WELCO METOT HENEX TLEVEL - Joe Montana's NFL Football

Publisher: Sega Developer: Malibu Interactive Year: 1993

To say that the game of football had something to do with Sega's success with the Genesis would be a massive understatement. The rise of console sports games in the west can pretty much be traced to EA's John Madden and Sega's Joe Montana 16-bit series. The competition between these two franchises was fierce, and lead to a lot of innovation and improvement on both sides.

Graphically, I'd say Joe Montana won out. The games featured a zoomed-in camera view that showed off nice big players, while John Madden stayed in a much wider view in order for smooth play and better field awareness.

The promise of what could be with Joe Montana on the Genesis was through the roof. Considering the bar set on the cartridge side of things – large characters, fast action, and a surprisingly decent play-by-play presentation – what would be possible with the improved hardware of the Sega CD was very exciting.

Plus the development team behind the game was Malibu Interactive, a group which had proven its prowess on the system with the stunning racing segments of Batman Returns.

Instead gamers were greeted with a feature-lean, unplayable mess.

Joe Montana's NFL Football is trying hard to take advantage of the hardware-based 3D scaling afforded by the Sega CD, but the machine doesn't appear up to the task. The game runs at an abysmal framerate, which makes controlling the action very difficult.

The bigger issue, though, is that everything on screen is a big, poorly-animated, pixellated mess. It looks like everything (including the field) is scaled up at least twice as big as it should be. When the players cluster (and hey, this is football, so it happens a lot) it's next to impossible to tell one from the other. And when they get around the logo at the center of the field...well...forget it.

The disappointment doesn't stop at the gameplay and visuals, though. Sega pioneered realtime play-by-play with their Joe Montana Sports Talk series of cartridges, where a digitized voice would deliver surprisingly good play descriptions during the game. So it goes without saying that gamers expected even better on the Sega CD. Instead they got a little bit of color commentary on the play select screen. Lame.

Finally – and this is just anecdotal evidence – but I vividly remember this game being very unstable. This may only have been on the first model of the Sega CD, but every other time I tried to play it the game crashed on me.

Joe Montana's NFL Football should have been the best console football game on the market. Instead it's a blemish on what was otherwise a fantastic sports franchise.