It's the end of another football season, which means it must be time for the latest edition of Sierra's vaunted Front Page Sports Football Pro series. The '96 model adds a new graphics engine with updated players. Initially it was to be a native Windows 95 game, but the designers hit a few snags along the way; so it's still stuck in DOS-land, which is probably a good thing, since some technical problems remain.
On the plus side, the increased graphic resolution makes the game considerably easier to play (and more realistic). Running up the middle under player control is now possible, because all the players combined don't just form a mass of undifferentiated pixels when the ball is snapped û you can now spot the holes and shoot for them. The graphics don't take a big performance hit, either; the football field is basically a giant slab of green. The simple grass textures make no pretense of duplicating the field perfectly.
All 30 of the 1995 NFL teams are present and accounted for; Sierra has also seen fit to include thousands of extra plays on the CD (in the EXTRA directory, which is undocumented). You can view the action from a near-infinite number of camera angles, switching views at any time during a play. What more could a player ask for?
For starters, how about a game that actually works right out of the box? Here's yet another product with a "first-week of release bug patch" nipping right at its heels, an almost industry-wide pattern these days. This is inexcusable, and one of many things which mar what could otherwise have been a superb product. Some of the bugs are pretty obvious, as well; the crowd sounds sort of stops after a few plays, regardless of sound card or machine configuration.
Numerous players on-line have been unable to get the play editor to work (and that first week patch has made it even worse for them, especially if they have machines with 8MB of RAM), and it's fairly easy to see why. It's a holdover from the previous release, and requires about 570K free base RAM. It also doesn't look anything like the rest of the game, and remains rather cumbersome to use. However, if you can get it working (and admittedly, it worked fine on a machine running it from a Win95 DOS prompt, albeit a machine with 16 MB of RAM), it remains an incredibly powerful tool for creating the west-coast offense of your dreams.
Other niggling details concern the way the computer simulates games and seasons. Quarterbacks can rarely complete over 50% of their passes. In the Year of the QB and the 100-Catch Receiver, this is a bit odd. If you let the computer do the kicking, you'll probably see at least one block every game. This has also been fixed in the patch, but what Dynamix has done is just make the computer kick at a higher angle, which means that you can't make long field goals or punt for more than 40 yards.
The best aspect of the game remains the career mode. The first thing I always do when starting a new league is take over a team, get rid of all the veterans and draft a bunch of talented rookies and try to build a winner from the ground up (with Dallas being the obvious model to follow). Unfortunately, a few things in Football '96 conspire to keep me from realizing my dreams of being the next Jerry Jones. First off, seasons now take an eternity to simulate. Where games used to take a few minutes to simulate, they now take, well, many more minutes. Overall, it takes a couple of hours to simulate a week, and the game doesn't allow you to simulate multiple weeks at a time (with FPS: Baseball I'd always start a season before I went to bed and go to work the next day û by the time I got back, it'd be, oh, a few months into a season). In defense of Football Pro's apparent slowness, it should be noted that this is the one product out there which actually simulates the physics of each game, instead of resolving play by simple statistical calculations. Choose yer poison.
Secondly û and perhaps this was just bad luck û the drafts feature extremely large pools of merely average players. The number one pick was as average as the number 30 pick in all of the drafts I ran. In order to truly build a team, you'll probably have to edit some of your players manually, which is a daunting task (though undeniably powerful, with fancy new formulas replacing mere numbers for some statistics). Finally, trading is still flawed (as it has been since the first FPS: Football). You can still rob computer teams (it's still easy to get starting DBs for a third string tight end, for example), so it's up to the player to play fair. Again, no one else has actually made a computer GM which actually works, either; we can always hope.
We can also hope that one day FPS Football Pro will actually live up to its promise. The '96 release adds some glitz to what remains a promising but highly flawed simulator. Sierra really needs to sit down and address some of the problems in the game for its next release. It would seem that Sierra and Stormfront (makers of Tony LaRussa 3 and Old-Time Baseball) are alike, in the sense that they keep bumping up the visuals for all of their games without doing what really needs to be done: they both need to work on the core simulation aspect of the programs, which is no doubt considerably harder than a pretty facade.
Until that happens, it's hard to see what new installments of FPS Football Pro will offer owners of earlier editions, other than new graphics, the expansion teams and updated players. For some, the graphics may be enough; but for long-time fans of the series, all of those niggling problems are beginning to add up, and are starting to turn this potential first-stringer into a bench warmer.
