Customer Reviews

Tecmo Bowl: Kickoff

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Let me first say that if you're a newcomer to the Tecmo Bowl franchise, and you're looking for a football experience similar to Madden or NCAA, look elsewhere. This isn't for you. Tecmo Bowl Kickoff is a game that will pull at the heartstrings of gamers like myself--adults who grew up playing the original Tecmo Bowl or Super Tecmo Bowl on the NES or SNES, respectively.

For those gamers, I'm sure this game has been on your radar. So how does it stack up? Let me start off with the bad. This game is not NFL licensed, so forget about playing your favorite teams with all the marquee players. There are 32 teams in two conferences divided across four divisions, and you can customize names and uniform colors, so you can recreate your teams and rename the players to match, but that's a lot of work to do right off the bat.

Next off, and this one was a big no-no for me, you can't track your players' stats. You can't access your individual player's stats to see how many yards they've run, TDs they've thrown, or ANYTHING. The only way you'll see that is if you're in the top 20 in the league's ranking. The best you can do is you can track your overall team's basic numbers in a VERY confusing to read chart.

Finally, some of the menu/displays are just weird or don't even make sense. One instance is that there is no way to figure out if you're five yards or fifty from the goal if you're going for a field goal--it doesn't show--or if it does, it's hidden in a strange, confusing interface. Another example of strangeness is that in the defense leaderboard, it shows the teams with the most yards. WHAT? If you're the top defense, you should be the team who's give up the LEAST yards.

Even with all these negatives, for people like me, Tecmo Bowl is still a ton of fun to play. The zig-zag running technique still works. There are still the same four running and four passing plays. The cheesy cutscenes still flash across the screen. While you're playing this, you'll be brought back to those days after school, when you were firmly planted in front of your TV, cursing the impossible interceptions and smiling as you sack the QB for the tenth time in a game.

It maintains the original look and feel of its predecessors, but it unfortunately does not add anything, and in fact, loses some of what made the original games so much fun. If you enjoyed the original games for the simple gameplay, then you'll really be in heaven, but if you are like me, and loved all the stats, you'll be disappointed. Overall, a good effort, and it gets three stars just for the nostalgia, but fumbles the ball with the loss of the biggest and best features of the original.

i played tecmo super bowl back in the day like it was the only video game ever made.
so when i heard that tecmo bowl had come out on the DS i was ecstatic.

Its a fun game. . .but there are some issues that i would like to point out. . .
1) for some odd reason you cannot see ALL your individual season player stats. . . you can only see your overall team stats and your player stats if he is in the top 25 (or so) of the entire league. This is annoying because i used to get a kick out of just running through the season stats of all my players, even backups that ran the ball maybe a handful of times. this seems so simple but yet its missing. .
2) the cursor for passing the ball is very difficult to distinguish . . . on passing plays, all receivers have a tiny white cursor above their heads. . . when you pick a receiver to throw to this white cursor becomes slightly bigger but hardly enough to distinguish. this is annoying when trying to get out of the grasp of a linemen.
3) not really a big deal, but when they say they used tecmo super bowl as the template they were not kidding. . .gameplay is the same, like the annoying nose tackle diving sack. . . even the playbook has the exact same plays.
4) menus are confusing and take some time to get used to. Given they used the same format as tecmo super bowl i dont understand why they couldn't just have used the same or similar menus.

overall its a fun game though. . . i would give it a 6 out of 10.

The Good
* Basically the same as original Tecmo. Same plays, movements and eccentricities. Old Tecmo Junkies will feel right at home playing the new Tecmo.
* Good music.
* New Player "special abilities" is a nice touch
* Customization allows you to program all 32 NFL teams with actual players if you want
* While the screen is small you get used to it pretty easily.
* Wi-Fi lets you play Tecmo dudes all over the country.

