3/10/2008 - TSB: Eli Manning to Tyree and Burress

It has been argued that a 1991 football game, Tecmo Super Bowl for the old Nintendo Entertainment System is the greatest football videogame of all time. I'm not a sports videogame fan, so I can't render a judgment. But I find it funny that after all these years, and all these releases of Madden football games by EA later, that people still play a 17-year old game that is so technically inferior to anything available today. Being a retro gamer, however, I can understand that mentality. Games today are so overloaded with complicated control schemes and production values that often overshadow gameplay that these games of the past still captivate a wide audience because of they're easy to pick up and play and are just plain fun.

The following for Tecmo Super Bowl is so large that modders have actually hacked the game so that the current roster can be represented. In fact, here's footage from an updated version of the game that actually recreates the two winning passes from this past Superbowl between the Patriots and the Giants:



Now this brings up another point... why, with the online functionality available today, must they release version after version of the same sports games with updated rosters and only minor changes to the gameplay? If they could just release patches for sports games that include the current roster and statistics, then you wouldn't have to buy a new disc year after year. I mean, if they can do it for a 17-year old NES game, surely they can they can figure it out for X-Box Live.