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Perhaps the biggest threat to Madden, Sega’s NFL series offered a great alternative for gridiron gladiators to get their digital fix. The series is considered by many to have peaked with the 1994 installment, which blended the famous Sports Talk feature with solid visuals and gameplay that required a better knowledge of play-calling than most football titles.
Sega took the Joe Montana series in a new direction with part 2, but what Sports Talk Football did with commentary wasn’t reflected in the gameplay. The game may be a true evolution in presentation, but people play games, not watch them and that’s where ol’ Joe came up short on fourth down.
Joe Montana’s NFL Football for the Sega CD is the redheaded stepchild of the series, and it pales in comparison to its cartridge brethren, something Sega CD games were simply not supposed to do. Take a time out and read our full review and see how poor Joe got sacked with this one.
What better way to compliment Monday Night Football than with a review of a Genesis NFL game? I’ll tell you a better way: include a game actually worth playing. The Joe Montana series was notoriously hit and miss, and the ’93 installment appears to be one of the bigger misses. Among the problems cited are a clunky interface and poor AI. Hey, that actually doesn’t sound too far off from this year’s Madden! We kid about that last part, but the Montana part is still true.
Last week we went into great detail about the development behind the original Joe Montana Football, a game that helped spark the great NFL rivalry on the Genesis between Sega and Electronic Arts throughout the ’80s. So we thought: after so much research and investigation, why not just review the darn thing?