Total Control Football - PC Review - Gamecenter

Free Email

Search

Chase Platinum Credit Card

CNET: Gamecenter: PC

Reviews

Total Control Football
Rating: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 best

CNET Gamecenter Review
By Hugh Falk
(12/10/1996)

Philips Media's Total Control Football is an ambitious game that lets the player assume the roles of general manager, coach, and quarterback of a pro football team in hopes of making the franchise successful. Unfortunately, the game is too ambitious for its own good, and none of these aspects is particularly well done.
Total The game has more technical problems than Howard Stern. Although a patch is available on the Philips Web page, Total Control is still full of problems, and the only site with a longer list of bugs is Orkin exterminators. A more ambitious game would let the player assume the roles of game designer, programmer, and quality assurance engineer of a software company in hopes of making Total Control Football a successful game.
will the real Al Davis step forward
What makes Total Control interesting is its capacity as a general manager simulation. Other games usually have basic G.M. functionality, but Total Control goes deeper. As G.M., the player can add seats and skyboxes to the stadium, set ticket pricing, negotiate player contracts, and hire and fire coaches and other personnel. The goal is to maintain the team's budget, which is carefully monitored from the G.M.'s computer. Number crunching replaces bone crunching in this part of the simulation, and even though I have no aptitude for accounting, I found this aspect of the game compelling.
Unfortunately, the compulsion soon turns to revulsion as the bugs mount. For example, if you raise your gate ticket prices $1 too high, 100 percent of revenue shifts to advance ticket sales. If the advance ticket price is $1 too high, 100 percent of revenue shifts to gate ticket sales. This is completely unrealistic. Some tickets will always be sold in advance and some will be sold at the gate. In my second season, the computer kept resetting my ticket prices to $25 by itself, and the budget reflected no revenue from ticket sales. And I never made a dime from skybox sales. Considering that tickets are a main source of revenue, and revenue is the most important aspect of any budget, the whole budgeting process fails.
Recruiting is a more enjoyable part of being a general manager. But when draft day arrives, the team's current roster isn't viewable from the war room, and filling needs is difficult. One minor note from my third season--Tennessee somehow had four quarterbacks eligible for the draft. Total Control must count each of Peyton Manning's arms and legs as a separate draft choice. A final disappointment from the G.M.'s seat: when the roster is finally complete, there is no way to modify player attributes to create a fantasy league.

Give me more!

Barnes & Noble.com recommends:

Visit the Software Store at B&N • Financial Resolutions for 2001 • Computer Books at B&N.com

Total Control Football

Click for printer-friendly format
Email this story to a friend
SPONSORED LINKS
Buffalo Wireless LAN
2.99% Platinum Card!
Shop B&N.com Today!

Comics
CDs
DVDs
Inline
Movies
Skateboards

Search for more products:

mySimon
a CNET Networks Company