Super Play Action Football

The Good
It is easy to see that a lot of work went into this game. Most of the flaws that cripple the experience are in the gameplay. The positives include:

• A detailed playbook and the ability to call an audible at the line of scrimmage.

• NFL, College and High school modes. *NFL has all the teams of the time complete with official logos. There are 97 colleges to choose from. Unlike the NFL mode, they do not use official names (ex: "Notre Dame" is "ND". Duke is "Fluke". UCLA is "LA of CA") but the colors are accurate. College mode also using a ranking system and bowl games. High school mode uses a simplified playbook and game mechanics for beginners and the ability to name your own team.

The game utilized real in-game penalties, but this is both good and bad since "holding" calls seem to appear at random.

The Bad
The gameplay holds this game back from being truly great.

One thing that could have dramatically improved this game would be to remove the "fatigue" feature. If you play NFL mode you will constantly be having to substitute players in and out of the game. Including your starting QB. It is a broken feature that never should have been in the final game.

The players move slow, so, throwing a long pass requires the QB to drop back at least 20 yards to both avoid defenders, give your reciever enough time to get downfield and to scramble out of the pocket.

On every pass, unless it is a screen dump off to the running back, you NEED to scramble out of the pocket. Any pass that goes over the linemen will either be blocked or intercepted. While scrambling, you will also be tapping the "A" button to sprint, which uses energy, which means your fatigue goes down.

Every action you do affects your fatigue. Even if you have a good RB and hand the ball off to him for a big run, if you used the sprint, stiff arm or spin features, the very next play that RB will be out of energy and will move very slow and possibly even fumble or get injured.

Of course you may naturally think, "why not hand it off to someone else?" you could, but it would pretty much be a waste of a play since no FB or QB sneak is going to get you significant yardage and its not like that original RB will be fully recovered on the next play. All fatigued players who are fully spent take forever to re-gain their energy and like I said, its not just one player. It's every player. If your QB sprints to complete a pass and your WR carries the ball 30 yards down field, on the next play both players are going to be out of or nearly out of energy. So why not hand it off? Oh that RB is out of energy, too.

The fatigue system is so broken that I find the best pass play is the "Fake Punt Pass" It puts the QB 15 yards behind the line of scrimmage so you're far away enough from defenders where you have a bit of a head start on avoiding them to give your recievers enough time to get down field to complete a pass.

But what kind of fun is that? You have a 32 play playbook in NFL mode and I find myself using 3 plays on offense.

The RB pitch called "sweep right" because its better to pitch the ball and run outside and to ever run up the middle in this game. The shotgun pass and the fake punt pass.

Every action is manual, too, which is ok if you can get used to it, but they should have utilized the difficulty modes differently. Have "normal" be more manual settings and "beginner" be more automatic controls. Instead, "normal" just means more penalties are called that you don't see in beginner mode. Oh, fun.

What do I mean by every action is manual? You need to hit a button to hand the ball off or to pitch it out to the RB. This can get messy in reverse plays that I see the CPU use, but I wouldn't recommend for players since you're just going to drain the fatigue of potentially 4 or 5 players instead of jusst 1 or 2.

You also have separate buttons for long passes and short passes. You don't chose the receiver like in Tecmo Super Bowl or hit a designated button for that reciever like in the Madden series. You have to look at the map and if the reciever is far down field and to the right you hold right and Y.

After throwing you then have to manually finish the receiver's route, again by looking at the map, and if that reciever is covered, you need to jump in front of the defender to catch the ball or else it will be intercepted. Throwing short passes is especially difficult because the ball moves pretty fast and often the QB throws it right by the man he is throwing to. Often you will need to sprint or even dive to catch a short pass which ends up wasting your energy. (Again, the fatigue meter)

As for this map, you'll spend most of the game looking at the little map in the upper-left corner of the screen with little dots to indicate the players that you will actually looking at the field. The map is very helpful, but I should have to be looking at it most of the game and I wouldn't have to if the game automatically completed reciever's routs and I could trust them to catch the ball on their own without it getting picked off.

"High school" mode actually fixes a lot of these issues, but who wants to play a mode with 4 plays and no season? You want to play as your favorite NFL or college team and not have to worry about fatigue.

I will add this, it is incredibly easy to block FG's and punts. It is also easy to recover onside kicks, especially if the wind is in your favor. Given all the issues this game has, I don't feel cheap at all by never kicking the ball off. Especially if the other team has a fast kick returner, don't even bother kicking to him. Take your chances with an onside kick. Even if you don't recover, at least you got tackled some slow guy for no yardage instead of letting that speedy KR score on you.

The Bottom Line
The game had potential and its obvious people who know the sport of football made this game. The problem is they tried to make it too realistic for it's time and there's too man manual controls that just end up handicapping the player.

This game came out in 1992. The SNES releases Tecmo Super Bowl the next year, which is an excellent football game. I'd suggest you play that one instead.