NFL (NES) Playthrough
109A playthrough of LJN's 1989 license-based football game for the NES, NFL.
In this video, I play the Super Bowl as the Kansas City Chiefs versus the San Francisco 49ers.
Super Bowl 58 happens this coming Sunday, so I hope y'all are you ready for some old-school football games! And since it was the first video game to ever rock an official NFL license, I figured that I'd kick things off with LJN's NFL.
All twenty-eight NFL teams are represented, there are four game modes (AFC games, NFC games, interconference games, and the Super Bowl), and the game has a novel "team package" system that allows you to tailor a team's strengths and weaknesses to your preferred play style, as well as a handicap option that'll boost the abilities of select positions at the cost of incurring RNG-based fumbles and penalties.
It has a lot in common with its big brother, LJN's Major League Baseball (https://youtu.be/18Hon9so10M), the first game to bear the MLB license. NFL, too, is a North American-exclusive title developed by Atlus that features real-life teams and offers options that allow players to micromanage various aspects of their team's performance.
Unfortunately, NFL also shares the distinction of being far and away the worst representation of its sport to see an American release on the console. It's not as buggy and broken a game as MLB, but it's somehow even slower and less fun to play.
The playbook provides a lot of options - there are sixteen offensive plays and sixteen defensive plays to choose from - but instead of using a menu-based selection screen, you call your next play by hitting a combination of buttons when the scoreboard is being shown. If you want to throw a short shotgun pass, for example, you'd hold right and hit B, and then you'd hold left and hit A. There's no in-game reference telling you which combos trigger which plays, and the manual doesn’t list them - they're only given on a thoroughly inconvenient poster - so unless you've committed them to memory, you'll probably be relying on pure luck. It's a needlessly convoluted system, and it becomes even more so if you're attempting to use audibles.
Things don't fare so well on the field, either. The players generally move at the speed of molasses. The game intentionally slows to a crawl whenever the QB is scanning the field for his intended receiver, and though the action speeds up once the ball is thrown, it always feels sluggish and unresponsive.
This is compounded by the game's wonky sense of scale and distance: as a pass approaches its target, the screen switches to a zoomed-in view to let you line up your players to make the catch, and once the catch is made, it flips back to the wider view of the field. These jarring transitions break the flow of the action, and since the game can only display up to three players in the zoomed in view, the screen doesn't accurately reflect what's happening around you.
The lack of consistency makes it incredibly difficult to keep track of what's happening in these moments, as do the constant interruptions caused by the game's loading times. Just like MLB, NFL regularly leaves you staring at a blank green screen for two or three seconds as it figures itself out, and this sometimes happens even in the middle of a play.
Of the NES's seven football games, NFL is the only one that can be called a truly irredeemable piece of trash, and it sits among the worst of the games ever published for the platform. Even by LJN's standards, this is dire.
_____________\nNo cheats were used during the recording of this video. \n\nNintendoComplete (http://www.nintendocomplete.com/) punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!