no, this Tecmo Bowl:Kickoff crap doesn’t really count.)
The NES incarnation of Super Bowl is easily the most beloved version of the game, in spite of also being the most glitch-ridden and technically inept of the franchise short of Tecmo Bowl. Somehow, it pulls through on the sheer power of charisma, not to mention a healthy dose of nostalgia. Not only is TSB the only really fun arcade-style NFL game ever created, it was also the first football game to incorporate an NFL license, and it did it in a really impressive way for the time (and set the trends for all the more “realistic” sims that came after it.) Aside from getting the full 1990 roster of teams (with mostly pretty close color schemes), you also get the 1990 roster of players, all of whom were researched and given relatively accurate statistical tweaks to represent their skill levels – they even got a little facial portrait that at least halfway resembled them in most cases. The selection of plays available to each team also mostly corresponded with the sorts of offensive and defensive schemes they were actually running at the time.
The game also had a lot of innovative little touches that have become staples of sports gaming in general. You could play out a full season, based on the 1990 NFL schedule, during which standings were kept which determined the playoffs at season end. You were also free to skip or play all the games on the schedule in any configuration you cared to. Though limited usually to only one or two alternates, there was a roster of backup players for each team who could be subbed in at any time, and this would often become necessary as players would succumb to random injuries from time to time during the season. Between games, you could also tweak the playbook a bit, choosing from a small assortment of different types. The game also kept track of both player and team records and statistics throughout the season, and had a running leaderboard. The real draw, however, was that it was two-player.
The gameplay is the really interesting part. Packed with glitches and little oddities, clever players would quickly figure out numerous ways to game the system and rack up ridiculous scores. Certain ‘star’ players were also so pumped up as to be broken – the famous example being Bo Jackson running loops around defenders and going back and forth from one end of the field to the other, as can probably be seen in many Youtube videos. The tackling and “tusslin'” mechanics were completely ridiculous. And the game would compensate for all this in “season” mode by pumping up the stats of opposing teams gradually throughout the year, and upping their odds of “busting” your offensive plays, so that by the time you got to the playoffs the game was virtually unwinnable without cheating and exploiting glitches.
Still, with all this weight on it, the game managed to be really fun to play, and still has legions of fans actively playing it and forming leagues nearly twenty years later. It has just the right dose of realism and authenticity to engage NFL fans, but the core gameplay is all fast action and instant gratification. In another bizarre-yet-brilliant twist, the cinematics employed in Tecmo’s Ninja Gaiden series were also used here to highlight major dramatic plays, and far from chopping the action up, it actually makes it much more viscerally satisfying!
Later entries for the Super NES and Genesis tightened the engine up a bit and delivered a technically more sound experience, but something about the peppy music, the over-the-top cinematics, the legendary “broken” players and the fast-and-loose gameplay makes this one the most compellingly entertaining entry in the series, and it’ll probably remain that way.
Links
Videos
- Bo Jackson doing his thing
- Christian Okoye plowing fools
- Watch out for Lawrence Taylor!
- Eli Manning Bowl
- Most Iconic Super Bowl Plays (recreated in Tecmo Super Bowl)
Tecmo Super Bowl (SNES, Tecmo, 1993)
Where to Buy: eBay
How to Emulate: coming soon!
Review by: C. M0use
Tecmo Super Bowl is pretty much content to just be a grade-up version of the NES game with nicer colors and rosters updated to the start of the 1993-94 season. Not that that’s a bad thing, though, as the direction taken by the series after this one was not to everyone’s tastes, so this is the last version that captured the classic “feel” of the NES games accurately (complete with peppy music playing as you move the ball up and down the field.)
