gregwong@maui.cs.ucla.edu (Greg Wong) (01/11/90)
This is a short personal review of Broderbund's Playmaker Football. At long last, I've found the computer football game I've been looking for. The game is divided into three sections - The Game, The Team Draft, and The Chalkboard Editor. The Chalkboard Editor lets you design your own plays. There are extensive tools that allow you to specify different types of blocks, different types of rush, different types of keying (how a player on defense reacts to the play development), and different types of passing among other things. You can even instruct your defensive backs to play man-to-man or zone. When designing your plays, timing is very important, and the Chalkboard Editor allows you to try your plays on a practice field to get the timing right. Once you've designed a play, you can also program the AI that goes with the play. I haven't actually tried the AI feature, but with it, you can instill your own coaching philosophy. When you play The Game, you can have the computer play against itself using your plays and your AI. The Team Draft allows you to create players for your own team. Basically you are given a number of attribute points that you assign to the different attributes of your players at each position. This includes strength, speed, intelligence (important to keep your defense from being fooled to easily), agility, and discipline (does he follow the play as you designed and does he commit a lot penalties). The players tend to run at their full speed, so the timing of the plays you design using The Chalkboard Editor depends on the attributes of the players. I recommend that you design your team before designing your plays. Finally, there is The Game. You can play human against computer, computer against computer, or human against human. The human player calls his own plays. The computer player calls plays according to the AI designed with the plays. The player on offense only has a few seconds to call his play or else he risks getting hit with a delay of game penalty. The player on offense can also call audibles at the line of scrimage from three plays that he specified as audible plays. When playing human vs. human, the player on offense must look away while the defense calls his play. This is a little inconvenient, but short of using 2 computers or some sort of encryption, this seems to be the only easy solution. The game has great sound effects if you have 1 Megabyte of memory and you have the sound option switched on. They have different digitized sounds of players crunching and groaning. As you can tell, I really enjoy this game. It's a bit complicated, but I think the detail and flexibility are very good. Broderbund has a real hit on their hands. >>>>> I do not work for nor am I in any way connected with Broderbund. This is just my opinion and my opinion alone. <<<<< --Greg +------------------------------------------------------------------+ |<gregwong@maui.cs.ucla.edu> | "Wile E. Coyote... Super genius."| +------------------------------------------------------------------+