Have you seen the commercial for “Blitz: The League” yet?
I’ve only seen it a couple of times myself, but I’m pretty sure that during the course of the commercial, in a scene set in a football game, a player takes off his helmet and swings it at another player’s head while he’s chasing him.
I’m not really sure what kind of message Midway, a video game production company, is sending with this game, but it certainly is a radical interpretation of football reality.
Also, “Blitz” is going the be the only pro football game coming out this season, other than “John Madden Football,” because the creators of “Madden,” Electronic Arts, recently purchased exclusive rights from the National Football League and the NFL Player’s Association to create a game based on the NFL. This means that any pro football game not produced by EA must be fantasy-based. No real teams, no real players. And they will suck.
So what’s the obvious thing for Midway to do since they can’t use NFL teams and players? Go the other direction and create an anti-NFL football game.
This is the grimy side of football, supposedly. The real deal that goes on behind closed doors, out of the media’s reach. Kind of like what just happened to those guys from the Vikings, one of which was Fred Smoot. Go State!
My initial reaction to this game was disappointment. I’m tired of the mean video games. But I’ve resigned myself to the notion that this was simply bound to happen. In the new millennium, video games have become R-rated movies that you can control, and it’s not going to stop at football.
But do you remember the old days of football video games? Allow me to take you back.
First, there were a lot of football games in the past that ranged from decent to good. Some people love the old self-contained video football game that you held in your lap. It was shaped like a football stadium and the screen was in the middle where the field would be.
I had one, but I thought it was boring.
Fast-forward to “Tecmo Super Bowl,” the first football game to be given the prestigious honor of “great.”
And let me tell you, man, that was the most fun you could have pretending to be in the NFL. So let’s count the reasons why.
First of all, you got eight plays to choose from, up from four in the original “Tecmo Football.” You got four running plays and four passing plays, and you could actually trade them out for better plays from your team’s playbook.
Second, you could save your seasons. This is something we take for granted these days, but back in the early ’90s most games didn’t allow you to save your progress.
Third, there were so many dominant players. For instance, Lawrence Taylor, who provides the voice of the main character in Blitz, was unstoppable on “Tecmo.” If you played with the New York Giants, who won the Super Bowl the year the game was created, you were guaranteed a sack or at least a great pass rush on virtually every play. And if the other team started to run plays away from L.T., you switched to Pepper Johnson and continued the defensive destruction.
Then, of course, there were Montana and Rice in San Fran, an almost guaranteed complete passing play as long as Montana didn’t get sacked. Plus, they had Ronnie Lott on defense, who was so juiced on the game that he could rush from his spot at safety and make a play anywhere on the field.
Bo Jackson and Marcus Allen were so dominant for the Raiders that they would both end up with 250 rushing yards in the same game.
Come to think of it, I’ve always wondered why neither Randall Cunningham nor Jim Kelly, who had a surprisingly Montana/Rice-like passing relationship in the game with Andre Reed, was featured on “Tecmo Super Bowl.” They were simply referred to as Quarterback Eagles and Quarterback Bills, respectively.
I guess someone else already owned the rights to their names.