ESPN Sunday Night NFL

Review

by Anthony Baize

ESPN Sunday Night Football is a fairly weak attempt at a pro football simulation. The graphics are poor. The sound is poor. The game play is jerky and rough. Even the portly Chris Berman cannot pull this game out of the dumper.

First off, the graphics are very weak. Other football games for the SNES, including Tecmo Super Bowl III and Madden NFL 94, have far superior graphics. The players in ESPN Sunday Night Football are not rendered well and look fairly ridiculous. The team colors do not look good, the field is totally without texture, and the crowd is a blob of dots. Visually, ESPN Sunday Night Football is not a good game.

The sound is also very weak in ESPN Sunday Night Football. The whole point of this game is that it is supposed to mirror the Sunday night football games on ESPN. One of the most striking things about those games is the colorful commentary from Chris Berman. Berman does not even speak in this game. Instead, the player gets a screen shot of Berman while boring white text scrolls next to him. The actual sound in ESPN Sunday Night Football consists of little more than basic crowd noise and an occasional referee's whistle.

Game play is the final fumble in this poorly designed game. Most football games have one of four major flaws: passing is too easy, passing is nearly impossible, rushing is too easy, or rushing is nearly impossible. ESPN Sunday Night Football is lucky enough to have two if these major flaws. Both passing and rushing are nearly impossible by human players. The computer players will eat human players alive on both sides of the ball. The only way to have any fun at all with this game is to play against a human opponent.

While I do not support the total dominance of sports leagues over video games, I do think that ESPN should have paid the licensing fee to get real NFL team names and real NFL player names for this cart. It would have been this game's only saving grace.