The Bad
* Player customization is very clumsy. It is nearly impossible to recreate superstars like Ray Lewis or Demarcus Ware since the computer rations out points per player instead of allowing you to dispense the points how you see fit per team. That means you have 22 mediocre players instead of say 5 great players, 12 mediocre players and 5 lousy players. It's why when the computer plays each other during the season the games all seem to end 24-21.
* Speaking of the computer, the AI is awful. Traditionally the computer gets better as the season goes on. Instead you just keep thrashing the computer 40-0 week after week.
* Tecmo got rid of player conditions. That is a damn shame as that was one of the features that made season play so interesting and forced team owners to use substitutions.
* No endzone logos. Small thing but irritating to see nothing in the zone.
* The cursor for passing the ball is very difficult to distinguish . . . on passing plays, all receivers have a tiny white cursor above their heads. . . when you pick a receiver to throw to this white cursor becomes slightly bigger but hardly enough to distinguish. this is annoying when trying to get out of the grasp of a linemen.
* When rushing the QB, if your player jumps to block the pass, he remains suspended in air and cannot chase the play.
* No auto skip mode during the regular season, you have to see the stat page for every game played before you get to your game.

The Ugly
* Terrible icons for Team helmets. You think they could have included one miserable bird as an icon considering all the NFL teams that have bird mascots.
* Halftime stats page is atrocious. It is completely unreadable. Why didn't they just stick to the standard halftime stats page from past Tecmo bowls?
* Indeed, stats in general are poorly kept. Only the top 20 in each category are shown, including team ranks. The team defense is ranked in the reverse order so that the team who gives up the most yards is ranked first. Then for things such as most receptions, the heading is COMP which is the same used for QB Completions. Doesn't Tecmo have people testing these things before release?

Overall grade is a B-

When I was a teenager in the early-mid 90s, Tecmo Super Bowl was probably my most-played NES game ever--even beating out other personal favorites such as Final Fantasy, Zelda, StarTropics and the Castlevania series. TSB was addictive like crack, extremely fun as a two-player quick-fix with buddies, and had infinite replayability due to its season mode and stat tracking. I still own a copy for the NES, with a recently-replaced save battery. The same can be said for TSB 3: Final Edition on the SNES, which I loved even more. TSB 3 was my go-to football title for over ten years until the Madden series finally won me over in '06 on the PS2. While I'm now a Madden junkie, I was excited a few years ago to see that a new Tecmo Bowl was coming out on the DS. I got it as a Christmas gift in '08, fiddled around with it for a few days, and haven't touched it since. I like the fact that Tecmo tried to jump-start a dead series, but the game really, REALLY pales in comparison to the old NES/SNES versions that it was modeled after--and I'm not just talking about the lack of an NFL license. While it is a bit annoying that EA's Madden series has exclusive rights to the license, I knew that going in and was willing to overlook that fact. Tecmo even came up with a nice way of somewhat circumventing that obstacle--they included an edit mode that allows you to enter the real player names and team names. The graphics are fine in a retro sort of way too--no problem there. The problem I have with the game is with the "feel" of the game. First of all, the controls are stiff and just don't feel at all like the old games did. The playbooks and graphics are similar to the SNES versions, but it just doesn't feel as smooth as the older versions when you're playing. That may not be a problem for young, new uninitiated Tecmo Bowl players, but it is for a seasoned TSB vet like me. The second problem I have is with the out-of-game menus--they look and feel nothing like those in past editions, and are not very user-friendly (compared to the classic TSBs). The third, and perhaps biggest, problem I have with this game is that the stat-tracking during season mode is almost nonexistent. I used to love tracking all of my players' individual stats throughout a season, and they completely dropped the ball in this area in this version. The lack of stat-tracking in this game makes the game worthless to me. It seems that the developers think that players these days only are interested in wireless multiplayer. Wrong. Anyone who played TSB back in the day knows that multiplayer matches were only one part of the TSB experience. Season mode is where it was at for many of us, and Tecmo guessed wrong when they assumed that our tastes had changed. This game could have been a great reboot of the series, but it turned out to be a flat, uninspired failed attempt at reigniting the old Tecmo magic. IMO, this game is not worthy of the Tecmo Bowl name. Hopefully the PS3/360 reboot this year is better.

First, I am a Tecmo Bowl junkie and was thrilled to see this game come out. I owned Tecmo Bowl for Gameboy and NES, Tecmo Super Bowl for NES, Tecmo Super Bowl II for SNES, and Tecmo Super Bowl III for Genesis. This game is modeled after the Tecmo Super Bowl version on NES, yet it is substandard to say the least.

