Monday Night Football - PC Review - Gamecenter

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Monday Night Football
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CNET Gamecenter Review
By Hugh Falk
(11/21/1996)

Players know that success on Monday Night Football requires amazing speed, size, and power. Unfortunately, I'm referring to computer game players, not football players. Any gamer who has tried ABC and OT Sports' new football game knows that only the fastest, biggest, and most powerful PCs on the market are up to the task.
more demanding than Kathie Lee's sweatshop supervisors
Normally, hardware requirements don't elicit top billing in a review, but check out these statistics: Windows 95, P75 (P133 is recommended), 16MB of RAM, 160MB of free disk space (for recommended install), and 16-bit color. ABC deserves credit for trying to publish a next-generation game, but Monday Night Football's highest ratings will come from PC benchmarks, not playability tests.
In fact, for a game with such outrageous hardware requirements, Monday Night Football is not an impressive spectacle. Players are drawn realistically enough but move slowly, player jersey numbers are unreadable, stadiums look downright awful, and NFL logos are merely adequate. I can only guess that Monday Night Football is such a resource hog because of its full-motion video. Al Michaels, Frank Gifford, Dan Dierdorf, Lynn Swann, and Chris Berman are all included. These guys are great sportscasters, but they aren't the reason I watch football, and they certainly aren't the reason I play a football game on my PC.
Full-motion video often hurts games more than it helps; Monday Night Football is a case in point. The video itself is high quality and unobtrusive during gameplay because it's generally limited to pre/postgame and halftime; however, the sheer volume of video obviously bulks this game up and slows it down the way a pan pizza slows an offensive lineman.
slower than Dierdorf
Speed is Monday Night Football's bane. I tested this game with a Gateway 2000 P5-133, a Matrox Millennium video card, and 16MB of RAM, and it plays like that pizza-laden lineman. The game itself isn't overly slow, but the wait to start the game and change options is unacceptable thanks to the superfluous "features." Once the action begins, the digitized speech is so stuttered that I have to wipe spittle from my speakers.

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Monday Night Football

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