GOTD 6/4/2016: Brutal Sports Football (Jaguar)

[celerystalker]

While many classic sports games struggle to get their due in history, games with exaggerated rules and general insanity tend to hold a stronger place in the hearts of fans. NBA Jam, Mutant League Football and Hockey, Arch Rivals... games like these hold up pretty well due to their bizarre violence and arcade gameplay. Brutal Sports Football on the Atari Jaguar is much, much less any sort of football game and much more a bunch of barbarians and monsters beating each other to death and kicking each olthers' heads about while occasionally running or tossing a ball into a goal. If that isn't a sport, I don't know what is.

Football is very much a misnomer in Brutal Sports Football. You do not run plays. There are no downs or possessions, no out of bounds. If I were to try and approximate it to an existing sport, it would be closer to rugby or aussie rules football, but even less structured. The game starts with a jump ball, and is from that point a free-for-all of grabbing weapons, tackling, and murder until someone manages to toss the ball into a goal. Then, it's jump ball, rinse, repeat. Because regular fisticuffs are underwhelming, there are myriad weapons haphazardly strewn about the field, including bombs, axes, swords, shields, etc. with which to maim your opponent, and powerups like rabbits and ice cubes that affect whole teams. Realistically, that's pretty much your basic game, save that when you've murdered and decapitated an enemy player, you can toss and kick their heads about for fun.

There are a few modes such as exhibition (unfriendly), league play, tournament (knockout) mode, and basic option tweaks like being able to change characters and difficulty. In league play, you earn money with which to heal players and beef them up in the locker room, reconstructing severed heads and improving speed. This is your season mode, and has a password save feature. There are also some extra powerups exclusive to unfriendly mode, like the ability to temporarily switch teams being controlled or cause a lightning storm to really screw things up. Vs mode is really where the money's at to me, as a crazy match is a good laugh, and fucking around with your opponent's severed heads is truly amusing.

Brutal Sports Football looks very good, much like a more refined take on Pigskin Footbrawl on the Genesis, but the scrolling is just a tad choppy. The sound is pretty average, but the real fun comes from the absurd violence level. It's style over substance, and yet on the Jaguar, standing next to Troy Aikman Football, even the substance starts to look better. It's the closest thing to Mutant League outside of the Genesis, and a real winner for multi-player.

Played it?

[JeremiahJT]

Make sure when you are close to a downed opponent you take the time to stomp on their head a few times. I think about half the games end in brutality. Once you kill seven players from your opponent the game ends. Fun game and great pick.

[celerystalker]

Make sure when you are close to a downed opponent you take the time to stomp on their head a few times. I think about half the games end in brutality. Once you kill seven players from your opponent the game ends. Fun game and great pick.

That's true; killing is a perfectly viable alternative to scoring! I try to balance the two to make as much money as possible for the locker room in league play.

[Garry Silljo]

These are the only kind of sports games I like. Simulation is boring as hell to me, but renegade rules arcade style sports are always a good time and I spent a good deal of time with this one. I wish there was a little more variety in player types but other than that it's solid fun.

[Steve W]

The idea of Brutal Sports Football sounded good in magazine previews, but after I got it, I was underwhelmed. The gameplay didn't have that spark that made me want to go back to it again. And at this point in the Jaguar's lifespan, I was desperate for any games that they could put out. I spent more time with Trevor McFur than Brutal Sports Football, that speaks volumes.

It's not like Brutal Sports Football is a bad game. It's just mediocre. Games like Basketbrawl have the same violent theme, and I really loved both the Lynx and 7800 versions of that. But there was something in Brutal Sports Football's gameplay that left me kind of cold. I played it some in the first week it came out back in 1994, and put it away forever. I wish they had made a Jaguar port of Basketbrawl instead.

[FrankSerpico]

much like a more refined take on Pigskin Footbrawl on the Genesis

I always wondered if they were by the same developer. The Jag has a decent amount of weird exclusives I should really pick one up

[drunk3nj3sus]

Played the amiga version of this recently via emulation. It's a pretty good pick up and play type game although as you say it's not really football it actually plays more like a soccer game, so it's sorta like a gory version of Nintendo World Cup which is one of my favorite NES sports games but it lacks depth. Wish they put in a bit more effort and made it into an actual football game because I like the side to side perspective a lot better than weird overhead one of Mutant League Football, kinda seems like they designed it for the amiga first and ported it from there cause you only really need a joystick/d-pad and one button to play it.