Sega Master System #2: Great Football (1987)

(Get used to dumb looking covers. The Master System has a million of them.)

I’ll always find it funny that Sega did a whole series of lousy sports games on the SMS and gave them the name Great. It’s almost like they knew their product was weak so they decided to just have fun with it. I guess it’s always been a warning that games with superlatives in the title are usually not very good. A good game doesn’t have to tell people it’s a good game in the title. All together there were seven Great sports games, and they are certainly not well liked by collectors. If you want the thole US set you gotta get all seven of them and you’re not going to end up playing them much. There are only 114 US games, so more than six percent of your collection will be these boring sports games. Great Football is definitely the strangest and hopefully the worst of the lot. I hope it is the worst because eventually for this blog I will have to play through all seven. Isn’t there another Alex Kidd game I could play through instead? (PS there is! I’m still gonna play these sports games though.)

(This game is about football so here is a picture of football.) 

I have never played anything quite like Great Football before. The two player game is typical mid-80s football, but the one player game is odd to say the least. It’s reminiscent of my childhood when a friend of mine only would let us play “over the plate” baseball. What that meant was that we weren’t actually allowed to pitch the baseball making it an all offensive game. In Great Football all you do is play offense. The computer never touches the ball except on a turnover, and when that happens you are just penalized and get the ball back. So how can you loose? Well game actually picks up in the fourth quarter with the player’s team behind by a certain amount of points. So it’s a football game where you only play offense, only get to play the fourth quarter, and have to overcome and imaginary deficit by a team that never even gets the football. Huh?

I was determined to beat this game on my first try because I didn’t really want to play it again. I picked the Bombers because that was my high school mascot and played against the Spartans because I live in Lansing just a couple of miles away from Michigan State University. I ended up with a twelve point deficit which didn’t sound too hard to overcome. I used the same strategy with this one that I used with 10-Yard Fight. I was determined to never pass the football. Since I never had to worry about turning it over on fourth down there wasn’t much to lose by just running it. As time went on I made things even simpler than that. I kept using the same play over and over again. It seemed to always result in either short gain or really long gain. This led to a couple of fairly long third downs which made the game almost exciting, but I didn’t have to worry about losing the football so I couldn’t get that into the action. The only time I tried to kick the football it went exactly sideways so I usually ran it in instead after a touchdown. Just to add to the weirdness the two point conversions are only worth one point. They just couldn’t get anything quite right in this one.

(Good ol' #7. Nothing beats that!) 

Home football gaming turned a corner when Tecmo Bowl came out. That’s really the first game that got American football right on consoles. Great Football fits into the group of lesser football games that came out before Tecmo Bowl. However, even among that group it stands out in a bad way. Even the original Atari version let you play defense. 10-Yard Fight was no masterpiece, but at least the computer opponent gave me a challenge and I had to switch up plays. Nobody wants to play a game that only needs one play to be won. With its odd setup I felt like I was only playing 1/8^th of a real football game, and that’s not good. Hey at least I had fun playing it with my brother back in the day.

I am happy that I finished this one because I don’t finish SMS games very often. I feel a little bad because the two games I have written about have been two of my least favorite. I may try to replay a few I actually like and write about them because I really do love the SMS. I am also going to try to keep track of my game completions on the side of the blog as an attempt to increase my output. It probably won’t work, but I like to keep trying. Of course with all the games I have already beat I could keep this blog stocked with about 400 more articles. Looks like I need to get writing!