NES Replay: 10-Yard Fight

Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: 1985
Regret: High

American football was very difficult to do on older consoles, and still remains a challenge. To make a football game, you have to have 22 separate players on the screen all doing their own thing. They each require their own fuzzy logic like, “If this player is nearby you, do this, but if this happens, do that.”

That leaves aside the necessity of including playcalling and making the game fun to play. Most of the older systems couldn't handle it, and it took a long time for it to be perfected on the NES.

10-Yard-Fight was the first attempt. In order to make it work, Irem tried to get away with just 9 players per team and did away with plays. They whiffed on the whole ‘fun to play’ thing, though.
First of all, 10-Yard Fight is painfully simplistic on offense. You have two choices on every play: Throw a screen pass or a long pass. If you throw a screen pass, your player needs to just get outside the tackle box and keep running in order to break at least a 20-yard gain. That’s it. If you throw a long pass, your quarterback had better be outside of the tackles and there better not be any opposing player in between the QB and receiver or else the ball will get intercepted.

There’s another problem too. At the beginning of every play, there’s a man in motion who runs from the right side of the formation over to the left side. At some times, your team is wedged up against the sidelines and you need that guy to run over to the left side. If you want to wait for him to walk all the way from one side of the formation to the other, prepare to claw your eyes out. It takes 10 seconds for your man in motion to run across the formation, and it ticks off an entire minute in game time.

Can you believe that? It's insane! I could run across the formation twice in that time period, and I’m a fat 30-year-old! In that time span, my unborn child was born, grew up, got married and died at age 82 surrounded by family and friends! Continents arose from the primordial depths, supported civilizations for countless eons, and then sunk into the sea! Half-Life 3 came out! That's an interminable amount of time!

Defense fares no better. On defense, you just need to position your player nearby the opposing ballcarrier to stop his progress, or position yourself in between the QB and his receiver. That’s all, and you’ve stopped forward progress. Just like real football!

In order to get around this, the computer cheats on higher levels. They’ll run faster than you, won’t get tackled as easy, and generally be an enormous pain. That’s a surefire sign that they couldn’t get the game to work as intended and just decided to leave it as-is.

The developers had to have known that they weren’t going to be able to pull off a football simulation from the get-go. Why did they even try? With a few tweaks, they could have made 10-Yard Fight feel more like football while being a lot more fun.

For one, there’s no need for an arcade-style football game to have five offensive linemen. If they would have reduced the number down to three, they could have had two receivers, one on the left side and one on the right side. Since there would be only eight players instead of nine, that could have sped up the pace of the game as well.

Also, it appears that the developers considered a ball in flight to be the same as a ball on the ground. That might have been fixed a Boolean value. When the ball is being thrown, it’s considered “low to the ground” nearby the QB. When it’s in the air, consider it “high above the ground.” As it approaches its target, it’s low to the ground again and can be intercepted. Maybe they didn’t have the horsepower to pull that off, but if they reduced the amount of linemen onscreen, they could have freed up clock cycles to pull off that sort of advanced behavior.

Even with its flaws, it’s understandable why Nintendo would have offered this as a launch game. At the time, this was the most advanced American football game on the market, and they wanted to show off what the NES could do. Football is insanely popular here, so they figured they could get some easy sales.

However, as it is, 10-Yard Fight just doesn’t work. The computer cheats horribly, playing defense is way too easy, and just everything about 10-Yard Fight is unfun from top to bottom. I have to give Nintendo credit for trying, but just like in the real game of football, you don't get any points for incompletions.

Final Rating:

Criminally Overlooked: Better Than Ezra: "How Does Your Garden Grow?"

Being in a band is easy if you don't have any desire to be respected. It's just a matter of making whatever people like and following the train to Moneytown.

