Developed by: Nintendo R&D1 (NES) Irem (Arcade) Published by: Nintendo (NES) Irem (Arcade)
Introduction & Bias:
There is a funny thing about me and sports video games. Sports are things that I can reasonably do in real life. Nobody will ever mistake me for a professional athlete but if I ever wanted to run a pick-up game in some park near my house I could choose to do that. I always thought that sports were silly things to try and emulate in video games so I have played very few sports based games.
This is a trend that I am going to need to buck since there are four traditional sports games in the original 17 NES games alone and a few sports-adjacent games in that set as well. The main reason I am choosing 10-Yard Fight first out of that bunch is because it appears first alphabetically.
Needless to say, I have never played this game before. So instead of punting this game down my schedule I will go for a 4th down review conversion.
Sports reference! Cheerleaders are usually cute.... I dunno.
First Impressions & Conveyance:
All right! We get another black screen with the title and gameplay choices. The choices are simple up front with a 1-player and 2-player option. There is no music in the background so I just let the title sit. I am rewarded with several demonstrations that play various kickoff return scenarios and the occasional line of scrimmage play. These demos educate the player a lot. I will try to spread out what I learned from the demos throughout the review rather than dumping it all here. Besides, it's not like the game is trying hard to fire me up.
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| Not Pictured: Fight music. Rah, rah, rah? |
This is the first time that the down arrow lets me select which game mode I want. Sorry, Select button, you are already outmoded. Picking the single player option lets the player pick the game's difficulty. The player then gets to decide one of five difficulty modes to play on: High School, College, Professional, Playoff, and Super Bowl.
Once the difficulty is selected the player is immediately thrown onto the field to receive the game's first kickoff. Since I watched the demonstrations I was able to figure out that the player actually controls a block of receiving players. The middle receiving player's jersey turns white once the ball is received so it is very easy to tell who the player is controlling. When the player kicks off to the opposing team, their ball carrier’s jersey turns black. The entire block of players can be steered to prevent the tackling team access to the ball handler.
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| Pictured: Nine-man synchronized running. Coming to a dance floor near you! |
Once regular play begins the offensive team has to move the ball down field like normal football would proceed. The player has three plays to move the ball 10 yards (in a fight, you might say) or be forced to kick a punt/field goal. The defensive team needs to read if the ball is run or passed up the field and try to sack the quarterback or take out the receiver correctly to minimize the yards gained.
After a couple of plays the player should notice how many football players they are controlling at any given time, the two different pass options they have, and how to move the ball down field. It helps that I do know how football is played so I was able to come up with strategies very quickly with the tools the game allowed me.
Overall, I was impressed with the amount of rules that 10-Yard Fight was able to represent in the game. On top of that the rest of the conveyance was excellent. The player never has to guess important statistics like the score, the down, or the yards to go. Plus, there is a neat graphic on the right side of the screen that shows the ball's position on the field and the next first down marker. There is a lot of information given to the player on this 8-bit screen and I really was not needing more conveyance from the game. Well done.
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| Pictured: A surprising amount of information |
Experience & Presentation:
I had a lot of fun with the game at first. It exceeded my expectations with the accuracy to the sport. The only football video game that I played that preceded 10-Yard Fight was the aptly named Football on the Atari. That game was primitive and honestly pretty hard to play with a joystick and one button. The NES, of course, has two action buttons and the ability to pause. This game takes advantage of the more complex programming allowed by NES carts to create a football game that if the player squints looks like actual football.
Two teams line up with individual players, the linesmen briefly get in each other's way, running backs cross the field before the play begins, and players that are eligible receivers raise their arms so the player knows they can catch a pass. The graphics do a great job animating the players to show what needs to be shown. The players themselves are somewhere between a small Mario and a big Mario in height and that is just enough to have arms and legs move and to make the jerseys noticeable enough that the teams are never confused.
There is basically no music that plays for the whole game and the sound effects are sparse as well. This actually gave me the space to begin narrating my own plays like a discount John Madden. After the first game and a half was completed I began to fall into a rut.
