Dave’s Football Blog

The new Soccer FanHouse isn’t the only thing taking up all my time these days. I’ve gotten myself totally hooked on Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 for the Nintendo Wii.

This is the first time I’ve ever gotten seriously into a soccer video game, and the reason is simple — the entire interface is point-and-click. You just point the Wiimote at the screen and put the ball and your players right where you want them. Through balls, one-two passes, man marking, you name it. It’s perhaps the most tactical soccer game on the market, and not only is it surprisingly addictive, but it beats the pants off FIFA 08 for the Wii.

A nice long review (and an explanation for that headline) is after the jump.
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I know, I know. You’re all sick to death of the endless stream of sycophantic babble about the now-retired Brett Favre. You don’t need to be reminded that he threw a lot of interceptions. You don’t care about who has the last ball he ever threw in the NFL — which, by the way, was an interception. Even the jokes about the media’s endless ass-kissing of Favre are starting to wear thin.

You have to admit, though, that IGN’s tribute to Brett Favre the video game character is kind of cool. When you think about it, Favre has been in almost as many video games as Sonic the Hedgehog. Maybe if the Packers could have signed Sonic to be a receiver, Favre might have come back for one more season.

Then again, maybe I shouldn’t suggest that. It might turn Peter King down the path toward mad genetic experimentation…

(Spotted on NFL FanHouse)

I put up with a lot of unnecessary shit from my cell phone.

Last month I upgraded from my old Treo 650 — the phone I used to liveblog NFL games from sports bars three years ago — to a new Treo 755p. At least, it seemed like an upgrade. The 755p had more memory, built-in EVDO for faster Internet speeds, a headphone jack that worked and the ability to use high-capacity memory cards. I threw an 8MB microSDHC card in there and declared it my new MP3 player.

Of course, the last few days have made me wish I hadn’t sold that iPod on Craiglist so quickly. To put it mildly, the 755p is a big, fat buggy mess. It freezes at inopportune times and often requires 2 or 3 reboots a day. Connecting it to my PC results in an instant blue screen of death, so I have to use a backup tool on the phone itself to save my data in case things go terribly wrong — which has happened twice already. I’m getting just as good at hard resetting this Treo as I am with reinstalling Windows on my laptop.

Why do I put up with all this? Because in spite of all the bugs, the Treo does everything I want it to do and then some. I remain enamored with this whole idea of the “swiss army knife” gadget, the one device that does everything. The Treo is my cell phone, my calendar, my organizer, my on-the-go camera and word processor, my email-and-web-anywhere device, my road atlas (thank you, Google Maps), my MP3 player, and my portable video game console. If I had a Slingbox, I could watch live Champions League matches from anywhere.

The Treo does all these things — and it excels at absolutely none of them. When it works, though, it’s still pretty cool, because I can still do more with my Treo than I can with anything else. You can’t play Ms. Pac Man on an iPhone — only a 5G/6G iPod — while I have MAME on my Treo, so I’ve got Ms. Pac-Man, Jr. Pac-Man, Pac-Man Plus, Galaga, Frogger, Donkey Kong, Hat Trick and obscure shit like Pepper II, Spectar and Q-Bert’s Qubes.

On top of that, I’ve got a console emulator on here that can play Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis and Turbo Grafx-16 games. They can play hacked ROMs, too, so Roethlisberger-to-Ward in Tecmo Super Bowl is doable. (And kind of cool.) The 16-bit console emulators are buggy as hell and require a lot of soft resets to run properly, but that didn’t stop me from going out looking for ROMs to run on them.

In fact, in my search for Genesis ROMs, I found not only multiple versions of Madden and FIFA, but also this little gem:

Yes, EA Sports gave us Rugby World Cup 95 for the Genesis, and it looks exactly as you think an EA Sports-coded rugby game for a 16-bit console might look:

Of course, I don’t have the first clue how to control the damn thing — ROMs don’t come with instruction booklets — but if I ever have some time to kill, I’m going to figure it out. I think it might help me appreciate rugby union a little bit more, and if I’m lucky, it’ll only require one or two reboots to work properly.