Take the band Sugar Ray, for example. They had a one-off pop hit in 1997 named "Fly" that sounded like a fun reggae-themed jam, sold like crazy, made them tons of money, and everyone hates now. The problem was that the album that "Fly" came from, Floored, was a rap/rock album, and no one liked any other tracks off of it. What was a non-self-respecting band to do?

Sugar Ray decided that they were better off following the money, and abandoned all rap-rock aspirations with their next album, 14:59. 14:59 was a fun reggae-themed album, sold like crazy, made them tons of money, and everyone hates it now. But big deal! Sugar Ray made money, and that was all that mattered.

If Sugar Ray had more self-respect, they may have said, "Hey, we make rap/rock, we like rap/rock, and we'll make more rap/rock, no matter what people say. Deal with it." They didn't, and they made tons of money. C'est la vie.

That brings us to Better Than Ezra. They had one big hit in 1995, with a song called "Good." Everyone sing along with the chorus!

"A-wah-haw. It was goooood, living with you wah-haw. It was goooood, living with you wah-haw."

Better Than Ezra, to their credit, didn't just want to be the band that made "Good." They wanted to be Real Artists. They tried with their next album, Friction, Baby, to prove that they could do just that. The album cover was even in black-and-white! That's as artistic as you can get!

Even though Friction, Baby was a really good record, they still got no respect for being a "real band." The public at large still viewed them as a one-hit wonder because of a song that had an unfortunate vocal tic. That mean that it was time for them to throw down the gauntlet and prove that Better Than Ezra was a Real Band, that they were True Artists that made Important Music.

Their next album, released in 1998, was called How Does Your Garden Grow? It was subtitled "A Series of Nocturnes," the first track was called "Je Ne M'en Souviens Pas," and it had electronic flourishes and two-part songs because that is Just What You Did when you wanted to prove you were a Serious Artist.

It would be easy to dismiss Garden as the work of a band adorably overreaching their actual talent level, and the first two tracks don't dispell that notion. The first track is desparately trying to sound mysterious and intellectual, with mumbled vocals and distored female vocal loops. The second track, "One More Murder," is their Message Song, where they try to end gun violence in their home of New Orleans forever through a song that tells people that it's bad. Like most Message Songs, it just ends up sounding turgid and silly in retrospect.

Then something happens. It's almost as if frontman Kevin Griffin really wanted to be a Serious Artist, doing electronically looped songs and songs that would blow your mind, but he just couldn't hold back his inner songsmith any longer. "At the Stars" is a lush, joyous, singalong of a song, three minutes of pop perfection that he follows up with two more catchy pop tunes, "Like It Like That" and "Alison Foley."

The rest of the album shifts back and forth between solid songwriting chops to electronic, Serious Artist pieces. No matter what, he can't keep away from those hooks, those dreadful, awful, wonderful, earworm-y hooks. It's almost like you can hear Griffin fighting himself:

"I know I have to prove that I'm a true artist, but dang if that hook doesn't sound pretty! But, no, I have to be an artist. How can you call yourself an artist if people actually like your music? But, oh, that chorus would be perfect here!"

The whole album switches back and forth like that, from electronic-based tracks back to catchy pop numbers and back again. If it sounds awful, the surprise is that it really isn't. It actually sounds like an artist trying something new and succeeding repeatedly, then retreating to safer ground when things get too scary.

That dichotomy can be best heard in the last two tracks, the dreadfully titled "New Kind of Low a) Low b) Coma," and the similarly awfully-titled "Waxing or Waning?" "New Kind of Low" opens with a blistering guitar-rock track where he sing-speaks half of the self-deprecating lyrics, then remembers that this album is supposed to be serious, doggoneit. The second half breaks out in an electronica and trip-hop influenced part that wouldn't sound out of place as the background music of a femme fatale in a Bond film. Then, finally, he just says "screw it" and makes "Waxing or Waning?" a lush acoustic track with a gentle chorus to conclude the album.

