Tecmo Super Bowl

In the January 1997 issue of GamePro, Tecmo ran an ad for the PS1 adaptation of Tecmo Super Bowl, the sequel to the company's most famous sports game. The ad spans two pages, the left presenting a drawing of an Oakland Raiders' ball-carrier emerging from the Tecmo Super Bowl jewel case, the right bearing the phrase "It's UN-BOWL-IEVABLE" atop four columns of text in 10-point font. The text is arranged under nine sub-headings. The ad is text-heavy, to put it plainly, and it reads like it was written by someone's CEO dad, who figured that explaining the appeals of the game very rationally, lucidly, sensibly, and at times laconically, all in a tone that is one part inter-office memo, one part life-lesson, would be the best way to sell Tecmo Super Bowl. The content of this advertorial-styled text is what will concern us here, as the game essentially reviews itself therein.

The text starts by promising that "Tecmo Super Bowl allows the user to trade any player, to any team, at any time. With this feature you have the ability to create your own Super Team. Just be careful when you're playing a friend. You had better make sure he [sic] didn't set you up. The only advice we can give is check your opponent's roster." The author(s) then goes on to the audio: "Tecmo Super Bowl's announcer gives true Play by Play [emphasis in original], not just an occasional phrase or two. If perhaps you think he's an idiot, you always have the option of turning him off." Then there is tournament mode, to which the author adds a dash of laconic levity: "Over the years Tecmo Super Bowl players have let us [the developers, presumably] know about the friendly competitions which sometimes take place. This version has a built in tournament mode for a total of 8 players playing one on one till one of the players wins the tournament. Chips and drinks are sadly not included." There are then four full sentences dedicated to the difficulty levels: "Knowing that some people haven't been playing Tecmo Super Bowl for years we've included 3 difficulty settings. Easy, Normal and Hard. Our football game gives you the ability to grow with the game. Internally we call this a screen save 'cause you don't have to throw a rock through the TV screen when you get frustrated with the game." Again, the writer—his or her hand presumably guided by someone in senior management who did not play video games, nor set foot in middle-class households—scrabbles to get the tone right, as is evident from the apostrophic shortening of "because." The wry wit returns for the description of instant replay: "If you want to analyze the last several seconds of play, simply pause the game and start the instant replay. In addition you can go frame by frame to fully analyze all of the action. Then again, you may not want to see the interception again, and again, and again, and again." By this point, having detailed the rather rudimentary feature of instant replay, which had been in football video games for approximately five years by this point, the advertorial seems just a bit condescending. The ad moves on to the game's statistical capabilities: "Tecmo's stats engine has always been unsurpassed. This year we've added the ability to keep the stats from any player in any position even if it's only for 1 play during the entire season. Here's your one and only chance to re-write the record book." Okay. And as for the play-calling capabilities: "From the game play menu, you now have access to the entire playbook for the immediate play. ...for [sic] more plays than you can possibly want, use, call, send-in, modify, change, and/or run as the case may be."

To this point, none of these features seem particularly revolutionary. Only when it comes to weather does the advertisement (if not the game itself) speak to something original: "Ordinary football games sometimes have weather conditions. So far as we know, Tecmo Super Bowl is the only game to actually change the weather during the game. So one minute it could be raining, and then it could start snowing, or then again stop or actually it's too variable to give you all the possible scenarios." From here the advertorial-cum-term paper moves into its conclusion, under the heading "MORE, MORE AND MORE": "We've tried to highlight some of the most important new features of Tecmo Super Bowl for the Sony PlayStation. Obviously, there are more features than we can possibly list. Tecmo Super Bowl is one of the most realistic and sophisticated football simulators ever created. Aside from all the technical improvements, think about the following: [...]." It is at this point that the advertorial switches its mode of persuasion from rhetorical to mathematical, providing this formula: "1 TECMO SUPER BOWL/1 SONY PLAYSTATION/1 Television + 2 OR MORE PLAYERS = GREAT FOOTBALL FUN."

For those rationalists among the gaming crew, this straightforward, detailed explanation might have us wetting our lips. But rationalism died out in advertising in the 1920s. Even if your game (or any product, really), lives up to the arguments and overall thesis you put forward in the advertisement, it will do little to sway a consumer. Since Edward Bernays introduced psychoanalytic principles to public relations and advertising, desire has been all the rage in selling products. In that sense, Tecmo's ad-staff and CEO were about seven decades behind the curve. They fare better when it comes to football video games, as they’re only a several years behind. Tecmo Super Bowl does not even live up to its description. Graphically, it’s a pixelated nightmare, even compared to contemporaneous offerings of Madden and Gameday. Moreover, the announcer is minimalistic. The only redeeming feature is the ability to trade any player to any team. Regardless, Tecmo Bowl for NES this is not, and reading the above description, you almost feel as if you don't have to play the game to know that. Rereading the ad in the context of Tecmo Super Bowl’s failings, it comes off more like an argument justifying the game’s existence, rather than attesting to any merit it might actually have. It is, in sum, not "GREAT FOOTBALL FUN", but more like MODERATE FOOTBALL FUN, at best. Tecmo Super Bowl, then, is one game that reads a lot better than it plays.

