 Sn-s-drunk. Tecmo Super Bowl is one of the most beloved video games ever made. It's remembered fondly to the point that it's even being directly referenced in a major commercial campaign that's being aired constantly during football games this year. So what is it with this game? What makes it so great? Why don't people go gaga for any other NES football games? Why this? Well, there's three major things I can point to. Accessibility, Visibility, and Bo Jackson. First, Tecmo Super Bowl does not overcomplicate things. You don't even really need to know football that well to get into it. Your playbook has 8 plays, they're all laid out right in front of you, so you can see exactly what each play is supposed to do, and you just press a combination of the d-pad plus a or b to select it. On defense, you just select the play you think the offense is going to run. If you guess correctly, you'll bust up the play in the backfield before it even gets started. Defense isn't all or nothing though, you still have a decent shot at stopping a play if you at least pick a pass when the offense does pass, same with a run. On defense, even if a play doesn't go exactly as planned, the controls are still open-ended enough that you can run around and essentially do whatever you want. And that brings me to the next part of why Tecno Super Bowl is so fun, Bo Jackson. Go ahead and look up Bo Jackson Crazy Tecno Super Bowl Run on YouTube. The dude is utterly unstoppable, he's almost twice as fast as everyone else, and he can break just about every tackle. I mean it's fun to be ridiculously overpowered in just about any video game, but within the context of a normal football game, it's pretty damned awesome. It got to the point in many households where the Raiders were just banned from being picked. If you wanted a competitive game, you couldn't pick the Raiders. To this day, Bo is just as famous for how kick-ass he was in Tecno Super Bowl as he was for his actual football playing career. That is the power of Tecno Super Bowl. Another reason this game holds up so well, like I said earlier, is visibility. You can see the entire field right in front of you, locked in a horizontally scrolling viewpoint. There's no issues with depth, no passing windows that pop up, no map overlays, none of that crap. Everything is as clear as day, right in front of your face. The only time it isn't is when a receiver goes deep and runs off the screen, but even that's not so bad, because if you know it's somebody good like Jerry Rice or Anthony Carter, you shouldn't be afraid to just chuck it down there, because they still have a fair shot at catching it. All the usual football stuff is here in spades too, like real teams, real players, full seasons, season stats, injuries, plus funny stuff like guys running out of the hospital when they've recovered. That always made me laugh. The only annoying thing is that certain players weren't part of the NFL players marketing agreement, so as a result we had QB Eagles instead of Randall Cunningham, QB Bills instead of Jim Kelly, and so forth. Just one of those dumb things that gets in the way, that's all. So yeah, Tecmo Super Bowl was the first football game to really get everything right. No goofy overhead camera angle like play action football, no painfully slow gameplay like NFL football or 10 yard fight. In fact I don't think it's a coincidence that there aren't that many football games on NES, Tecmo Bowl just nailed it, and then Tecmo Super Bowl just took everything that game did, and made it bigger and better. Not even that many SNES or Genesis games can even compete with that. Even if you're not that into football, Tecmo Super Bowl is still a timeless classic.