First, there are numerous glitches. When rushing the QB, if your player jumps to block the pass, he remains suspended in air and cannot chase the play. This happened more than once. I also have had the game freeze on me during a fumble play. Changing things in the menus is choppy at times as well. I have had to back entirely out of a menu and reenter at times in order to complete revisions (renaming the teams, changing uniform colors, etc...)

Then, there are the annoyances. After a successful two-point conversion, the game displays a screen saying "Turnover". I guess possession of the ball is changing, but this is not a turnover situation. It is also next to impossible to call a timeout, but rather easy to see the clock burn off about 8 seconds at the end of every run play.

Next, the statistics being kept are ridiculous. Only the top 20 in each category are shown, including team ranks. The team defense is ranked in the reverse order so that the team who gives up the most yards is ranked first. Then for things such as most receptions, the heading is COMP which is the same used for QB Completions.

Finally, when I changed who my kick returner was to a second string RB, his stats did not get recorded at all.

It's all very annoying. I cannot believe this got passed the testing phase if one was conducted. Honestly, the whole thing would have been better if they just stripped down the original Tecmo Super Bowl to remove the names and then added the appropriate amount of teams. Finally, there isn't even an intro sequence. The Nintendo DS supports full length movies on games like Final Fantasy, but this cartridge has a feel that it was made in the 1980s.

One positive is the realism factor. QBs can no longer throw a pass into triple coverage and get a completion and they also cannot hurl the ball 80 yards through the air anymore either.

If you a die-hard fan of authentic Tecmo Super Bowl, this will leave you pulling your hair out. I would still consider owning it for the ease of portability, but otherwise this is a game to steer clear of.

A dorm room football phenomenon emerges from the backfield in the form of "Tecmo Bowl Kickoff." A double-reverse throwback that sheds decades of technological advances as a running back would defenders, the game is an effort to recover fumbles made by today's over-serious gridiron grinders.

With circa-1991 graphics, a side-scrolling, broadcast-style point of view, quarterbacks who can launch 120-yard bombs and lead blockers who can send linebackers tumbling backward, "Kickoff" recaptures the off-kilter Japanese charm of the seminal "Tecmo Super Bowl." Developed by an American team, "Kickoff" recaptures the old game's incongruous quirks without making them overly cheesy. Static cinematics, which punctuate big plays, are good for constant chuckles.

"Kickoff" is no threat to EA's "Madden" hegemony, with its 4.5 million in 2008 sales as of late September, and exclusive NFL license. But a few minutes with the game and its silly thrills may have old-school players declaring "Kickoff" has the exclusive license on over-the-top football fun.

The template, "Tecmo Super Bowl," is the 1991 NES and Super Nintendo title that remains popular as PC-downloadable bootlegs and mods.

Players who squint hard at the new game might trick themselves into thinking they're playing a portable version of the original game, but the myriad adjustments become clear when you start to play.

Touch-screen controls are interchangeable with traditional D-pad and button-presses. Savvy players will use a combination of the two, using the stylus for pinpoint passes and player direction, with a point-and-touch guidance of "The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass" while switching to button-mashing to break tackles.

Legacy exploits, including an old dirty trick that let unscrupulous players use the nosetackle to dive through the line and instantly sack the quarterback, have been benched. Devotees will be happy to hear that the ludicrous yet skill-oriented tactic of zig-zag running is still there.

A season mode allows players to guide one or several teams through a preset schedule, through the playoffs and ultimately the Tecmo Bowl championship. In-season trades are available but there's no true franchise mode.

Game runs an end-around on EA's license, copying the league's 32-team, 8-division structure and replicating nearly all of the NFL team's cities, going so far as to echo current teams' play styles, strengths and weaknesses. Obsessive players can take the similarities to the real thing several steps further by editing team playbooks, colors, logos, player names and attributes.

Online competition lets gamers lock facemasks with friends via the tedious Nintendo-specific ritual of swapping friend codes, or take the field against all comers via the matchmaking system. The fluctuating skill levels ratings, which rise or fall after each game depending on the result and opponent's rating, echo the "Mario Kart Wii" and "Tetris DS" setups. The lack of online voice chat is disappointing, although sadly understandable given how few DS games have taken advantage of the system's capability.

Taking on human opponents, either online or via local wireless, is necessary because artificial intelligence is so lacking. Computer-controlled teams will kick for one point when down by two, mismanage the clock during tight games and make moronic play choices.

