Unnecessary Roughness '95

More than 1000 NFL players, including bruisers like Reggie White and glamour guys like "Neon" Deion Sanders, compete in this bone-crushing Genesis game. You get 28 pro teams and two all-star squads, plus a long list of options for stuff like weather conditions and type of field. Hit the High-Impact Button, and you'll see some real game-bustin' plays! Use a multiplayer adapter to get four-player kicks. A1 Michaels (of Monday Night Football fame) calls the play-by-play.

American Football. The ever vacuous Nicky Horne brought it to our tv screens on wintry Sunday nights back in the early 8os and with only a few cosmetic changes (unlucky Nicky), it has stuck around for over 10 years. Now the nicknames Redskins and 4gers are as much ingrained on the minds of uk sports fans as the Gunners and Canaries. And American Football simulations are much the same as the real thing.

They arrived a long while back with tubby John Madden, stuck to gamers like Ultimas, and now could fill a monthly magazine on their own. So as you are taking time to flick through American Football Zone, Ill delve into the latest hut, hut, hut offering from Accolade, Unnecessary Roughness.

Stat attack

Unnecessary Roughness combines excellent statistic-laden coaching options with gruelling arcade action similar to Joe Montana and Mike Ditkas namesake sims and the current benchmark. Front Page Sports. Accolade has supplied a myriad of playing options from the total coach (you define plays and let the action unfold), to the total footballer (you allow the computer to do the brain power and just follow orders), or a combination of both: the most sensible and enjoyable option. You dont even have to play the game at all with the full season simulation, which calculates the scores of all games in your league in about the time it takes a small snail to tow a caravan round the M25. The simulator also calculates the scores on a week-by-week basis, so you can pick and choose which games to play and bypass the boring ones like the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Talking of names, Accolade hasnt been sanctioned to use the nfl team nicknames and logos. Although all the players from last season are in here, each team takes just the city name and a rather dodgy (non-NFL) logo. But its all fruitless anyway as saddoes spend the first hour of gameplay editing all team names to their nfl monikers and terminal saddoes spend this time dreaming up the Green Bay Slackers and Buffalo Dills and the like. The logos can also be drawn, allowing you to create a giant dill pickle for the Buffalo squad, although the graphic capabilities of the logo editor are on a par with Etch-a-Sketch.

All good football sims rely on a healthy play and team editor and Accolade has stuffed Unnecessary Roughness with both. You can play a full season or the usual one-off exhibition game, and can customise players and teams, setting up your own leagues, choosing strips (everything from emblems on hats to the stripes on trousers). The team editor is comprehensive allowing you to give players inhuman strengths, and a notable 80 plays are programmed in with options to change these subtly or create entirely new plays.

Unnecessary Roughness includes one of the best play editors of all American football games with the ability to change the priorities and routes of every single player/position in a play. The point and click interface for editing plays is a doddle to use and makes all the difference for enticing inexperienced players into the editing side of the game. All the plays you create, whether they be inspired or downright idiotic, can be saved into any number of playbooks. These contain up to 30 plays and, usefully, display six plays at a time to save on excessive page turning.

Play the game

As all American sports fans bow down to Statisticus, The Great God Of Number Crunching, these editing features are crucial to extending the life of the game and at the same time destroying your own life, as you will spend months fiddling with the minutiae of your teams stats.

Far more socially rewarding is the arcade action bit with which you can buy some company by inviting in someone off the street for a spot of two-player Unnecessary Roughness. Unfortunately, youre going to have to work hard to keep them there. The graphics and gameplay are solid, if not inspired. The sprites are small and not particularly well animated (not up to Front Page Sports standard). The ball is passed by switching views to highlight a pre-ordained series of receivers. These receivers do not appear in windows, but in full screen, and, unless you have the game map up which runs down a quarter of the screen, it is difficult to judge where on the field they are in relation to your Quarterback. Still, many games use this type of passing method, so there isnt much alternative, although the target cursor approach used in Coaches Club Football and John Madden is far superior, giving you more control.

While Im on the subject, the controls are a serious danger to your mental health. The keyboard is a fine passer of the ball, but makes an awful sound when you keep the keys used for running depressed for more than a couple of seconds. The mouse, on the other hand, can move you around the field smoothly, if unpredictably, but passing is a headache. A joystick is probably the best option, but the one I tried lost all calibration and try as 1 might I couldn't get the game to work sensibly with it.

Unnecessary griping

Despite my incessant moaning, average arcade action mixed with excellent editing facilities make Unnecessary Roughness a worthy addition to the American football lorry load. The only Unnecessary Roughness in this whole saga, however, is aimed at those with anything less than a 486DX/33. Apparently, this is the minimum hardware required to run the game and, judging from my experience on a lower spec machine (the screen redraws every few seconds while running down field), this is no joke. So if you are still without a Pentium and own a 386, you can forget it and put it down to Unnecessary Daftness on the part of the programmers.

This hard-hitting football sim stars players from the NFL Players Association and boasts the standard gridiron features, plus full-season, playoff, and championship play.