Football Frenzy (Neo Geo AES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

A playthrough of SNK's 1992 football game for the Neo Geo AES, Football Frenzy.

The video shows the tournament (3-game) mode played with the Bullets on the normal difficulty level.

Football Frenzy was the first, and only, American football game to ever appear on the Neo Geo hardware. While it might sound strange for a 90s arcade platform, the Neo Geo never dealt much in sports outside of soccer.

So how does Football Frenzy fare? Well, it actually feels pretty similar to SNK's 1991 NES football game, Touchdown Fever. The sport has been stripped down to the basics for this cart. The playbook is tiny - the unique plays you can run can be counted on your fingers, all of the others are just slight variations on the basic ones, and there aren't any specific to the teams. When running the ball, you don't get to spin, shuck, jive, or whatever else. You can run, you can hammer the A button to run slightly faster, and you can get tackled. Oh, that arcade simplicity.

The rules are a loosely applied here, too - even though it's not really necessary since the CPU doesn't put up a huge challenge, you can get a way with a lot of shenanigans. It's actually pretty funny to see just how unrealistically lopsided a score can end up by the end of the game. There were a number of ridiculous plays I ran just because I could.

The real high point of the game is the graphics and the sound. It's bright and loud, and the effort to grab your attention is a pretty good one. The animated cutscenes are completely hilarious and awkward - the "oh no!" face makes your player look like he's being subjected to painfully loud sounds, and the "hells yes!" face makes the guy look like he's angrily praying. The halftime show is pretty entertaining as well - you get to watch a squad of cheerleaders showing their panties as the mascot runs about the field, and it's capped off with a weird image of a girl (that I guess you might call 80s hot? I think that's what they were going for) smiling while posing like The Thinker. Such a strange choice, but it's too funny to not enjoy it.

You get some commentary and lots of grunts and crunching sounds, and the soundtrack sounds like an offshoot of what you'd hear in Baseball Stars 2 - lots of guitar, orchestra hits, and drums - which does add a fair amount of bombast to the whole package.

Overall, Football Frenzy isn't anything particularly special - Tecmo Bowl never had to fear for it's prize position - but its shallow gameplay is definitely entertaining for short bursts. I do have to wonder, though - was this really a good choice for a console port? It's fun, but not enough to justify the cart's original price tag, nor enough to warrant feeding it coins at the end of every quarter in the MVS version.

But still, if you can find a copy cheap, it is an enjoyable distraction, and there's certainly nothing else like it on the Neo Geo.

And is it just me, or does the woman in the intro cinema remind anyone else of Tommy Shaw? I'd be convinced that it was actually meant to be him if it wasn't for the cleavage.
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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