I've always felt that Australian Rules Football is one of those sports that will never translate well into a video game, there are too many subtelties that means it just can't be simulated like Soccer or Baseball.
Not that there haven't been a few attempts at it. The earliest I've seen is a Commodore 64 game from the late 80's titled simply "Australian Football". I could never get that to work on an emulator, but it looked pretty rancid.
In the early 90's came the NES game, Australian Rules Football, it was flogged ad-nauseum during the pre-season comp that year and by the time Round One rolled around every kid in my class had a copy. It wasn't too bad, all things considered, the only notable problem being a lack of a proper season mode unless you had more than one human player and that you couldn't save your games. It also had some terribly generic teams like "Perth" and "Canberra", which just went to show that despite throwing a truckload of money at notorious thug Dermott Brereton to be in their ads they couldn't be arsed shelling out for a proper AFL licence to use the team names. The most notable features were the practice mode, which involved a little kid punting the ball around an empty surburban park - a cute touch - and the boundary umpire who'd appear and say "Out of Bounds, on the full" in the most monotone voice ever whenever the ball was kicked over the line. I guarantee you that if you go up to some 19-22 year-olds and ask them to say "out of bounds on the full" they'd do it in the voice from the game. That cartoon boundary umpire is still a cult-figure to me.
Then the trail went dead for a few years, until early 1995 when the game "Finals Fever" appeared. That's the reason for this post, so we'll come back to it after our cheap and nasty history of AFL computer games has finished.
Next came the AFL 98 games on PC and Playstation. They weren't bad, save a few bugs with the PC version, but even on the hardest difficulty level you'd be thrashing the computer by massive margins within a few hours of picking the game up. Leading Fremantle to the AFL Premiership? Easy as. Even the awful 1997 Melbourne side could be turned into champions after a few hours learning the game. The sequels to these games raised the bar a little bit, but the pissweak learning curve still meant the games replay value was limited.
Kevin Sheedy's AFL Manager in 2002 made the first attempt at introducing a coaching sim to the genre, and it was absolutely shithouse. I've not heard anyone even mention the game in the last year, and I'm tending to assume that means nobody is still playing it.
Currently the flag is flown by the AFL 2003 game, which is pretty awful and has commentary which sounds suspiciously like what you used to get on Megadrive games in the mid 90's and the relatively unknown Footy Fanatic, which is the first decent stab at an AFL management game. It's only ever been let down by some horrifically buggy early versions, the latest edition is supposed to fix most of these but it also had the effect of stopping the game from working on some computers (for instance, mine) so we'll wait a bit longer before passing judgement on that particular game's legacy.
So, back to Finals Fever.
It was easy, very easy. But it was addictive, which is what made it great. In fact, back in the days before computer piracy was widespread and everybody still seemed to own the same games I can't remember too many of my classmates not having it. In fact it seemed that one of them spent his entire weekends seeing how many points he could have Carlton beat Collingwood by, he claimed once to have racked up a 1000 point victory in a full-length game - a claim greeted with both suspicion and pity.
The simulation of the rules was also highly dubious, the only free-kick you could get was for out-on-the-full (without the comedy voices of the NES game), and the whole point to tackling was to press both buttons at once at push the opposition player fair-and-square in the back.
And it had a horrific bug which meant you could insert Brownlow Medallist James Hird into the frankly useless 1996 Melbourne squad.
I played it for the first time in years tonight. Setting up a rematch of Saturday's debacle at Kardinia Park. Geelong stormed into a four goal lead at quarter-time as I struggled to remember how to play the game. Then, led by Gary Lyon and Jeff Farmer who kicked nine goals between them, the Demons (with James Hird, obviously, on the half-back-flank) stormed back to within eight points at the last change and punished the inaccurate Cats with a Todd Viney behind in the dying seconds setting-up a thrilling one point win (10.8.80 to 10.19.79).
It's only after you win a game that you get Finals Fever's best feature, the club theme songs played on a xylophone. It's hard to explain the significance of these performances now, but let me tell you that for a time during the mid 90's every kid in Melbourne went to the footy and wished they'd play the instrumental version of the club song after the game.
Finals Fever only had one major fault. Once you'd played through a full 22 rounds and finished in the top six (as it was then) there were no finals. Yes, that's right in a game called "Finals Fever" they'd neglected to actually put a finals series in it. When the game came out I lived around the corner from the company who created it, I always meant to drop in and ask them what the HELL they were thinking making a mistake like that but I never did. Which is a shame, because I'd like to have heard their explanation.
I also had a bit of a problem with the fact that the game box claimed it was the "ultimate AFL coaching experience", when this turned out to only go as far as shuffling your lineup before a game I was somewhat disappointed. At least you could indulge Neil Balme's ultimate fantasy of finally playing Ivan Bartul. The real-life version refused to cross to Victoria after he was drafted, but in this game you could do whatever you liked with him.
So, if you're nostalgic for the days of Fitzroy and the Brisbane Bears, want to hear some rocking xylophone music and aren't fussed about actually playing off for a Premiership at the end of it all then Footy Fanatic might just be the game for you. It shouldn't be too easy to find somebody who's got a copy sitting around in a box somewhere. You can't have mine though, I think I'm going to keep playing it now.
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