Garden was not a successful album commercially, and Better Than Ezra would get dropped from their label after its poor performance. They're still making albums and they have a few more minor hits under their belt, but none have been as adventurous as Garden. It's almost as if, chastened by their reach exceeding their grasp, they retreated into a shell from which they're not ready to emerge anytime soon.

Still, a wildly ambitious album desperate to prove something important that got quickly forgotten by the public at large but still managed to be pretty good? That sounds Criminally Overlooked to me.

Microsoft @ E3 2012: All That Needs To Be Said

Nintendo @ E3 2012: The 3DS Software Showcase, Or How To Disappoint an Audience Without Really Trying

Nintendo did their 3DS presentation yesterday, demonstrating upcoming games for the handheld. If you watched the comments alongside the stream last night, the comments were overwhelmingly negative.

"Show us something new!" "Where's Zelda?" "This is boring!" "We already know about these games!"

I too, left the presentation a little cold. I was really hoping for something new. When they cut to Reggie Fils-Amie at the end, I was hoping for some big reveal, and instead he just told the presenter that he did a great job. I was incredibly disappointed as I walked away.

However, as I chewed it over, though, I realized something: We're incredibly spoiled.

Listen: We're getting two new Mario games, one of which is an RPG that looks very promising and another a side-scrolling Mario game. We're getting Kingdom Hearts, Castlevania, Scribblenauts, Luigi's Mansion, and Lego Batman 2.

Yet we're still whining! Why is that?

It's actually pretty simple: When you announce a separate presentation to showcase your software, there are certain expectations. I tuned in expecting to hear an announcement of a new game, not a rehash of what was already announced, and I suspect a lot of other people felt the same way. It's only natural to have that sort of reaction. After all, that's what companies do at E3, and Nintendo made a point of setting aside extra time to show off their software. It felt a little misleading.

That doesn't mean that it was a bad presentation. After all, I know a lot more about Paper Mario than I did before, and New Super Mario Bros. 2 makes a little more sense to me now (but just a little). But we all expected a little something extra, frankly.

I think that's why Nintendo made a brief announcement after the show that Fire Emblem: Awakening was making it to Western shores. They must have picked up on the hostility and decided to drop that little nugget to defuse it.

But to be perfectly honest, what more could we really ask from the 3DS in the coming months? There are going to be more than enough games to play for a while of all different types. We really shouldn't be whining as much as we are.

Are We Approaching Mario Oversaturation?

A long time ago, I had an article entitled "A Warning For Activision" wherein I said that Activision was going back to the well far too often for their franchises and drew some comparisons with Sega. I made the same argument with Mega Man too, expressing concern that Capcom was destroying the Blue Bomber with multiple trips to the well.

Now I find myself taking Nintendo to task for the same thing: Too many Mario games!

In the Mega Man article, I pointed out that Nintendo had been extremely careful with Mario during his 27-year lifespan, releasing only 16 games up until this point:

4 - NES (Mario Bros, Super Mario Bros 1-3)
3 - Game Boy (Super Mario Land 1-3)
2 - SNES (Super Mario World, Yoshi's Island)
1 - N64 (Super Mario 64)
1 - Gamecube (Super Mario Sunshine)
1 - DS (New Super Mario Bros.)
3 - Wii (Super Mario Galaxy 1 & 2, New Super Mario Bros. Wii)
1 - 3DS (Super Mario 3D Land)

But something funny has happened in the last six years. Since Nintendo hit the jackpot with New Super Mario Bros. in 2006, they've been on an absolute tear with new Mario games. Here's what we'll see released since 2006 through to the end of this year:

1 - DS (New Super Mario Bros.)
3 - Wii (Super Mario Galaxy 1 & 2, New Super Mario Bros. Wii)
2 - 3DS (Super Mario 3D Land, New Super Mario Bros. 2)
1 - Wii U (New Super Mario Bros. Mii)

That works out to more than a game a year. That's too much Mario.

