Brutal Sports Football @ Abandonia

Wednesday, April 4th, 2007, 6:21 pmRoys

IGN’s article on the Top 25 Tuesday: Most Awesome Covers last week reminded me of one game I played years ago - Brutal Sports Football - developed by Teque and published by Millenium Interactive in 1993.

Brutal Sports Football is one hell of a fantasy football game. Teams of super old men duke it out on the pitch with each other as well as with teams of lizardmen and goatmen (players of Games Workshop’s Blood Bowl will find the premise familiar although Brutal Sports Football is more of an action game than tactical game). The objective of the game is very simple - score by touchdown or by throwing it past the goal line. To simplify the task at hand, you can equip the players with weapons and powerups.


A sport so brutal that balls are brought into play by heavily armored runners ;)

There are powerups that grant you the ability to spew flaming pots and knock down opponents in front of you, summon lightning to strike down foes, freeze your opponents, turn yourself invisible and conjure a rolling sphere of invincibility. There’s even a powerup that cause the ball to drop from your opponent’s clutches, sprout legs and then proceed to run towards their goal until one of your players catches it. Instant powerups like speed-up and bombs and negative ones like slow-down are also available by running over them (represented by rabbit and tortoise respectively)


Celebrating a successful touchdown… moments before the opponents dive on him.

You only need to remember two keys to start playing this slightly insane game.

Fire1 is to throw the ball when the ball is in your possesion. Press Fire1 again to attempt to catch the ball when it’s in the air. When the opponent has the ball, press Fire1 to throw bombs, punch, stab with a sword or tackle (opponents wielding shields cannot be punched or tackled, neither can they tackle you or jump for the ball - although they can punch you). Fire1 is also the key to press to stomp on opponents who are down.

Activate your power-up with Fire2. Fire3 is for locking and unlocking the currently controlled player so you have finer control on which player you control.


One down. Six more to go!

Some tips to get you started:

  • Feinting the goalie is an essential skill - once the goalie has mistimed his tackle, the goal is yours.
  • Start with the League, not Unfriendly or Knockout (the difficulty for Unfriendly and Knockout can be quite rough wheres League pits you against woefully inept foes at the start)
  • Change to other modes when you are familiar with the controls to be able to change players (Novice is good for starting out, but often annoyingly switches to another player when you are about to lop a head off someone)
  • The two goalies are the only players on both teams that automatically tackle incoming players - protect yours at all cost, take out the enemy goalie for easier scoring.
  • You can only pick up and store a single power-up at a time.
  • Can’t score a single goal? Why not take it out against the enemy players instead? It’s another way to win :p
  • After each match for League mode, you can go to the locker room to recharge your men. Repeatedly press up until the doors close and select the action by pressing up or down to choose Heal, Energize or Resurrect and press the Fire1 key until the icons stop blinking to indicate that the action is complete. To exit the locker room, keep pressing the down button until the doors open and the word “Exit” is shown. Press Fire1 to return to the menu.

    Something to keep in mind: By default the keys are set to I,O,W,S,X,P,Q for Left, Right, Up, Down, Fire1, Fire2, Fire3 respectively. Space and Enter are used for some menu selections.

    You can download Brutal Sports Football at Abandonia. DOSBox is required to play this game on Win XP. Read this article on how to configure Brutal Sports Football to play on DOSBox.

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    • 5 comments:

    1. gnome, Saturday, April 7th, 2007, 6:15 am

      Ah, another fantastic post… Now, why don’t you write a piece on MUDS?

       
    2. The Download Munkey, Sunday, April 8th, 2007, 7:02 pm

      Ah, roguelikes are more to my liking - maybe a intro to AliensRL soon …

       
    3. gnome, Monday, April 9th, 2007, 4:15 am

      Ok then… as you wish. Don’t mind if i wait here then?

       
    4. The Download Munkey, Monday, April 9th, 2007, 6:24 pm

      No problem. Probably this Friday in time for the weekend. Heheheh

       
    5. gnome, Tuesday, April 10th, 2007, 9:09 am

      :)

       

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