NES Play Action Football

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NES Play Action Football
Developer(s)	Nintendo IRD
Publisher(s)	Nintendo
Platform(s)	NES, Game Boy, Virtual Console
Release date	NES: September 1990 VC: September 10, 2007
Genre(s)	Sport, American football
Mode(s)	Single player, multiplayer

NES Play Action Football is an American football video game for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It was a first party game designed by Nintendo's IRD division (responsible for the Punch-Out!! and StarTropics series), and was released in 1990. The game was also ported to the Game Boy as Play Action Football, and received a follow up on the Super Nintendo, Super Play Action Football, in 1992. On September 10, 2007, the game was re-released on the Nintendo Wii's Virtual Console in North America.

[edit] Overview

This game was highly impressive for its time. It allowed players to choose from ten real teams from various cities, and each team featured all the actual players that were currently playing for them.

The game used an isometric view, presenting the game at an angle to make it appear 3-D, and the game allowed a very large number of moving objects (all the players) to be on screen at the same time; in earlier games, the system couldn't handle it. In a typical NES game, few moving objects could be onscreen before they all started flashing, because the system couldn't render them all at once, but NES PAF managed to avoid this somehow and allow the system to render two entire football teams onscreen simultaneously.

Another feature that was ahead of its time was the use of real voices. NES PAF was one of an extremely small number of NES games to feature voices. Most games never bothered to implement this feature because of the primitive sound capabilities, but in NES PAF, players hear the referee say in a real voice "Touchdown!" or "First down!" You can even hear the football players yell "Ready! Set! Hut, hut.." before the play begins. At the end of each game, Nester appears as a commentator, announcing who wins and who lost.