NCAA Football 2000

In the seventh chapter of his 2017 book ­­Bit by Bit, novelist Andrew Ervin sketches a compelling analogy between the history of video games and that of visual art. He parallels innovations made by Renaissance painters like da Vinci and Michelangelo with advancements made in video game development in the 32-bit era. While visual culture in the Middle Ages was characterized by a flatness of perspective and lack of dimensionality, Renaissance painters introduced depth of field, creating the impression of three dimensions on the canvass. Ervin submits that "one could say that Sony PlayStation and the Nintendo 64, successors to the SNES, accomplished something similar" (104). The PS1 and N64, then, in adding 3-dimensionality to video-gaming through the rotation of thousands of polygons per second, moved video games away from the flat, two dimensional imaginaries of the 8- and 16-bit eras and, in effect, ushered in something of a “renaissance” in their own right. Superficially, this comparison has a sort of intuitive momentum on account of the direct correspondence upon which it is founded: just like the Renaissance, game-designers of the 32/64-bit era added dimension to the visual representations they were creating. Adding dimension, however, does not a Renaissance make; truth be told, the 32- and 64-bit era was hardly a golden age for video games.

A fitting case in point is NCAA Football 2000. Among the most prominent selling points of the fin-du-millénaire edition of EA's popular college football franchise were its graphics. While its precursor NCAA 99 was the first in the series to feature three-dimensional polygonal graphics, NCAA 2000 updated the player models such that they came in varying sizes, and could be fully displayed in an array of camera angles during gameplay. Accordingly, wide receivers are lean and wiry, while linemen are Bunyanesque hosses. To the sports gamer of 1999, the year in which NCAA 2000 was released, this would have looked quite alluring. To the contemporary eye, however, NCAA 2000's graphics are abominable. Even when assuming the forgiving attitude the old-school gamer typically affords graphics from previous eras, NCAA 2000 is still an eye-sore. Especially problematic are those full-figured linemen, all of whom look like bloated quadrangular blobs. Of course, after the snap, it is nigh impossible to distinguish the bigger blobs from the littler ones, and play proceeds mostly in pixelated clumps. Animations, when discernible, are rigid and attenuated, and the gameplay is much the same, suffering from a damning combination of floaty movement and yet stiff articulation of actions. The game’s motion-captured sequences look passable in screen shots, but in-game they imbue the players with a jittery, cretinous manner of ambulation, a somewhat jarring break from their otherwise wooden movement patterns. In short, NCAA 2000 might have been better appreciated as a painting...in the Middle Ages. At present, NCAA looks and plays no more pleasingly than those vibrating motorized electric football games that were in currency (I hesitate to say "popular") in the 1960s and 70s.

Playing NCAA 2000, then, is to hearken back even further than the end of the 90s, to a time before video games, and potentially even a time before electricity. Seeing the abstract, undifferentiated masses wrought by these developers eager to make forays into polygonal graphics, one has scant convincing evidence for characterizing the PS1/N64 epoch as a "renaissance" of video gaming. Playing NCAA Football 2000, one wonders if the 32- and 64-bit era isn't more accurately described as a Dark Age.

NCAA Football 2000 is not without its bright spots, however, especially when it comes to bells and whistles. The game includes, for instance, a "Create-a-School" mode, which delivers as advertised, allowing you to pick the logo, stadium and even enrollment numbers for a cow college-cum-contender. Also, NCAA 2000 features a thoughtful "Great Games" mode in which the player can jump straight into bowl games of bygone eras, among other classics, such as the 1946 "Game of the Century" between Notre Dame and Army, which ended in a thrilling 0-0 tie.

As bowl season swings around, one might see NCAA 2000 among the cheap PS1 refuse in their local game store and get tempted to purchase it, revisiting the game as they would revisit classic bowl games of the past. Isn't there, after all, an ineffable appeal in a dizzying plurality of over-hyped perfunctory one-off playoff games for arbitrary championships named for foodstuffs and B-grade corporate entities? For even the most acute sufferer of bowl mania, however, NCAA 2000 is not the prescription. Although NCAA 2000 may have serviced a yearning among contemporaneous college-football fans, it is anything but timeless. Quite unlike a good piece of art, NCAA 2000 does not stand the test of time, not only against present-day college football fare, but even compared to college football games released a couple years later (such as NCAA 2002 for PS2). Its concomitant competitor on PS1, NCAA Gamebreaker 2000 by 989 Sports, though not a great game in itself, has actually aged better, largely on account of the fact that the developers weren't so overambitious with their player models. So while NCAA Football 2000's developers and many, many others in the 32-/64-bit era attempted a dimensional innovation not unlike that of Renaissance painters, the comparison falters when we consider outcomes. Da Vinci and other Renaissance artists did the additional dimension well. It wouldn’t be until the PS2/X-Box/GameCube era that three dimensions worked with consistent efficacy in video games. Like so many other games released for PS1 and N64, NCAA 2000 attempts to expand dimensionality, but it does so at the expense of coherence.