As the popularity of the Arena Football League grows, so does Electronic Art’s representation of the league on home video gaming systems. To follow up last year’s fresh entry into sports video gaming, EA is hitting the Playstation 2 with Arena Football: Road to Glory.
Unfortunately for pigskin fanatics looking for a huge follow up to last year’s effort, sadly, if you took away the menus and put Arena Football and Arena Football: Road to Glory side-by-side, very few people would be able to pinpoint which game is which. Hopping in for one last go at the previous generation of systems, the title adds a new chunk of features that makes Road to Glory more appealing than its predecessor but those features are hardly new to the sports game genre.
As an off-season alternative to the NFL, AFL steps in to provide a more action-oriented take on the classic sport. With teams of eight players taking both offensive and defensive roles on a 50-yard field as well as walls on the sidelines, games are high-scoring, long-passing, smash mouth affairs.
On the whole, EA captures the heart of the AFL fairly well in the presentation of its video game adaptation.
The menus are clean and easy to navigate, the character models are up to par with the Madden and NCAA levels and the animations are less canned than in past sports games. While the main visual focus of the game is spot on, however, the environments are far less appealing. The stadiums are generic at best and the crowds look incredibly washed out. That being said, as long as the game is motion and distracts a gamer’s eye from the surroundings, Road to Glory features a number of well-done collision animations to stimulate a sports fan’s enjoyment.
On the other spectrum of presentation, Road to Glory fails to please with its recycled sound and lack of play-by-play and color commentary. While the title’s sound effects are spot-on with what is happening on-screen, the generic public announcement post-play dictation fails to impress in a field of sports games that emulate the commentary of actual television events. As much as wicked tackles and wall hits are pleasing to the ears, what players do not hear in the field of commentary is the title’s most glaring weakness.
Article comments
1 - David
Good article,
I'm a big football fan and I love playing the video game version of the sport as well. I remember playing the first John Madden Football for SNES and Joe Montanta talking football for Sega Genesis. I even remember further back playing TecmoBowl for the original Nintendo system. I don't mind watching Arean Football on television, but honestly, I'm not sure how much of a market there will be for it in the video game industry. I don't think there are enough differences in the technical aspects of the game to warrant a different title altogether. The rules, the field and the playing conditions are slightly altered, but not to the point where a seperate video game would bring a different gaming experience. It will probably be the same game engine with a few tweaks. With something like college football as oppossed to the NFL it's a little different because both leagues have individual teams with legions of devoted followers. Arena Football is still a little too young in its history to bring the legacies of historic teams and players to the table. Did they ever make a video game for the XFL? I can't imagine that it sold well if they did, and I would think they should expect the same kinds of results from a release like this. Personally, I think the industry should focus more on adventure, action and strategy games. They seem like they are milking the sports game genre dry here lately, when there are only so many spins they can make on the same approach (ie. Madden, NFL2K, NCAA Football, NFL Blitz, Arena Football etc.). At least in the earlier years they tried to put a novel approach on it (ie. the "talking" aspect of Joe Montana football, The "Mutant League" titles for Genesis etc.). Most of the football games these days seem pretty redundant. There just seems to be much more room to work with in coming up with new and fresh adventure, action and strategy titles -- yet the major sports continue to get multiple releases each year, most of them lackluster. Look at a games like Zelda for example. They stand on their own, and have carved out their own niche in the video game world. I wish programmers and coders would take more initiatve in creating stand alone games and titles like this instead of rehashing whatever the popular sport is at the moment (see: Tony Hawk skateboarding, Professional Wrestling, and XTreme games). I got curious and did a little poking around online trying to find out more info about the kind of games I mentioned earlier and I came across a couple of interesting articles like this one that actually goes over the history of the genre itself. Pretty interesting if I do say so myself. Check it out if you're interested in that kind of thing and have a few minutes to spare. Great post though by the way, I just wish the industry would begin to focus a little more of their resources on other genres. Keep up the great blogging!