John Madden Duo CD Football (TurboGrafx CD) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
90A playthrough of Hudson Soft's 1993 football game for the TurboGrafx CD, John Madden Duo CD Football.
Played a regular season game as the Philadelphia Eagles against the New England Patriots. At 34:34 I show the game's credit sequence that you get when you win the playoffs - I did the playoffs as Dallas, as you can see from the bracket winner screen.
I hope that the Super Bowl tonight isn't quite as one-sided as this game turned out to be!
John Madden Duo CD Football is the Madden that time forgot. I vaguely remember when it was released because of a little blurb in some out of the way corner of a Game Pro magazine, but by 1993, nobody was paying attention to the Turbo anymore. Even if it was Madden, and even if it was the first game in the series to be released on CD.
But even if nobody noticed, the game was still really good. It was essentially an "enhanced" remake of Madden '93. Since Duo CD Football was a Super CD-ROM2 disc, hence the "Duo" in the title, it really shows off with some of the neat stuff that's been added. The star feature here is the inclusion of the FMV, and it looks great. Despite the lack of FMV that shows up in Turbo games (at least when compared to the Sega CD's library), Madden Duo really does show off how well the system could pull off FMV. I don't recall seeing full-screen video in any other Turbo game besides this one, but wow. It might not impress so much today, but that pre-rendered 3D intro must have absolutely blown people away in 1993. The constant pop-up video clips in-game are crystal clear and quite entertaining as well. Even the mundane ref shots are cool - they don't last longer than a few seconds, but they elevate things to a whole new level of fun gaudiness. I don't ever remember a ref shooting a gun at the end of football game, though. Was that a thing?
The in-game graphics are a bit more cartoony and a bit less smooth than they were on the Genesis, but the scrolling looks good, everything is easily recognizable, and the whole game moves along at a solid pace. I'm also a big fan of the title screen. John Madden appears to be suffering some sort psychotic episode in time with the awesome music, leaving me wonder if I should feel a bit guilty for laughing so hard at what looks like a serious medical issue. Even though there isn't much of it, the music is great (especially the Redbook stuff!), even if the PSG-generated tunes sound a bit out of place playing during video cutscenes. The in-game audio is pretty good too - there isn't much in the way of commentary, but you get lots of ambient crowd sounds and some pretty painful sounding crunches to listen to.
But regardless of the differences between the platforms themselves, John Madden Duo CD Football is essentially John Madden Football '93 for the TurboGrafx 16, and developed by Hudson instead of Electronic Arts. It's endlessly playable, hopelessly outdated, and still a blast to play.
I always loved how this one would let you get into your opponent's formation and push their center out of the way so that you could run in and sack the QB. Hahaha, how did they manage to miss that?
And that ending is absolutely amazing. I can't remember another sports game that had one that I enjoyed watching so much. It's a mash-up of clips of the development team socializing and doing random things, and it finishes with them all waving in front of the Hudson building. That was a super neat and unexpectedly personal touch right there.
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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