[YouTube] Tecmo Bowl Retrospective

[CGQuarterly]

YouTube Link

 

In the latest episode of CGQ-TV, I take a look back at Tecmo Bowl and Tecmo Super Bowl, as well as showcasing Tecmo Super Bowl 2014.

[BassGuitari]

Tecmo Super Bowl is my all-time favorite football game. The Packers are my team, but I like playing with other shit teams too, like the Cardinals, Buccaneers, Colts, Patriots, Browns. Anybody can win with the '49ers, Giants, or Bills; it takes skill to win with the Tecmo Bengals. And thanks to Tecmo, complete NFL nobodies like Bob Nelson, Timm Rosenbach, Wayne Haddix, and Anthony Dilweg are immortalized.

And for Packer fans in 1991, hitting Sterling Sharpe with bomb after bomb from the Majik Man for TD after TD sure beat the hell out of watching Mike Tomczak and Blair Kiel running for their lives on TV every Sunday, flipping wounded ducks in someone's -anyone's- general direction, and getting sacked for 17 yards while Darrell Thompson and Allen Rice averaged -3 yards a carry.

I haven't seen the new Tecmo '14 yet, but it looks reasonably up to date if they have Secena Wallace as Aaron Rodgers' backup. In some of the previous editions ('13, '12, etc...), the roster work has sometimes been pretty sloppy. There would be things like the profile faces not being that accurate (sometimes not even close), not having uniform numbers, same player on multiple teams, and other lazy/dumb stuff like that. To be fair, that stuff takes a LONG time to research and get right, though. I've been working on a 1991 roster hack (with the actual 1991 rosters, and not the projected preseason ones the original game had) off and on for a couple of years now, and I'm still not done tweaking stuff, although now it's more team strength/balance issues.

Tecmo Super Bowl is a terrifically fun game in and of itself, but weirdly -and it feels slightly shallow to say- having the official NFL teams and players does make a difference. At least for me. I've played the new versions with the generic teams (since EA and Madden have the NFL licenses all locked up), and it just feels hollow. I need my Nelsons and Rosenbachs and Haddixes and Dilwegs, The BEST things in Tecmo, though, from a gameplay perspective, are 1) scoring a TD with a kicker, and 2) scoring a TD with an offensive lineman (or 3) intercepting a pass with your nose tackle).