New Super Mario Bros. was an amazing success, undoubtedly. Speaking from personal experience, I can say that when I first played it, I knew I needed a DS that instant. It had been so long since I played a new Mario game that I was positively famished for it.

Each game since then has brought something new to the table, whether it's crazy gravity hijinks, the inclusion of 3D, multiplayer or just tightened gameplay. New Super Mario Bros. Mii is going to bring more collaboration, I suppose.

However, I can't for the life of me figure out what New Super Mario Bros. 2 is supposed to bring to the table. I know that digital distribution is going to be a big part of it, but if that's the only reason it's seeing release, it just seems like a shameless money grab more than some substantial upgrade.

I guess we'll find out on August 19th.

Nintendo @ E3 2012: Snap Judgments

After seeing the hardware demonstration from Nintendo, here are some quick takes on it.


1) Nintendo did everything they needed to in the hardware portion of their conference.

The problem among most gamers was "How will the tablet work well with games? Am I going to have to swing it around?" Those questions have been answered. The Wii U has been demonstrated clearly and openly, so it should totally make sense now.

2) You can use two tablet controllers.

Finally, the question everyone wanted answered has been answered. Frankly, if it would have been one tablet, I would have been mad.

3) Still no price or release date.

Sigh.

4) Will Nintendo filter comments on New Super Mario Bros U?

If I'm playing New Super Mario Bros U and I see comments pop up about the game, will I see profanity? Crudely drawn penises using ASCII text? Or will Nintendo filter those for content? Sounds like a huge job for them.

5) Scribblenauts Unlimited is a great idea for the Wii U.

Scribblenauts is the kind of game that would be great for collaboration, and the Wii U is just the perfect place for it. The tablet controller will make it easy to use too. Maybe we'll see a Drawn to Life too.

6) The "theme park" game is so-so.

It's called NintendoLand, and I'm not so sure about it. Maybe once more people try it out they'll be able to say if it's any good.

That's all for now.

It's E3 Time! How Will Nintendo Do?

E3 is upon us, and it's like Christmas in June for gamers. For Nintendo fans, we have extra reason to be excited.

Nintendo is slowly pulling back the curtain on the Wii U, and what's out there so far looks interesting. Nintendo is primed to have a great E3 if we get answers to a few pressing questions.

• What will Nintendo price the Wii U at?

If it's priced at $399, it's going to be in trouble. If it's $299, that's great, but will it be enough for Nintendo to turn a profit?

• What's Retro working on?

Retro is apparently working on a big new project for the Wii U. There were rumors of it being a StarFox/Metroid mashup, but those seem to be quashed. So what are they doing over there?

• What games will the Wii U launch with?

Will it be an awful launch library like the 3DS? That nearly killed the 3DS in the cradle, and Nintendo can't afford another near-miss like that.

Hey, speaking of the 3DS:

• What games are on the horizon?

We know that Smash Bros. and New Super Mario Bros. 2 are certain, but what else is on the way? A new Zelda? A new Pokemon (besides Black & White 2)? A totally new IP?

• What's up with the redesign?

There are rumors about a 3DS redesign. It's not a smaller version, but a bigger one, like the DSiXL. Um... why? Anything else this thing does, or is it just bigger? Because if it's just bigger, that's weird.

• What's happening to the Wii and DS?

They're obviously going to send the Wii and DS to the big spike pit in the sky, but are Xenoblade Chronicles and The Last Story set to be the last great games for the Wii? Is Pokemon Black & White 2 set to be the DS' last hurrah, or is there more coming?

How Nintendo does this E3 will depend entirely on the answers to these questions. For my money, here are my answers:

1. $299
2. StarFox for Wii U
3. A LOT, including Pikmin 3 and New Super Mario Bros. Mii
4. A new Zelda and a new Metroid, as well as a new IP
5. It's stupid
6. One more big game for the DS, nothing more for the Wii

We'll see if I'm right in a few days.