what a terrible defensive co-ordinator you are simulating there, they should be in nickel vs 4 WR!
(just messin)
Pro Strategy Football is made by the same guy that made Tom Landry Strategy Football in the 90s. It’s a fun time.
Draft Day Sports Football is good, but it’s missing some mojo that I can’t put my finger on which means it doesn’t draw me in the way Front Office Football used to do back in the day. I quite like the college version though.
Legend Bowl has some growing coach mode capabilities, but the franchise-type stuff is still currently built by third party tools. Those tools are available from the official Dev discord and are good and easy to use, but obviously it’d be ideal if that stuff was handled in game.
I am happy I still have a Pro Strategy Football version on my phone, as it seems the game left the Apple store. It played so well on those tiny screens, what a shame!
Exactly how the AI can beat you, or you can beat the AI. Of course dependent on personnel and a bit of random luck.
The game will tell you the formation the offense is in when you are on defense, but when you are on offense you do not know defensive formation.
Oh that’s strange, I had checked last year and the store was showing me none :O
I still long for a tablet version of Gridiron Solitaire. Never going to happen, what a cool game that is — but I can’t play with the mouse for extended periods of time anymore!
I wiled away many an hour in my previous job playing Gridiron Solitaire with half my brain while talking to customers on the phone with the other half.
Too few games require that perfect amount of strategising ;D
Sunday Rivals is a fun, arcade football game. Not perfect, but still getting updates.
This might be worth watching, with a projected release date of 5/6/22
Looks cool! Wishlisted.
yep, launched into early access today.
$25 for an early access title like this one seems a little ambitious, especially since the dev explicitly says they want player feedback, and that the EA period is going to last one to two years! Guess we’ll see if any reviews start rolling in.
Visually, the old Frontpage Sports Football games were much more to my taste. I know this is EA, but this is some cold looking generic 3D stuff with a grim early 2K interface.
I marked this one to follow in Steam. Looks promising, but without a franchise mode, I’ll probably pass for now.
I hear you. It has a couple of modes that help with replay-ability, but I mainly just play it with my son. Legend Bowl just added a franchise mode, so maybe that would be a good one to check out if you don’t have it already.
This is early access, but looks like something to keep an eye on:
It seems playable right now based on updates and user reviews, and it already has a decent mod community. I’ll wait for future developments to try it out, but it’s going on my Steam watchlist.
Despite not watching any college football I picked up Football Coach College Dynasty because I really like management games set in that universe. Something about having max 4 seasons of a player before he’s out the door gives a nice twist that I enjoy.
There’s a lot of good in the game already while still having a lot of space to grow, but one thing I do want to mention early is an underrated part of management games - the UI.
Football Manager has become an ever-increasing kludge of pointless press conferences, social hierarchies and bemusing player interactions but the UI is really on point, allowing you to get to almost anywhere from almost anywhere in one or two clicks and adds in neat tricks like presenting drill through detail using on-hover.
UI/UX design is definitely a skill - one missing in a lot of the single devs or small teams that build this sort of game - but Football Coach College Dynasty has a lot of those tricks baked in already.
First it does simple things like tell you on screen “these points refresh every week, so make sure you spend them, every week.” It provides checklists each week for things you should do before progressing to the next game/week and when it says “you should do a thing” it gives you a pop up when you roll over “thing” to tell you how or a hyperlink to go directly to that thing.
In the same vein when you’re notified a player is injured if you hover over the injury you’ll see what the player’s healthy rating is, what their injured rating is and how likely the injury is to get worse if they keep playing.
Then on the recruiting screen, if you can’t remember what “80 OVR” actually means for this High School QB you can just roll over the “80” to see the ratings for the individual skills below.
It’s not perfect on that front - when I examine a Cornerback’s attributes and then hit back I go back to the whole defence screen and have to click back to Cornerbacks again. Also sometimes if the number you’re examining is close to the edge of the screen then the detail pop up is half off the edge and out of sight, but it’s a great start.
Oh and the game is good too. I suppose I could talk about that if anyone’s on the fence for buying.
I wonder what happened to the Front Office Football stuff. I remember him selling the IP and going to work for the company, but I don’t believe I’ve heard anything about what they were working on since then.
It is a shame the partnership with OOTP didn’t work out, and it topped off the tragedy of the project right before that coming to an end to the programmer’s declining health.
I would love for someone to give me a Football Manager for, uh, football. Barring that, then just give me a remastered Front Page Sports Football. I was very happy with that back in the 90s.
I used to talk with Jim (designer/owner of the FOF stuff) and he really struggled a lot with the entire experience of developing the game and improving it and dealing with the public. Jim took it really personally when people attacked the game and him. Of course, in those days the gaming world was much different than it is today. He actually chatted with the SI (FM) people at one point and was disappointed that never went anywhere. One issue is that he just never really made enough money.
It was such a rise and fall story of a small guy with a great concept and, for a time, a very strong fan base.