Path: menudo.uh.edu!menudo.uh.edu!usenet From: kevin401@houston.relay.ucm.org (Kevin Jackson) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: Professional Football Simulation v3.1b Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.games Date: 15 Jan 1993 18:07:56 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 231 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <1j6uhsINNp63@menudo.uh.edu> Reply-To: kevin401@houston.relay.ucm.org (Kevin Jackson) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Keywords: game, sports, simulation, strategy, football, modem, commercial PRODUCT NAME Professional Football Simulation v3.1b BRIEF DESCRIPTION Professional Football Simulation ("PFS") is the most complete and accurate statistical football game for the Amiga and maybe any other personal computer. Version 3.1b is the latest of a seemingly endless number of updates to this great football game. As the documentation states, Professional Football Simulation started out as "Head Coach" in 1965 on large main-frame computer systems and has been continually updated and refreshed ever since. DISCLAIMER I work for the company that markets this great football game, but I have been a fan of PFS much longer than my association with MicroSearch. I am not involved with the sales nor prosperity of this program on the market, and my goals in writing a review of it are merely to make its presence known in the market. PFS never seems to be included in the "Which Football Game Is The Best?" debates, and my review of PFS contains purely my own personal thoughts and feelings about the game. Hopefully, you will accept it as a non-biased review, regardless of my connection with the company that produces it. AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Name: MicroSearch, Inc. Address: 9000 U.S. 59, Suite 330 Houston, Texas 77074 Telephone: (713) 988-2818 FAX: (713) 995-4994 LIST PRICE $44.95 US dollars SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS SOFTWARE Works under Kickstart 1.3 & 2.04. There is an HD install program on disk 2 that uses the Commodore "Installer" program. Hard drive installation on previous versions of PFS has been near to a nightmare but the PFS hard drive script utilizing the "Installer" was simply a breeze. HARDWARE Requires an Amiga with at least 1MB of RAM and two disk drives. The box claims, "Minimum Requirements: Amiga 500, 600, 1000, 2000." As far as loading goes, the game worked on a one-drive system, but the disk swapping was almost unbearable. PFS worked fine on the Amiga 600HD, although 1.5MB of RAM is required because of the hard drive buffers taking up too much RAM. (Note: The hard drive can be disabled in an Amiga 600HD by pressing both mouse buttons upon a reset and following the directions on the screen.) The box does not claim compatibility with the Amiga 3000 and 4000, but the game appeared to work fine on both; however, turning off the DATA CACHE and DATA BURST on the 68030 and 68040 almost a necessity, or else the game will run entirely too fast! PFS is best when run from a hard drive. The loading is almost instantaneous from a hard drive, making the game much more enjoyable. COPY PROTECTION You must enter a word from your manual. Lack of disk-based copy protection makes it easy to make a backup of your originals using DiskCopy just in case.... The copy protection is annoying, but it's not unbearable. I guess MicroSearch has to put something in to at least slow down piracy. MACHINE USED FOR TESTING Amiga 3000 w/2MB CHIP RAM and 8MB FAST RAM Kickstart 37.175 and Workbench 37.67 Amiga 600HD w/2MB CHIP RAM and 4MB FAST RAM Kickstart 37.350 and Workbench 37.75 REVIEW PFS is a very in-depth game and certainly requires a little bit of patience before you can get it running smoothly. What the game lacks in graphics, it makes up in playability. If you are looking for a football game with realistic graphics and fully animated players running around the screen, this game is not for you. If you are looking for a football game that keeps realistic statistics, plays an extremely accurate game of football, and has realistic gameplay, then PFS is the winner. The game runs on 640x200 16-color screens. The screens and menus look very professionally made and are easy to follow. The title screen (and the cover of the box) is a very nice looking, 640x200, 16-color, raytraced image of two football helmets on the ground of a football field, with the goal posts sticking promptly up in the air in the background. The main menu is basically your "main office" to the game, where menu items for "Play a game", "Edit a team", "Edit a playbook", "Edit a game plan", "Edit a league", "Read documentation", "League office", "Transfer stats", "Make files/disk", and "Process files" appear. These are pretty much self-explanatory. I haven't found too many games that let you read the instructions to a game right in the game itself. It's still more convenient to read the paper instructions, however. The setup menu lets you alter how your actual game will be played. You may have the computer play itself, you can play the computer, or you can play against a friend. You also have a feature that I'd like to see in more Amiga games -- a modem option to play a game against a person on the