Backyard Football
| Backyard Football | |
|---|---|
The current Backyard Football logo.
|
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| Genres | Sports |
| Developers | Humongous Entertainment |
| Publishers |
Humongous Entertainment Infogrames Atari The Evergreen Group |
| Platforms | Nintendo DS, PlayStation 2, Wii, Windows, Xbox 360, Game Boy Advance, Game Boy Advance SP, Macintosh, Nintendo GameCube |
| Year of inception | 1999 |
| First release |
Backyard Football 1999 |
| Latest release |
Backyard Sports: Rookie Rush 2010 |
| Aggregate score | |
|---|---|
| Aggregator | Score |
| GameRankings | 60% (Wii) 15% (DS) |
| Review scores | |
| Publication | Score |
| AllGame |
  (PC/PS2) (Wii) (DS) |
| IGN | 6/10 (Wii) 1.5/10 (DS) |
| Aggregate score | |
|---|---|
| Aggregator | Score |
| GameRankings | 68% (Wii) |
| Review scores | |
| Publication | Score |
| AllGame |
(PC/PS2/Wii/DS) |
| GameZone | 6.8/10 (Wii) |
| Aggregate score | |
|---|---|
| Aggregator | Score |
| GameRankings | 57.50% (X360) 65% (Wii) |
| Review scores | |
| Publication | Score |
| AllGame | |
| OXM (US) | 6/10 |
| ZTGameDomain | 6.5/10 (X360) |
Backyard Football is a series of video games for various systems. The series was developed by Humongous Entertainment and published by Atari. It is one of several sub-series in the Backyard Sports series, and is the first to feature professional players as kids, examples being Steve Young and Barry Sanders. The series currently has eleven titles.
Backyard Football attempts to recreate the experience of playing American football as children.
Backyard Football, the third "Backyard" game, was developed by Humongous Entertainment and published by GT Interactive in 1999. In it, kids and professional football players as kids play football. There are three types of gameplay available in Backyard football. The first one is a single game. At the single game screen the player can select the field on which he wishes to play, the weather (between sunny, where the players are able to run very quickly; rainy, in which the players are slowed somewhat and the ball is difficult to throw; and snowy, where players are slowed considerably), and the level of difficulty (between easy, medium, and hard), among various other minor settings. They then pick their team name, which can be any of the then-31 NFL teams and ten backyard teams. When the team is chosen, a player would take turns choosing players with the CPU. There are a total of seven players on a team, two of which will be on the bench while five get to see action. The statistics of a player in single game mode have no effect on a player's statistics in season play.
The second type of gameplay is season mode. The player selects their coach name, settings, and team before the season and drafts all seven of their players before the CPU picks any for the rest of the computer controlled teams in the league. The coach guides their team through a 14-game season, at the end of which if they are to win their division or be picked as the wild card, the team will compete in the playoffs. Eight teams, four from each conference, compete in three rounds of games to determine the winner of the "Super Colossal Cereal Bowl" (which is a spoof of the Super Bowl in the NFL).
The third type of gameplay is online play. Backyard Football is the only game along with Backyard Baseball 2001 that offers online play with players across the globe. Online play is hosted through the Junior Sports Network, online play that is only available for Windows users, since the network system does not support Macintosh. Since www.jrsn.com has been discontinued, no new coach names may be registered to play online. While doing online play, the player may make contact with another coach online. They may then chat with each other with only pre-written dialogue, since the network is not being monitored to make sure no inappropriate language is used. Like Backyard Baseball 2001, there are three modes of difficulty: Easy, Medium, and Hard. The harder the difficulty, it becomes less likely that the players out on the field are going to make magnificent plays to "bail the coach out".
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Wikipedia