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What better way to compliment Monday Night Football than with a review of a Genesis NFL game? I’ll tell you a better way: include a game actually worth playing. The Joe Montana series was notoriously hit and miss, and the ’93 installment appears to be one of the bigger misses. Among the problems cited are a clunky interface and poor AI. Hey, that actually doesn’t sound too far off from this year’s Madden! We kid about that last part, but the Montana part is still true.
With all the football games available on the Genesis, you’d expect some of them to be bad. What you wouldn’t expect is for any of them to be this bad. ESPN Sunday Night NFL is a train wreck of a game that does nothing to keep players interested, and about the only real football sensation anyone will get from playing it is that of a quarterback when they toss this turd across the room.
Bill Walsh passed away last year at age at seventy-five, leaving behind three Super Bowl victories and two college bowl championships at Standford University. Quite the Hall of Fame career, one would think, but as impressive as coaching Joe Montana to three rings may be, it pales in comparison to having your own Genesis game! Electronic Arts immortalized Walsh in gaming with the stellar and imaginatively named Bill Walsh College Football for multiple consoles.
There are great football games… and then there’s Pro Quarterback. Tradewest’s train wreck of a release tried to emulate the SNES’ Mode 7 scaling, despite the fact that the stock hardware didn’t support such a feature. The result was a choppy mess of a game that, along with the lack of real teams and players, ranks at the bottom of the list of play-worthy titles in the genre.
In 1991, Sega shocked Genesis owners with Joe Montana II: Sports Talk Football. Aside from changing the game’s vertical perspective to a horizontal one (an internal team had been working on one for the original, but it was scrapped in favor of EA’s vertical game), Sega also added play-by-play commentary. Though it might seem cheesy today, this was unheard for consoles at the time, and it marked an important step in bringing realism to sports games.