other side of a phone line. Each team has its own "smart mode", "stats file", "gameplan", and "playbook" to keep track of all the specifics of a team. Among the things you can alter are natural or artificial turf, rain, temperature, wind (direction), snow, injuries, league stats, and even the name of the stadium. The modem option supports Hayes Modems or a null modem cable at 2400, 4800, 9600, or 19200 baud. Because of the nature of the game, high speed modems did not appear to be a factor at all in the speed of the game. Graphics consist of the top view of a game field with team colored player numbers running around on the screen. The game strongly resembles a coach's chalkboard playbook, but animated. When you get down to actual gameplaying, you step in as the coach to the team. You decide what plays are to take place and what all the players do on a particular play. The game comes with a "beginner" and "standard" playbook, for the novice or expert football fanatic. Even the beginner playbook can be a mind-blowing experience. You can call plays using a mouse, or you a program plays using a series of "dot commands" that program how each player performs. I found the "dot commands" to be a little over my head, as I consider myself only a novice when it comes to football knowledge. Even the beginner playbook can be a mind-blowing experience. You can call plays using a mouse or you a program plays using a series of "dot commands" that be a little over my head, as I consider myself only a novice when it comes to football knowledge. Even the beginner playbook lets you choose right/left sweeps, right/left dives, draw plays, long bombs, right/left floods, screens, halfback passes, sneaks, out-of-bounds passes, right/left rolls, right/left reverses, zone passing defenses, three different blitzes, goal, rush, prevent, and double coverage defenses, and a multitude of ways to program each of these to do exactly what you want it to do. The manual to the program details exactly how to do all this and is easy to follow. The back of the box lists some of the features which are present in the game: uses artificial intelligence routines, instant replay, league standings, compiles and prints statistics, playbook includes 136 offensive and 104 defensive plays, detailed playbook mode for calling thousands of plays, create custom plays, exchange playbooks, game plans, and team file with opponents, set team rosters and strengths, etc. Game stats are continually updated; and after the game is over, you can view a detailed list of everything that happened on your monitor or have the stats printed to a printer. This is another feature I wish more games would use. You can even run PREFERENCES directly from PFS so you can change your printer settings without having to reset or exit the program. DOCUMENTATION The half-inch thick documentation comes on nicely printed hole punched loose paper ready to be inserted in a binder of your choice. The documentation is very nicely written and is very easy to follow and understand. There is also disk-based documentation that you can read directly from the main menu of the program. LIKES AND DISLIKES I like the fact that the program plays a realistic game of football and keeps accurate statistics of the game. I dislike the fact that every time you want to play a football game, regardless of whether you have exited the program or not, the copy protection requires you to enter a word from the manual. COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS This game is very similar in game play to Tom Landry Strategy Football ("TLSF") by Merit Software, doesn't seem to keep track of nearly as many statistics. Both games are simple to install on a hard drive (using the Commodore Installer utility). TLSF doesn't even come close to the playbook versatility of PFS. In TLSF, you are limited to certain selection of plays; but in PFS, you can do just about anything you want and even design your own plays. BUGS The game doesn't officially say that it runs on 68030's or 68040's, but it does. The game does run a little fast on these machines however, which maybe is why they aren't mentioned as being officially supported. VENDOR SUPPORT Professional Football Simulation has been updated every few months for the past 4-5 years. If you send in your registration card, updates will be provided for a minimal cost. WARRANTY Unknown. CONCLUSIONS If you are a football fanatic or just a football game player, I highly recommend Professional Football Simulation. It simply plays the most realistic game of football you can get on a computer, and keeps the most accurate statistics. This game is really addictive if you like football. After playing a game, you may just find yourself playing another game, trying some different plays and different strategies. It's fun just experimenting with playbooks and seeing how they work on the football field. I rate this product an 8 out of 10 stars. COPYRIGHT NOTICE If you have any questions, comments, or just want to write me, I can be reached at kevin401@houston.relay.ucm.org. Copyright 1993 Kevin Jackson. All rights reserved. This review is freely distributable, as long as the wording remains intact and unchanged. --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu