What a year 1983 was, eh? The release of the Nintendo Entertainment System heralded the Third Generation of Gaming – arguably the zenith of game design – and we had the first Super Bowl broadcast on Channel 4. Both rocked my world as a teenager. Nintendo had Super Mario. Channel 4 had Super Gario AKA Gary Imlach who is one of the greatest sports broadcasters ever. They also had Mick Luckhurst. Who isn’t. Now that is what I call variety!
Both worlds are gloriously represented in my latest gaming addiction NFL Retro Bowl ’25.
Oh sure, the world may be going nuts for Star Wars Outlaws which lets you be in the Star Wars universe in an open world game where you can go wherever you want, carry out any task or mission and blast whoever you feel deserves it, but that kind of thing seems exhausting to me these days. I have been put off open world adventures by the most open world adventure of all.
Life.
That is a tough one, too: We are currently on our seventh family attempt to defeat the Covid End of Level Boss, who seems to be harder to put away than Malenia in Elden Ring. Thankfully my wife and I are close to completing the Parenting Mission on Co Op Play. Our score isn’t great, we’ve only completed one quarter of the tasks, but we just want it to end.
What I want in gaming is the opposite of open world. I want closed world. Tiny world. A world with only a few options. I want Retro.
The original 2020 Retro Bowl was fun on mobile, but the new version has officially licensed players. I really want to take Patrick Mahomes in my arms and squeeze him so tight. Not the real three times Super Bowl MVP Patrick Mahomes because I am a very tight hugger, and he may get a clavicle injury, but his 8-bit Retro Bowl incarnation, which is so darned cute. I find all those gloriously clunky 8-bit renditions to be … well … cuddly. In the same way you want to pick up a fat baby, I look at 8-bit graphics and want to hug them.
This is why the original graphics for 1983 Mario appeal to me much more than today’s polished, gurning, corporate shill. The great slab of moustache resting underneath what was a ridiculously long nose atop a big chunky body, this was an everyman hero, the gaming character equivalent of footballers like Xherdan Shaqiri who barrel around the pitch like some bloke who just happens to have brought his boots along. Modern Mario is too slick. He has been slimmed down with an extra sheen of jolly I find unsettling.
Aside from the hugging, this is the first game in a while I have looked at graphics and been impressed. Technology has allowed modern game graphics to be so good that using them as a review category is redundant, but Christian McCaffrey in blocky 8-bit? Wow!
(Sidebar: Am I the last person in the world to realise 80s Mario is virtually identical to Konami’s Track & Field athlete?)
Retro Bowl is a homage to the legendary 1987 release Tecmo Bowl, which also featured real players, but people can only remember one of them: Bo Jackson, whose mega stats meant he was unstoppable. You could unplug the machine and he would still keep running. Retro Bowl takes it one glorious step further by just simulating defence. This is a genius move. Nobody enjoys playing defence on NFL games. “Oh great, I’ve been intercepted. Now I get to play on Defence!” Said no one playing Madden. Ever.
On the negative side, the stripped down simplicity means you can’t decide to take a time out once you have selected a play, you can’t deliberately pick a stiff arm, and you do not have the last resort of the sports game scoundrel: the boost button. However I find the limited controls to be incredibly soothing. I am not sitting there trying to remember 50bn combinations to do a special juke move, which makes playing this game an almost Zenlike experience.
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Can it pass the ultimate test of mobile gaming, though? The toilet test? Yes! I can sit there playing it until both feet fall asleep, the mark of a truly great handheld game. In fact with a match lasting as little as three minutes you can get to the Super Bowl in under an hour, though I would only recommend trying this in a house with more than one bathroom.
I won the Super Bowl in the second season of asking so I was worried it might be too easy even for me, but a switch to Dynamic makes the difficulty contextual: it gets harder if you are doing better. Go a couple of scores up and the other team will intercept your passes easier, and your simulated defence will morph into Swiss cheese.
I like that. It keeps the challenge in perfect proportion to my ability and gives it huge replay value. It is not just the perfect game setting, but the perfect setting for life itself. Are you successful? Things will get harder for you. Are you poor? Well things are going to get easier.
In other words, the Retro Bowl Dynamic difficulty setting is doing what a Labour government should. If only politicians were as reliable as Bo Jackson.