The sprites don’t look much different from those of the NES version other than more vibrant and accurate colors. The cinematics have been redone, however, now featuring a bunch of overly ripped dudes (seriously, what quarterback or kicker is that bound up?) and some Mode 7 effects here and there. The new cinematics are OK, but largely uninspiring, and don’t really replicate the impact of the ones from the original. The music is pretty OK on the whole, with a number of remixes of the tunes of the previous game using a cool pipe organ sample as the lead instrument. Unfortunately, the classic “LEDDY! DOWN! HAT HAT HAT HAT HAT!” has been replaced by some dude who sounds like an 11 year old kid. You randomly get different play calls, which is nice, but I would rather have the manliness of the NES guy, this kid just sounds ridiculous.
If you didn’t like the play balance issues, glitchiness and sometimes baffling AI scripting of the previous game, you won’t much care for this one either as it’s virtually unchanged. Your defense is still totally useless unless you either make the play yourself or happen to pick the right counter-play. Gameplay doesn’t get quite as ridiculous towards the end of the season, actually ramping up to a decent challenge here, but as usual the playoffs are ridiculous if you have to face one of the already over-inflated teams (Buffalo and Dallas in this one.) Watching John Elway and Thurman Thomas run so fast away from the defense that they strain against the edge of the screen every single time they touch the ball might make you reconsider just starting the season over again to hope you don’t get them in the mix next time (though you nearly always do thanks to their stat abuse.)
Since this is 93-94 the Oilers are still in the AFC Central, Seattle is in the AFC as well, no Jags or Panthers yet, etc. I’m sure someone’s whipped up a roster patch over at knobbe.org, but otherwise teams and conferences can’t be re-jiggered so you’re stuck with the old school style. Also, you can only run one season using the 93-94 NFL schedule, no altering that either, no franchise mode, etc.
The real joy of the game is multi-player anyway, so the season mode glitchiness and cheapness really doesn’t matter all that much. This entry really could have (and should have) improved on the old TSB formula a lot more than it did, but as it stands it’s still one of the most fun NFL licensed football games of the 16 bit era.
Videos
Tecmo Super Bowl (PlayStation, Tecmo, 1996)
Where to Buy: Amazon
How to Emulate: coming soon!
Review by: C. M0use
The Playstation port of the beloved arcadey football series is basically Tecmo Super Bowl 3 beefed up a little in some areas, but also lacking some of its previous options — mostly those that involved saving data.
Tecmo Super Bowl 2 and 3 represented a pretty big aesthetic change from the previous games, with the Ninja Gaiden cinematics and peppy on-field music being abandoned for a more “realistic” sort of look. If you didn’t like that stylistic change, welp … too bad as it continues here. The one big new thing here is a quasi-3D in the style of the 16-bit Madden games, where you can rotate into a vertical view of the field rather than just the typical horizontal one. During stock gameplay, you’re still on the horizontal plane, but the game rotates automatically behind the kicker for field goals and extra points.
One nice new detail here is that the weather can change during games, and there’s a new announcer that keeps you apprised of this but he’s not particularly chatty otherwise only occasionally busting in with a “3rd and long … passing may be probable!” or something of that nature. The first Joe Montana SportsTalk game for Genesis had more advanced commentary tbqh.
The season mode features are actually a step down from the 16-bit games. Create-a-player from TSB 3 is gone, and you can’t mess with the rosters at all other than changing starters – no trading players. There’s a “free editor” that allows you to change the names, numbers and stats of existing players on the roster, but that’s kind of a cheap substitution for a proper season/dynasty mode.
The gameplay is still very solid, with more formations than previous games. However, this means the “steroid swarm of death” when a defense guesses the offensive play call is gone. Not everyone will miss it, but it did add a certain component to competitive play, where you would get to know an opponent and predict what they’re going to call in certain situations. Also was fun when you managed to toss a screen pass and get a few yards in spite of a busted play.
The enhanced capabilities of the Playstation offered an opportunity to really bring back the classic elements of the series that the fans loved in a blaze of glory and merge them with more modern functions … instead Tecmo just kinda went down the path of continuing to homogenize and Maddenize the game more, and this ended up being the end of the series until some halting attempts to revive it on portables ten years later.
Videos