Even in a succession of blowouts against the computer, the game remains fun and compelling, tugging at your jersey for one more scamper on the playground. In the arena of compelling gameplay, "Tecmo Bowl Kickoff" scores an electrifying touchdown.

I usually research all the games that I buy, but I bought this one on an impulse because I am such a huge fan of Tecmo Super Bowl. Overall I really enjoy this game, here are my pros and cons.

Pro's
- Gameplay is almost exactly like the NES version with only small differences. These differences include switching sides to play going right to left and left to right and minor playbook differences.
- This version is fully customizeable, I have read articles people have written on how to hack into the code of a rom to accomplish this, but this version lets you do it in game. You can put in current rosters, past rosters, or a roster of you and your friends if you want.
- Pocket sized, great for airplane trips or long car rides.
-New features like points that can be earned to boost players and special abilities for players.

Cons
- I was a little miffed at the lack of statistics, I was definitely a TSB stat freak.
- No NFL team liscenses. If you want the teams to be named like the pros, you have to do it yourself, time consuming.
- No auto skip mode, you have to see the stat page for every game played as far as I can tell.
- Menu style was so easy in TSB, should not have been changed.

Overall 8/10, but if you are like me and remember every player from 1991 because of TSB, buy this game- in fact buy a ds if you don't have one just to buy this game. I liked this much better than the last ds madden that I played.

as a big fan of the NES and SNES games, i was very excited for this release. even though it didn't have an official NFL license, i had read it featured a team and player editor so i thought i'd just do all of that myself. now that i've begun that process (it took 2 hours for one team!), i'd rather play the SNES version. by the time i finish editing, the 2009 season will have started.

here's why it takes so long:
1. the jersey numbers of the generic players don't correspond to the NFL players. so if you want to keep it authentic and give your real players their real numbers, you'll end up changing them to a number already used by another generic player. the game won't let you save it that way so then you'll have to find who's been assigned that number, attempt to change it, and probably get the same error.

2. you would think the generic teams would have corresponding star players where their NFL counterparts do. for instance, the BAL team should have 2 awesome linebackers. well they don't. you can edit the skills of the players at these positions, but your pool of skill points is limited for the entire team. so if you want to make ray lewis a better tackler, you need to take away some of troy smith's throwing power.

you can edit the teams themselves too which doesn't take much time at all. jersey styles can be changed and team colors can be altered. i did find the color selection a little weird though. you get about 7 horrendous hues to pick from, none of which look affiliated with any NFL team whatsoever.

overall this game plays just like the tecmo bowls of old, which is great. but the reasons i'd always played tecmo bowl were for real players and real stats. the stats are here but the effort required to get the players just isn't worth it. thanks again EA for your monopoly on the NFL license!

I would like to start off by saying I'm not a Maddenite when it comes to football video games. Running a long season, tracking stats, trading players, these things are not what I look for. What I like is a simple, fun to play football game that I can truck through real quick, and this game gives me that in spades. Passing and running plays are simply executed, and the presentation is fast paced and enjoyable. I never played the original Tecmo Bowl, but I did play the heck out of Play Action Football for Gameboy. I am happy that I have found something similar for a newer portable system. If you just want to play football and don't care if your favorite players from watching TV are in it, give this one a whirl. It doesn't disappoint.

I expected Tecmo Bowl like it used to be. The teams would have established players with their own unique stats. These players would give each team a unique strength and weakness. That's how it used to be. These players would compliment the pre-selected plays and allow a chance to play, or replay, a season with the unique play that only tecmo bowl can create.

This wasn't it at all. Every player on this game is "customizable." I get that customizable games are the current thing. There's a demand for complete control over every aspect of the game. Yeah, it would have been nice to have the option of creating our own unique players...but this goes too far. Tecmo Bowl was never about customization. It was about the experience of controlling different teams and pre-established players. If you are looking for a Tecmo Bowl experience where you can control how each and every team is designed, then this is the game for you.

As for me....this wasn't what I wanted. I wanted Tecmo Bowl like it used to be. I wanted pre-generated players based on actual players. I wanted to see statistics, not this incomplete crap this game displays. I get that some people really like this game...but this just wasn't for me.

I wish I never got this game.