Big fumble

by ERIK LEIJON

Back in 2004, when the NFL and EA mutually decided the time was right to screw over every football-game-loving consumer by signing a five-year exclusivity deal, it was obvious the future would feature many half-assed cash grabs toting the NFL licence and a minute promise of fun.

NFL Tour (Multi/EA Sports Big, EA Tiburon) doesn’t even have those meagre aspirations. This sorry excuse for a game (likely designed for the bandwagon-jumpers who buy a big screen television specifically for the Super Bowl) is indicative of the disrespect from multinational corporations towards hard-working, cash-strapped video game players. I usually try to find the bright side of every game—because even bad ones were made by humans who tried their best with the tools they were given—but NFL Tour has killed my zeal.

NFL Tour is an arcade-style football title in the vein of NFL Blitz: advertising big tackles, crazy speeds and unrealistic levels of cartoon violence. All of this is done in a pedestrian manner—what becomes evident is that after three or four games, the developers neglected to include anything else in the game beyond a time-based tackle evasion button as a game mechanic. Using the Madden engine, the developer likely constructed Tour as a demo in one month, slapped ’roid-raging Shawne Merriman on the cover and sent the unfinished product to the assembly line.

Play one three-minute game against a completely clueless opponent and you’ll get the gist of what makes Tour so shallow: it’s nearly impossible to stop throws and play defence, the tackle evasions can be perfected in two minutes, the same slam running play works nearly every time, there are no fumbles and few turnovers and there’s animation-clipping galore.

The simplified controls ironically make it harder to throw to your second receiver, the game moves too fast for players to change defensive players before the snap, throw-offs are meaningless, and of the four distinct game modes, two of them are pointless Mario Party mini-games. Idiotic announcer Trey Wingo repeats the same dozen lines, each unamusingly pointing out how repetitive he is—similar to how Tour is one big joke no one finds funny.

NFL Tour is the ammunition sceptics use to argue that video games are not a viable art form. Tour was clearly conceived in a boardroom and thrust upon poor Tiburon with the mandate to make something presentable in two months. The sad thing is the game will probably sell thanks to the NFL licence and Madden’s decent track record (although the 2008 edition of the venerable franchise was as solid as the Gaza-Egypt wall), but the sadder occurrence would be if heads rolled at Tiburon because the game failed to generate enough pocket change for NFL jefe Roger Goodell and EA.

What really confuses me is how NFL Street, EA’s other commercially viable and critically lukewarm arcade game, was punted in favour of Tour. Then again, thinking about this game in any context is giving it too much credit.

Dungeon master

Orcs and Elves (DS/EA, id)—a partially turn-based dungeon crawling RPG from Doom creator John Carmack—is a much better showing from EA. Originally a cell phone title, the DS version isn’t a fully interactive experience as the character can only move left, right, up and down, but the graphics have been enhanced and the gameplay was pretty tight to begin with. I like how the characters and environments look very Doom 1-ish.