A playthrough of Digital Pictures' 1996 FMV football game for the Sega Saturn, Quarterback Attack with Mike Ditka. Played a game at the Pro difficulty level. With the Super Bowl being tomorrow, I thought it would be fun to upload one of the strangest, most obscure console football games out there. It's a pretty excellent experiment that only could've happened in the 90s, and for no discernable reason, stars Mike Ditka. Quarterback Attack was always a bit of an odd duck. It's a football game, but it's also an interactive movie. The concept itself sounds pretty cringeworthy, but if you give it a chance, you'll probably find more to it than you might expect. It's a nice improvement over the similar Slam City with Scotty Pippen (
). Quarterback Attack puts you in control of the quarterback, but not the entire team like most other football games do. It may sound limiting, and it is to some extent (on defense there really isn't much to do but watch), but the focus on one position does provide an interesting opportunity to play video game football as a player instead of sitting in in the typical omnipotent puppet master role. You pick your plays, and once the ball has been snapped, you chose a camera angle to track who you're passing to or to a third-persion view in order to avoid anyone who is about to sack you. If you run with it, you get a ridiculous POV cam where you weave through some hysterically bad looking opposition - the closeups look like the pixelly zooming zombies in Corpse Killer. Overall, though, Digital Pictures did a good job of making the game interactive - it isn't just a mashup of QuickTime events. The graphics are also surprisingly well-done. The video quality isn't so hot, but the sprites layered over the FMV are effective. They certainly aren't seamless, but they look a fair amount more natural than, say, Pebble Beach Golf Links while still carrying that awkward 90s sense of charm and accidental humor. And speaking of accidental humor, Mike Ditka. Yeah. He's loves to scream at the camera and throw things, not completely unlike what you see in those dramatic recreations of domestic abuse on Lifetime. That chicken that gets a concussion is also something else. Quarterback Attack is quite a bit of fun, and quite unlike anything else I've really played. It might not keep you occupied for months on end, but whether you prefer Madden or Night Trap, you'll find some fun here if you give it a chance. The Saturn game is a port of the original PC/Dos title released in 1995. You can see my video of that one here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYX85jflqjg Quarterback Attack with Mike Ditka was also released on the 3DO, and a remastered version is available through the Android and iOS appstores. _ No cheats were used during the recording of this video. NintendoComplete (
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