Odyssey Football . . . ouch.
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Playing Football on Odyssey, for me and my son, is worse than staring at a blank wall.
We're not into football. We don't watch football. We don't even own a football. (well, we have a Nerf™ somewhere.) Beyond our lack of interest, I honestly think that if two football fans played this back in 72/73 they would have tried it for 15 minutes and said "Screw this, let's go outside and throw a football around."
Football is more of a "football abstraction". It's as if the game is asking you to pretend that you are playing a football simulation. It includes an Überlay, a game board, about 40 cards, a football marker, and a yardage marker and utilizes no less than three of the pack-in Odyssey carts. You use the included gameboard to keep track of where the ball is. There's a table printed on the board to help you figure out the yardage results of plays based on cards drawn and dice rolled. This game is 95% boardgame and 5% videogame -- and…I actually thought that would be part of its charm.
At the start of a "play", the player in possession of the ball chooses a play (pass, run or punt) and the other player tries to guess which one they picked. If the defensive player guesses correctly, the offense suffers a penalty on any yardage gained after a successful play. The yardage gained is calculated depending on a drawn card and the point which the Ball Spot exits the screen (top left, middle left, bottom left or out of bounds at a certain point). Some cards will have special events like "breakaway" or "the bomb" to indicate very successful plays with appropriate yardage gains. In "gameplay" these "plays" are more or less exactly what we were doing in Tennis and Table Tennis - using "ENGLISH" try to wiggle the Ball Spot past your opponent's Player Spot. "Run" is a little different. It involves moving your whole Player Spot past the defense. If your running square hits the defense square, one of you disappears! This represents a tackle, but feels almost exactly like a square on the TV disappearing.
I'm probably being too hard on it because I'm not into football. The game -is- creative. The designers (an advertising firm) said "how can we simulate football with three squares, only one of which moves on its own?" One must give them credit for trying.
Something interesting about the different "plays" (pass, kick, run): each of them requires a different cart! Can you imagine playing a game today that repeatedly had you taking out and putting in different media to play it? Think of it this way. There are 20 of those so called "plays" in a quarter. 80 for the entire game. That's potentially 80 different cart swaps for one game.
I wish there had been game critics back in 1972 so I could see what people who had nothing else to do with their TVs said about it.
Maybe, if we loved football and just loved the idea of playing this game on our TV, we may have been more tolerant of this attempt at a "port". As it is, we couldn't bear it for more than one "quarter" (20 plays as described above). I think that there must be (must have been) better "electric vibrating magnetic football" games out there (back in 1972/73) and if we really loved football, we'd probably be playing them instead. Missing Ultraman for this? Never. I wouldn't miss Gilligan's Island for this, even if it was an episode I'd seen many, many times and didn't like. (Though, I totally dug Mary Ann.)
The score: Ultraman: 3, Odyssey: 0.
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