I decided to play it easy by picking High School difficulty first. I won the game handily in spite of some learning mistakes. The gameplay became entirely predictable, also. For example, if a pass is thrown over the linesmen on the line of scrimmage the ball will be intercepted every time. By linesmen, you know, the fat guys? Also, if a pass is thrown and not intercepted it will be completed every time. No pass interference here. In fact, there are no penalties in the game whatsoever. I wish this meant there was plenty of unnecessary roughness but, alas, it was not to be.
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| Pictured: Avoiding unnecessary roughness |
I quickly came up with the strategy of passing the ball sideways in a lateral/handoff and then just running the ball around everyone. It was rare that I was forced into a third down, let alone kicking the ball off. I also saw that the computer team on each difficulty level had one, maybe two different plays in their arsenal. In fact, the only two real differences I saw between difficulties included the fact that I had to run the ball much farther down the field after receiving a kickoff and that the computer team reacted and pushed through lines much more quickly.
In spite of these mounting disadvantages I quickly beat the first two difficulty levels. When I won each game I was not dumped back out into the difficulty select screen. Rather I was promoted to the next difficulty level with the encouraging message that I was getting closer to the Super Bowl. I was running out of review time during the third difficulty so I skipped straight to the Super Bowl. I was only able to play through the first half and I'll just let the final picture speak for itself.
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| Pictured: A Super Bowl ring in my near future. |
Verdict & Score:
This is the first game that I reviewed for this blog that put my expectations up high at the beginning but then slid down to mediocrity by the end. My early impressions were great but that wore off rather quickly once I realized how routine all the plays became and how reliably I could win with one strategy.
While writing the review I flashed back to how much I enjoyed calling my plays and seeing my success but I know that I only had about ten minutes of unique gameplay left after my hour was up. Since I do want to go back at some point and win the Super Bowl in spite of the malaise that set in I am going to award 10-Yard Fight a 5/10. I think it is a mixed bag but I did pretty easily squeeze an hour of enjoyment out of the game. Not bad for football.
Factoids & Trivia:
As it stands today 10-Yard Fight may be a little obscure and not highly sought after. A quick search tells me that the game is common enough to fetch a price of less than a dollar online.
Like with the Zapper trilogy, 10-Yard Fight did not begin life as an NES game. As the 1983 copyright indicates, this was an arcade game first. The arcade experience was significantly different from the NES game. The arcade game only challenged the player to making a single offensive drive per game half to score a touchdown. If the player succeeds they may move on to the next difficulty level. The player does not get a chance to participate in defense.
The game’s legacy upon contemporary and present-day reviews states that the game was a great step up when it was released but quickly faded into the background when other football games were released such as the upcoming (way later) Tecmo Bowl and Tecmo Super Bowl. To its credit, 10-Yard Fight did bring American football out of the Atari era and that is no small feat.
A little bit about its developer, Irem. This is the first game I have reviewed for the NES that originally came from a non-Nintendo developer. I want to take a little bit of screen space to profile Irem.
Irem started in 1974 as IPM standing for International Playing Machine. The company spent the first few years of its life creating arcade cabinets for pachinko and slot machines before moving on to producing original arcade titles in 1978. In 1979 IPM changed its name to Irem for International Rental Electronics Machines and later Innovations in Recreational Electronic Media.
Irem gained notoriety in creating very difficult arcade games. Probably the most famous of these games is R-Type, a hugely difficult shoot-em-up game that found a good home in the arcade and the TurboGraphix 16. However, the company’s fortune began to decline and many of its staff and working divisions spun off to make other companies. One of the most significant of these were a group of game developers that left to form Nazca Corporations which is best known for making the Metal Slug series.
Today Irem is still alive making cabinets for pachinko and slot machines; the same field it had before getting into arcade games.
That's a bit of a somber note to end on. Can't be helped. Next time on OHR I will cover a game that represents my favorite sport as a kid: baseball. The game is called: Baseball. Oh, that's not very dramatic.
That's a bit of a somber note to end on. Can't be helped. Next time on OHR I will cover a game that represents my favorite sport as a kid: baseball. The game is called: Baseball. Oh, that's not very dramatic.
Sources:
NES box art:
10-Yard Fight arcade gameplay footage:
Wiki to 10-Yard Fight:
Wiki to Irem:
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