If you're a fan of both football and computer games, you won’t find a better combination of the two than Play Maker Football. It's a superb game that’s actually more coaching simulation than play simulation.
PlayMaker Football’s monochrome aerial view shows a football field on which animated figures run offensive and defensive plays. The animation is reasonably good, and the game features authentic sounds. An announcer function calls up a dialog box that describes plays run by both teams. These announcements can be saved to disk as a game transcript.
PlayMaker Football works on several levels. At the most basic level, you can select two teams from the ones that come with the package. Generally, you control one team and let the computer control the other. Because the program includes simple AI routines, the computer knows what plays work and reacts accordingly. Beating the computer can be anything but a snap, and you’re not restricted to simply watching the plays happen. One player (a quarterback, runner, or middle linebacker) can be controlled by the mouse. As your skills improve, you can add new plays or refine existing ones.
The highest level of play involves building your own team. Each player’s attributes can be set individually. You won't be able to create a team of superplayers, however, because each team is limited to a certain number of points. Each level of skill and talent you select consumes points. You can build a good defense at the expense of your offense or emphasize the running game over the passing game, but you can’t have it all.
After you’ve built a team, it’s time to start building its playbook. It’s not enough to be a good armchair coach in order to build a good playbook. You need to know how to run traps, draws, and screens if you expect to create good plays. The manual, two sample playbooks, and on-disk examples can help make you an expert.
Just as in real training camp, building plays means diagramming them on a chalkboard. You can tell each player where to move and what to do. You can set your quarterback, for example, to drop back, pump-fake, roll left, and toss to a halfback, who has faked a pass block and then broken out to the flat. After you save plays, it’s best to take them to the practice field and refine them. Once the plays have been set, you use PlayMaker Football’s AI features to specify when and how to use them. If you know, for example, that a certain team always runs on first down, be sure a run defense is always called. The AI features are especially crucial in league-type play, where the games are played without human involvement.
Because PlayMaker Football lets you have both teams use password-locked, user-specified playbooks to play, several electronic-football leagues have evolved. There are active leagues on CompuServe’s MAUG area (GO MacFun, section 10) as well as on America OnLine.
The program is incompatible with the IIci and later Macs, but Broderbund will supply a fix if you send in the master disk. The game is also heavily copy-protected, requiring you to insert a key disk each lime you start up.
These minor annoyances aside, PlayMaker Football is simply the best football game you can get today on any microcomputer.
Bobker, Steve. (May 1991). PlayMaker Football. MacUser. (pg. 88).
Brian Brinkmann
Games
out of 10 (1 vote)
102 / 
2014-04-14 / 
2023-05-01 / 
ac2d389e016bf1b2cb0f23720ee62cc89ffea389 / 
/ 
playmakerfootball_2_0.zip
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
