Funkmaster V Reviews

7800 Rank: Unranked Genre Rank: (Sports) Awards: None Ahhhh... the Atari Sports Classic Match-up: RED TEAM vs. BLUE TEAM? not so fast... Pros: You Create Your Own Plays at the Line Cons: The game is too anemic, slow, and broken to enjoy Looks Like We Got San Jose State vs. the Oakland Radiers in 6 on 6 ball, ya'll

Overview: As a New York Jets fan on the road to an 0-16 season, Touchdown Football caught me at the WRONG time, son. But truth be told, if the J-E-T-S Jets Jets Jets were soaring to the Super Bowl, this game would be a poor excuse of a sports title on a system devoid of anything worth a crap outside of Olympic carts and Basketball. The main problem here is that this game is painfully slow. There are some interesting ideas inside Touchdown Football, but don't let them fool you. This game sucks. Let's get political with it then, if you don't believe me: Conservatives and Liberals, Indepedents, Libertarians, Greens and even the Democratic Socialists will all want to kneel on this American football disaster.

Graphics: Like a hooker with a winning smile, the girl smiling at you at the bar looks good at first. Don't let her fool ya. There's some gross stuff going on inside. Touchdown Football's title screen is pretty damn impressive. And likewise, the game menu screen fools us into thinking we are off to the races. But nah... the game starts and things go south. The players are tiny... so tiny in fact that the lone cheerleader that appears when her team scores looks like she could go run out on the field and eat the quarterback... and all his linemen could do is stare in horror. The scrolling field is impressive, but everything else is so bare bones, its hard to get excited about the one sport that is supposed to be about big time moments and pageantry. I can't blame the programmers of this game too much, Madden has been boring for 20 years now.

Sound: There's not much going on in the realm of audio in this cart, although the kick off ditty has a definite football flavor to it. There are swells of crowd noise when a team scores, but lets say, after something akin to a 50 yard gain occurs, the crowd is as quiet as a church mouse. There ARE ear piercing whistles however... so that will make your dog happy, I'm sure.

Gameplay: I will qualify this again- the slowness of Touchdown Football's gameplay makes this cart horrendous. Now, that being said, there are some good ideas here. You can make plays at the line of scrimmage, just like old Broadway Joe. There are no running plays here, save for quarterback bootlegs or sneaks... which rarely gain more than a yard or two, so you are better off making up passing plays for the most part. After setting up a formation, which there are several, you then assign each reciever one of 9 (!) running routes and give the line one of three blocking schemes. On my old site, I wrote down six go to plays that I created on notebook paper, crumpled them up to make them look like pages from an old playbook, took screenshots and posted it to my "cheat"section. Those images are lost forever, and at this age, I doubt I'll ever find the time to do that again for ths sorry ass game.

Originality: This title is a port of a computer game, but I'm sure everyone that played it died of boredom. We are going Originality score here, kiddos. Making plays at the line of scrimmage is awesome if you are a football guy (or gal), but the game cannot be saved by this concept alone. There's too much wrong.

Value: There are no selectable teams. No running game. Field goals NEVER work...that mechanic is broken. There are no seasons. There are no player attributes. There are no leagues, seasons, or reasons to play. No injuries, no player names, no differences in skin tone, no numbers, no trades, no player hold-outs, no championship games, no playoffs, no bowl games, no rivalries, no trophy games, no history, no tight ends, no fullbacks, no running backs, no outside linebackers, no H-backs, no cornerbacks, no Wildcat, no option offenses, no reverses, no trick plays, no fake punts, no 2 point conversions... and I lied about something. There are no 50 yard plays. About the best you are gonna pull off is something like a 30 yard play... and that's if the defense is in punt block formation and you throw it over them. So... no big plays either.

Overall: I'll give Touchdown Football this: Good football games are hard to make. There are TONS of bad ones on almost every system. Hell, the Nintendo Switch has been around for 3 plus years and they STILL down't have a football game, and the last several Madden games are boring, broken affairs to boot. And where are the fun college football games? It's not only a bad time to be a Jets fan, but a bad time to like American football games, too. I've been doing these reviews for a long time, and I realized that there are 2 different times of bad games. For example, there's games like Jinks. Pretty terrible, but so weird and unique that it could fool you over time into thinking that it is a good game, and you could actually have fun playing it. Then there's games like Atari 7800 sports titles, Froggo offerings and flight simulators. No one in their right mind should play these things. So going back to TD Football, its like the Jets. It tried. But it sucks. Fire everyone on the staff and trade the players away... we must rebulid. There's nothing here to hook a curious john in the night, no matter how lonely he is. So............ let's go play Tecmo Bowl III and forget this sh*t.



I would like to thank Mitch Orman of www.Atari7800.org for the use of his screenshots in this review.