*bump*
I was going to start a new thread, but there are a few serious Tecmo players in here already.
I play NES TSB every day. I have for about a year now, since I re-acquired the game in a trade. It was a childhood favorite, but I never imagined it would rule my gaming life the way it has. I was born in Colorado, into a family of Bronco maniacs. Thus, they are the only team I use (aside from flirtations with Tampa Bay and Detroit just to use players I loved).
Now that you have all that important info, here's what I have experienced over a year of daily play:
The team I play the most in the Super Bowl is San Francisco (5), then the Giants (3), then Chicago (2), then Philadelphia and Minnesota once each. The two teams I can always count on playing in the AFC Divisional and Championship rounds are Buffalo and Houston. The Bengals and Raiders also make the playoffs often but never make it to the Championship round. I have never seen Indy, Cleveland, Kansas City, or New England make the playoffs. NFC-wise I have seen every team make the playoffs at least once with the exception of Atlanta, even the fucking Bucs and Cardinals have made it.
The three QBs with insane accuracy (i.e. will connect with a receiver even if he's double-covered by myself and a CPU player) are Warren Moon, Joe Montana, and Dan Marino. The quality of the receiver also plays a big part in this. I have never ever seen a Montana attempt to Jerry Rice where Jerry didn't catch it.
I always see people bitching about "lurching", the technique of using a nose tackle to slide and get a cheap sack right after the ball is snapped. Lurching is essential in certain situations. You should always lurch if you have your opponent on their 1 or 2 yard line, and you should absolutely lurch Moon and the Oilers if you are against them in the playoffs, otherwise you will be burned all day by Moon to Jeffries and Hill bombs. If you are against a skilled human player, they will have their offense set up to neutralize lurching anyway. Lurching itself carries grave consequences if you miss that tackle: take down Schroeder, but watch helplessly as Marcus Allen leaves your backfield chasing him 30 yards behind. A player who doesn't have a strong anti-lurching offense is prone to LB sacks as well, so people who hate the lurch seem to be those who don't run Shotgun and have flashy running plays instead of effective ones.
Interceptions are much harder to pull than sacks. If you notice, as a defensive player's condition improves to 'Excellent', all his stats raise except INTs, which never crawl above 50, even with guys like Deion Sanders and Darrell Green. Pick a Safety whose hitting power will go up huge when he's 'Excellent' and stay strong even when he's 'Bad', combined with a reasonable INT rate. This is why Steve Atwater is the 2nd-best Safety in the game behind Ronnie Lott.
The craziest thing I have seen was in a preseason game against the Eagles, I had never played them before. I blitzed Cunningham (QB Eagles) and he threw one of those passes that is clearly headed out of bounds, but in this case his intended receiver made a leaping attempt near the sideline, activating the cinematic of this, caught the ball out of bounds and landed out of bounds, and the CPU called First Down.
I have lost Playoff games on the final play of the game via 98-yard fumble returns and had game-winning field goals blocked with the same result.
One of my favorite aspects of the game is that Tecmo clearly had great love for the project and had as much attention to detail as was possible. Is there anything better than every single player in the game having a manga-style portrait to accompany his profile, most of them a pretty good facsimile? A lot of players share a face, but some guys had the honor of being exclusive, like LT, Montana, and...Jim Everett. Oh, and BABE LAUFENBERG. No player is miscolored.
Its not enough to just win. You've got to go 16-0 and win the Super Bowl. You've got to have the #1 rated passer, league-leading rusher, sacks leader, points leader, and anything else you can top the league in (except punting, although one punt of 86 yards or so will make your guy the league leader for the entire year). You MUST have the #1 overall Offense and Defense, try to lead in every category for those.
My all-time scoring record in regular-season play is 82-0 over the Bengals. Preseason games don't count as the CPU fights considerably less harder in those.
The only complaints I have with the game are that it doesn't track tackles and there's no trade/create-a-player, which I think was asking way too much of it anyway. I'm far more irritated by these omissions in the SNES followup than in the NES original.
But perhaps the greatest aspect of Tecmo Super Bowl is that this game is a time capsule for the single best era of professional American football, ever. Practically every team has a Hall of Fame guy on the roster, or at least a multiple Pro Bowler. There are championship players and teams in every division, memorable guys and true legends of the game.
If you stuck with me through all of that, right on.
-Tech
