Played as part of Atari 50.

I'm glad I vaguely know enough about American Football through playing 30 minutes of Madden maybe once a year at random friends' houses growing up and by reading gay furry romance novels (shoutouts Kyell Gold) to know that this isn't a very good one. Sports games are a big blind spot for me that I've wanted to fill in for a while but even from my limited experience, this has to compromise such a ridiculous amount of football's complexities to fit on a 2600 cart that it's hardly even worth the effort. The play setup system is woefully simplified, it's nigh impossible to run the ball any distance since you're trying to coordinate with un-planned 1982-era CPUs, and the single button control scheme severely limits what you can actually do when you're playing. Still a novelty but certainly not worth more than a cursory look.

I don't have much of a tendency to talk about sports, mostly due to lacking any good reason to. I'm not very athletic, but I played a decent handful of sports while I was a child.

My parents tried getting me into soccer by signing me up for a kids team, but I was usually too afraid to trip over the ball or accidentally kick another player, and I didn't have enough coordination to do anything successfully. Our team was called the Monsters, we lost our first and only league game, and after our last practice we all went out for pizza.

My dad was a shortstop and pitcher on his high school baseball team, so he tried his absolute best to push the interest onto his kids. I remember the first time I ever hit the ball in my five-year-old tee-ball team I ran as fast as I could and then became immediately confused because I had no idea where first base was. The field was brown and dusty. I like baseball jerseys. I've had a genuinely nice time attending baseball games and just sitting around eating hotdogs, popcorn, and not paying too much attention to the actual game. There's a lot of standing around in baseball,

There's a lot of standing around in football, too.

I don't think I've enjoyed a single American football video game I've played outside of maybe NFL Blitz because it's barely even a football game. I do not give a shit about actual American football. There are a million rules, you have like twenty guys on a field at a time, it's noisy, nothing fucking happens the entire game, and when something finally does happen everyone in family gatherings starts yelling and discussing Mickey McPasstheball's five-year career like they've studied him religiously for their entire life.

RealSports Football is a great American football game because, like the sport itself, it fucking sucks.

Hand-egg.

Deflate-gate.

Goat Brady.

So for the most part, it certainly is football and considering how much it would've taken to make a game high tech as this is impressive. A lot of Madden fans should thank this game for what they have now... though considering it's Madden by EA... probably not so much. But anyway the game itself plays like a rough football game, that works in terms of hutting and playing as the quarterback, but the defense always seems to knock you down or intercept the ball perfectly. And sometimes your Wide Receivers won't be able to even get the ball, some of them will be crashing against another player, the one in the middle will be glitched out, and the ones on the side have a 25% of actually catching the ball.

When sides change as to who has the ball, the CPU becomes moronic and ends up giving away the ball, rinse and repeat. Maybe you'll get an opportunity to score but that's if the game decides to be nice. It's a grandfather to all the Madden games, and nice experiencing but I'll probably never play it again.
Played within Atari 50.