Customer Reviews

Super Play Action Football

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This is my favorite football game for the SNES. It has the complete packege. You can create your own high school teams or select from real or made up (have you ever heard of Notre Dame State?) college teams. You can also play pro games. The only downfall with this game is that it gets to be way to easy after about 3 months of playing, and i didnt play too much, maybe an hour per week. Its a much better 2 player game.

While Tecmo Super Bowl for the NES is often regarded as the grandfather of modern football sims, Super Play Action Football is a long forgotten hidden gem. Its downfall is its difficult control (more on that later), but its innovation for a game from 1992 was ahead of its time.

Super PA Football offered gamers 3 distinct modes of play: High School, College, and NFL. While the NFL mode offered nothing unique, it did squeeze in the NFL license for accurate team names, numbers to match the players from 1991, and a season mode with stat tracking for a player's chosen team. Tecmo Super Bowl for the NES provided a richer experience on the NFL level, but it's the other 2 modes where Super PA excelled.

High School mode gave players a chance to wet their chops with a simplified version of the game- fewer plays, easier controls, etc. While High School mode only allowed for single game play, it had the unique option of creating your own high school team. This team creation was extremely basic- team name and colors were the only customization options. Still, it was one of (if not the) first examples of a game allowing a player to create his own school.

College mode is where I devoted most of my playing time on this game. Roughly 100 teams are available for play, and while there is no official NCAA license, all the teams correspond to true NCAA counterparts. Some of the team names have quirky rhymes or other ways to correspond to the true team. Examples: Fluke=Duke, Moldy Moss=Holy Cross, TX-Waco=Baylor, Boston, MA=BC Eagles. Without the NCAA license, no team logos are found, but team colors are represented accurately. After choosing a squad, players then create an 11 game schedule for the season. There are no locked in games, thus a player can load up on cupcake opponents or powerhouse teams from 1991. Choosing to play those powerhouse teams helped your squad move up the top 20 rankings quicker throughout the year. At the end of the season, if your team played well, you may be asked to compete in a season ending bowl game. Similar to the team names, all the bowls matched to bowls from 1991. Examples: Violet Bowl=Rose Bowl, Salt Bowl=Sugar Bowl, Banana Bowl=Orange Bowl, etc.

It was this college mode that set Super PA apart from other sports sims of the early 90s. Its main competition in the early 90s was Bill Walsh College Football by EA Sports, and the first Walsh game had a playoff format instead of bowl games.

The graphics for the game are well-detailed for the 16 bit era, but as mentioned before, the control is where the game suffers. Much of this is due to two factors- the camera angle and the limited view of the field. The camera angle takes a large amount of getting used to. It's a vertical camera shot but turned about 30 degrees clockwise. This made stepping in front of passes to make the grab a challenge. Most missed passes would end up in the hands of the defense for an interception, but with practice the timing of making the reception improves.

By having large player sprites on the field that are proportioned correctly to the field size, the view of the field is incredibly limited. From the line of scrimmage at the snap on 1st and 10, the first down line is not even visible. This makes it difficult to read the defense by looking at the players. To compensate, the game offers a radar on the left side of the screen to show all 22 players on the field, but this can be distracting from the actual field of play.

Despite these flaws, Super PA Football was innovative for the world of college football sims. Though it has not aged as well as Tecmo Super Bowl, it still earns mention as a breakthrough sports title from the early 90s for its feature set and quality 16 bit presentation.

this game is very very slow.
the graphics are pretty cool, but man, it's to slow.

This was always one of my favorite games for the SNES. A good feature is the create your own High School team, and you can also play college and pro. Gets easier after a while against the cpu, but is always fun to play with your budds.

This is a relatively fun game if you have two players. The graphics are a little weak but nevertheless a good solid and competitive bit of football.