Arcade Archives Tecmo Bowl

Tue 4th Mar 2025

JJtheTexan said:

Tecmo Bowl for arcades is further evidence that the most-talented development teams at Tecmo in the late 1980s were working on the publisher's home console releases, not their arcade titles. As was the case with Ninja Gaiden, there are both arcade and Nintendo Entertainment System versions of Tecmo Bowl. Both of are very different, and the arcade version of both is inferior to the NES release.

While Tecmo Bowl for NES is a fast and fun American football game for one or two players, Tecmo Bowl for arcades is a slow, sluggish attempt at simulating the gridiron game. It's not a performance issue; the game is technically just fine. Unfortunately, the football players seem to move at a crawl, as though they are playing on a planet with much higher gravity than Earth.

As was the case with most arcade sports games at the time, the single-player mode is nasty, brutish, and short, with the computer-controlled team dominating throughout.

Not recommended. Play Tecmo Bowl on the NES Online service instead.

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