NES Replay: 10-Yard Fight

Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: 1985
Regret: High

Football games were always hard to make for old consoles because older consoles just weren’t very powerful. That made it difficult to have 22 separate sprites on the screen all doing their own thing AND include plays AND make it fun to play. 10-Yard-Fight tries to get away with just 9 players per team and does away with plays. They swung and missed on the whole ‘fun to play’ thing, though.


Offense in 10-Yard Fight is painfully simplistic. You have two choices: Throw a screen pass or a long pass. If you throw a screen pass, you'll get tackled quickly. If you throw a long pass, you had better be outside of the tackles, or else the ball WILL get intercepted. It’s like the game designers were confused. “Hey, quarterbacks can throw OVER other players, right? They’re not shooting the ball from a cannon embedded in their torso, right? I guess I’m a little fuzzy on this.”

Not only that, but at the beginning of every play, there’s a man in motion. If you want to wait for him to make it to the other side of the formation, you are in for an experience in clawing your eyes out. How long does it take him to get from one side of the formation to another? Let’s find out!

10 seconds! That is absolutely ridiculous! I could run across the formation twice in that time period, and I’m a fat 30-year-old! In that time span, my unborn child was born, grew up, got married and died at age 82 surrounded by family and friends! Continents arose from the primodial depths, supported civilizations for countless eons, then sunk into the sea! Half-Life 3 came out! That's an interminable amount of time!

That runs off an entire minute in game time, too, if you didn’t notice. Where exactly did they find these players from? Did they wheel them in straight from the nursing home, or did they at least take them to McDonalds first for an Extra Value Meal and a senior coffee?

The computer cheats, playing defense is horribly easy, just everything about 10-Yard Fight is terrible from top-to-bottom. They really tried, but there’s just no way that anyone should willingly play this game and like it.

Final Rating:

CORRECTION: I originally noted that the developer was listed as Irem. However, Irem developed the game for arcades, while Nintendo developed 10-Yard Fight for the NES. This error has been corrected.