Still, you can’t do that on your iPhone or Crackberry, can you? Typing on an iPhone sucks, and it won’t run 3rd party apps (yet) or work with a Bluetooth keyboard, among other things. So I’ll stick with my buggy-ass Treo, thanks.

What I really want to know is this — where are the Aussie Rules games for the old 16-bit consoles? Did they not make any AFL games until the Playstation came out?

If you were hoping another video game company might get a shot at giving the all-powerful Madden series some competition in the near future … well, you might as well be hoping for the Miami Dolphins to win the Super Bowl before the decade’s over. EA Sports’ iron clad grip on American football will now last beyond the end of the Mayan calendar.

Just over three years ago, Electronic Arts tackled the sports genre by announcing it had signed a multiyear exclusivity deal with the National Football League and the NFL Players, the players’ union. Under the agreement, EA Sports’ Madden NFL franchise was the sole official licensee for the US’ most popular sport, forcing rival 2K Sports to get creative with its own pro-football series.

Today, EA Sports announced that it has extended its contract with the NFL and NFL Players through the 2012 season. That means the Redwood City, California-based publisher will retain exclusive game rights to all NFL teams, stadiums, and player likenesses and information through until the Super Bowl XLVII champion is crowned in 2013.

So there.

EA Sports’ competition in the American football video game market now consists of digitized old-timers and doomed attempts at recapturing nostalgia. Other companies make college football games, yes, but if you want to recreate the NFL experience on your Xbox, PlayStation or Wii, you have to give EA your money.

I still think it’s a bad move for the NFL, because competition makes these games better in the long run. EA has to make FIFA 09 better to withstand competition from Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer. Plus, if the NFL really wanted to diversify its existing video game properties like it says, it wouldn’t limit itself to one video game company.

Let’s not lie, though — Madden is a license to print money. If EA Sports wants to pony up the cash for an exclusive deal, the NFL won’t say no to the truckloads of cash they’ll receive from it. Plus, EA will make it all back in sales, and everyone else is out of luck.

Hey, maybe other video game companies can get in on this United Football League startup that Mark Cuban is helping to build. After all, what young football fan wouldn’t love to re-create that glorious David Carr-to-Charles Rogers touchdown combo that’s sure to come our way this fall?

(Spotted on FanHouse)

We haven’t gotten a fresh batch of football links from our man Carlito in a while, so it’s high time we spotlighted the new “silliest goal celebration ever” — though really, was it any worse than Steve Smith’s change-the-diaper touchdown celebration? — and looked around for interesting stories that I missed in the last week.

After all, trying to follow every football code on the planet is hard. Posting a load of links to other sites makes it a little easier:

• The genius of basketball and the genius of soccer. [The Run of Play]
• Ten things you should know about non-league football in England. [Pitch Invasion]
• NFL games in England could be here to stay. [Reuters]
• Speaking of Reuters, when did there bloggers morph into hookers from Leeds? [Reuters Soccer Blog (twice)]
• Could St. Louis beat Philadelphia to win the 16th MLS franchise? [Goal]
• Are Australian punters more mentally stable than the American ones? [UWire via Deadspin]
• Aussie-style kicking is definitely helping NFL punters. [World Footy News]
• Speaking of Australia, it just dropped domestic rugby union. [Scrumbag]
• One Super 14 club is using Aussie Rules for training. [World Footy News]
• Gary Ablett would be great at rugby league. [Fox Sports Australia]
• Watching soccer is different when you play it… [SoccerLens]
• …and more fun when you’re drinking. [Center Holds It]
• Medieval mob football isn’t dead yet. [Washington Post]
• An open letter to the NFL from a frustrated fan. [Joe Sports Fan]
• Tecmo Bowl predicts this Sunday’s conference championships. [ArmchairGM]
• Would computers ever replace NFL coaches? [NFL FanHouse]
• The scandal of African player trafficking in soccer. [Guardian]
• Your African Cup of Nations preview. [That's On Point]

In addition to the African Cup of Nations kicking off this weekend, the two participants in Super Bowl XLII will be determined on Sunday, the Pool Stage of the Heineken Cup finishes up, and on Monday, we’ll find out if Liverpool still has what it takes to remain in the Top 4 when they head to Birmingham to face Aston Villa.

