A playthrough of Digital Pictures' 1995 FMV football game for PCs running MS-Dos, Quarterback Attack with Mike Ditka. This video shows a 24-minute game played on the "varsity" difficulty level. The very beginning of the video is the game's installation and setup routine - I've always loved that weird, alternate-universe company jingle that the Digital Pictures games used in their sound card test utility programs. I always wanted this game after I had gotten hold of a demo CD that let you play a couple minutes of it - I think it was from the cover of a PC Gamer or CGW? Too many years ago now to recall clearly! I always liked the weirder, less mainstream games that you couldn't ever seem to find for sale, even when first launched, and this was precisely one of those titles. That demo had buried itself somewhere in my memory a long time since, when a few years ago I was going through and ancient issue of GamePro and spotted a familiar sight - it was this game, only the 3DO port. Having been thrust to the forefront of my attention again after so many years, I resolved to procure a copy of my own. I did, and then it sat forever collecting dust, forgotten about yet again. I came across the box a couple of weeks ago and popped in the disc. I was fully expecting two decades of anticipation to ruin it for me (you know that mental propaganda machine telling you how cool and awesome and wow something was to the point where the realty becomes guaranteed to disappoint?), or at least a Dosbox glitch to ruin the impossibly near moment, but everything worked, and I thoroughly enjoyed it! It's got much more depth to its gameplay (yes, gameplay in an FMV title!) than I had ever expected despite the game being restricted entirely to the viewpoint of the QB. It's a really neat game, and one of the last that Digital Pictures ever released. It's sad, because after a few years of practice, they were getting the hang of it. Of course, a two-million dollar budget probably didn't hurt this one's production. And Mike Ditka. If not for games, I'd have never heard him before. There's a game that was never released centered around him on the NES, a Genesis and a PC game that take his name, and then this game that saw releases on PC, the Sega Saturn, and the 3DO. This is the best version for video quality. The resolution I believe is a higher than that on the Saturn, probably explaining the visible dithering in this version (if the Saturn did that too, the composite video signal hid it pretty well). For a '95 PC game, the video quality here is pretty decent, but certainly not the best that PC FMV was looking like by this point. The dithering is NOT at all like what the Sega CD does to all source material (they thankfully canceled the planned SCD version), and there had to be some consideration I imagine for lower-spec PCs and disc space when deciding the quality, as opposed to a port developed for a single-configuration on a console platform. You can't tell that the dithering is actually there though in the YouTube video - the site's reencoding of the file seems to have wiped any evidence of that. The 3DO version doesn't look bad at all, but the video is a bit muddied compared to the other two. I'd absolutely recommend QBA to any FMV fan, or to anyone that wants a bit of personal personality in a sports title. It reminds me a lot of Tecmo Cup Soccer Game (a super obscure, turn-based RPG for the NES that's also a soccer game - but the soccer matches are the RPG "battles") in that regard. But man, Mike Ditka can't act for beans. It's a bit embarrassing to watch him awkwardly lob a stool at a chalkboard in a fit of empassioned encouragement. He's not quite Samuel L. Jackson as Coach Carter. _________ No cheats were used during the recording of this video. NintendoComplete (
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