Organic balls have been outlawed.
PLAYERS: 1-2 simultaneous
PUBLISHER: Jaleco
DEVELOPER: Tengen
GENRE: Sports
RELEASE DATE: 1992
If there’s any sport in this world that confuses me regarding its appeal, curling would be first, then football. As Orson Scott Card nimbly put it, “It’s like a ballet where slugs bash into each other.” I’m not sure he said the “ballet” part, but the point remains the same. Throwing robots into the pigskin mix, however, sounds like a recipe for success. It kinda, sorta worked for Base Wars, did it not? Well, color me metallic grey because it sure doesn’t work here. Imagine if 10-Yard Fight, that awful first-gen football game, had robots, and then imagine if they tried to give 10-Yard Fight a modicum of strategy. I know, it’s confusing, but that’s exactly what Cyber Ball tries to do: add a fantastical element to the lumbering game of football, then pretend like it’s a real football game by giving you play options. Huh? Pick your poison, Cyber Ball. You should either enhance football with your teams of cybernetic organisms – like how in Base Wars, when two members of the opposing team collide, they begin to fight until one of them explodes – or just throw in some huge dudes and make it a typical football sim. The latter isn’t hard, really. Madden’s been doing it for twenty-plus years and he seems to make a comfortable living.
D-
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3 replies on “#156 – Cyber Ball”
10-yard Fight sucked? What planet have I been living on? Just kidding.
Football confounds me. Why do they keep stopping? When someone is tackled, there should ensue a vicious dogpile, and when someone finally emerges with the ball, just keep going. No time-outs, no spending 3/4 of the game lining up players, just nonstop carnage frome start to finish. Then I might consider watching.
Player Safety.