“I’ve been embarrassed before in my life, but, uhh…”
-Mike Ditka
Sega Genesis
Released in 1991 by Ballistic
Grade: F
“God puts people in places for reasons, and he probably put me here to be humbled. I deserve it,” Ditka said in 1999, after a loss to the Atlanta Falcons. It was pretty bizarre to see the often brash coach speak so meekly. My theory? He played his video game.
Where it falls in the series
It’s the one and only. Ballistic never made another football game. “I don’t have it anymore. They broke me down today.”
Gripes
This game has the most unusual passing system. You drop back, and when you’re ready to throw, you STOP TIME! Yes, that’s correct. With all the players frozen in place, you have all day to survey the situation and choose where to throw. You could even decide to hold the ball longer, restart time, then stop it again.
Sounds too easy, right? It’s not. You’ll still throw a lot of incomplete passes. “There’s not very much talent on the offense. None.”
You need to finesse your receiver toward the ball in a tiny sliver of time, which seems impossible. Sometimes you get it right, but the guy still doesn’t make the catch. “We threw the ball deep … dropped it.”
The CPU opponent has no trouble with this, even on the the lowest difficulty setting. “They threw the ball deep … caught it.”
In fact, the CPU does the whole time-stopping process in an instant, and it’s quite disorienting trying to play defense. The camera jumps around and the players flicker. They don’t move with any lifelike flow. They’re like little robots, yet they’re aggravating to control. It’s hard to do anything right. “We don’t make plays, period.”
The playcall screen is junky and slow. The defensive plays don’t even have diagrams, just names! John Madden would never allow that in his video game. “I’m probably the wrong guy for this job, I’ll say that.”
The action has no pizazz. The AI is limited. There’s music in the background that repeats over and over, and if you turn it off, the game has hardly any sound at all. “I got nothing else to say. This is just silly.”