Enjoy your football, everyone!

…but for now, I’ll just point you to this IGN video that discusses Madden 08 for the Wii, since that’s the console I own.

I think Madden would be more fun for everyone if you looked like you were dancing in an “Up With People” halftime show while playing it.

Much better Madden coverage is available here. For the record, FIFA 08 is due out for the Wii on September 28. I haven’t heard anything about EA Sports releasing a follow-up to Rugby 06, which is odd, given that it’s a World Cup year. Oh, and Sony Computer Entertainment has the AFL license, which pretty much confirms that the game will A.) never be released for the Wii, and B.) never come to America, except through shady BitTorrent sites.

…to come up with the best rugby union primer I’ve seen yet.

I think I picked up more from this video than I did from watching the entire Super 14 final. Maybe I’ll start figuring out some actual in-game strategies during the Tri Nations series, which starts up in a few weeks.

Y’know, if anyone is in the best position to teach the world how different sports are played, it’s EA Sports. They could introduce an “International Football Series” that includes Madden 08, FIFA 08, Rugby 08 and AFL Premiership 08. Except that I don’t think they have the rights to produce that last one. Not yet, anyway…

Brian Cook, one of my many cohorts at the NFL FanHouse, shares a report from IGN which reveals that Tecmo Inc. is reviving the Tecmo Bowl franchise.

Clearly, all you 30-somethings who grew up playing Tecmo Super Bowl on the NES will read this and discover an instant cure for dry mouth. Sadly, I have to be the one who pops your bubble. This version of Tecmo Bowl won’t have NFL players like those old NES and SNES versions. EA Sports has exclusive rights to the NFL and NFLPA licenses through 2009.

Granted, the new Tecmo Bowl could still be a better game than, say, Arena Football: Road to Glory, but without the ability to run Bo Jackson 800 yards for a touchdown, gamers aren’t going to take a shine to this like they did Tecmo Super Bowl. Playing as fake franchises with rosters full of names you don’t know just isn’t the same as playing as your Sunday afternoon heroes. That’s what helped to make Tecmo Bowl so beloved in the first place.

I wish ‘em luck, but unless EA grants Tecmo a sub-license — which is somewhat less likely than the Pittsburgh Steelers trading Ben Roethlisberger — the new Tecmo Bowl just won’t have the same allure as the classic.

I hope the NFL doesn’t let EA keep those exclusive rights beyond this deal. Lack of competition is going to stifle Madden in the long run.

UPDATE (5/17): Our pal MJD has a fantastic take on the return of Tecmo Bowl. He uses the phrase, “Mariah Carey’s naughty pillows.” It’s awesome. Go read it.

Association football may be the third-most popular sport in Japan behind baseball and schoolgirl-groping, but football of the gridiron variety has a growing audience there, too. In addition to its scores of high school and college teams, Japan is home to the X-League, which consists mostly of corporate-owned and sponsored teams. Japan is also the two-time defending American Football World Cup champion. (Where ya at, USA?)

So of course, the country has to show its love of American football the best way it knows how — through anime.

Eyeshield 21 is the story of a small, unassuming, doe-eyed teenage boy who just happens to have the ability to run fast and dodge tackles in ways that make Tecmo Bowl Bo Jackson jealous. The superstar quarterback at his high school coerces this boy into playing for the football team, but in order to keep other schools from luring him away, the coach makes him front as if he’s the team secretary and puts a thick green eyeshield on the boy’s helmet to conceal his identity during games. Because that makes perfect sense in an anime series.

I found out about this series through, of all things, a Wii blog. A video game version of Eyeshield 21 is coming out for the Wii in Japan:

Somehow, I don’t think Madden junkies in America will ever have the opportunity to play this. More’s the pity. I bet the anime cheerleaders would put Minka Kelly to shame.

Incidentally, a YouTube search for Eyeshield 21 turns up a whole slew of episodes, so if you want to see what some Japanese folk think of American football, go check it out. Given the cult following the gridiron game has there, the Land of the Rising Sun might be fertile ground for NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s World Domination Tour.