Video games based on Australian Football (AFL) | minimme

Ozzie rules football also known as AFL and also also known as just footy I have lived for this crazy sport I was born into supporting the Sydney Swans I've been attending most of their home games for years and I've been so bored while it's been on hiatus but thankfully there's a long line of footy video games to help tide me through now these video games to put it lightly have a pretty poor reputation because the target market for them is a fraction of Australians that are both into footy and video games when it comes to budget and production value of these inherently can't compare to the FIFA's and to Kay's of the world yet they've consistently been coming out since the 80s all the way up until just a couple of months ago on modern consoles and despite them being so budget II and BT I've sunk more hours into playing AFL games than any other sports games so join me as we look one-by-one at these extremely niche corner of the world oddities and among other things explore just why they're so special to me now a whopping 4% of my audience is Australian apparently and I know if you're seeing this spot for the first time it might look like the most complex chaotic thing ever and it kind of is it demands a wide skill set with kicking handballing jumping and catching and there's lots of rules and plays and stats like there's a Vice video out there calling it the most data rich sport on earth which says something so while this video is obviously for fans of Aussie Rules if you're not a fan I'll try my best not to leave you behind I truly think this is the most entertaining fast-paced sport ever and it'd be cool if I could get someone out there to fall in love with it I'll include a link in the description that'll explain the basics if you're interested if not for now think of the game sort of like basketball played on a cricket sized field where players can kick it or punch it out of their own hands to pass and if you kick it through the big sticks you get six points if you kick it through the small sticks you get one point that's right you get a point for missing before jumping in I realize this video is long and I've done my best to keep it succinct but I know that I'd personally likely be watching it in parts if I were you so I've included timestamps in the description for that very reason starting off with a whimper we have the absolutely nails astray lien rules football for 8-bit pcs releasing all the way back in 1989 and the a reason this is quite rare but not valuable at all five versions of the game were made as is typical for PC games back then and in fairness the only one I could play with my setup was the Commodore 64 version ports back then were often very different so maybe I played the wrong one but man it is as chaotic to play as it is to look at that player's twitch around the map like ants and the field is split into three screens making it very disorienting but being determines I have stuck at it to get a feel for things essentially the only strategy is picking up the ball whenever you can and hacking it forward you can only kick and tackle the eight Direction movement means any precision is out the window and even if you could be more precise you can't see where you're going anyway because of the screen switching what's worse is the rules are all wrong if you score a behind the play resets as a Senate bounce if the ball goes out it's also a Senate bounce which simply isn't what happens the reason for this I think is that the game was developed by the Brits and it appears to have only been sold in the UK - judging by the eBay listings and advertisements showing pounds thankfully there are gameplay videos on YouTube of the Amstrad and spectrum versions but sadly they look just as nonsensical it's biggest crime though really is making you play as Hawthorne in all seriousness it at least has a ladder you can climb giving it some structure and if you don't want to play as the Hawks you can choose the Outback League and play as the fictional koalas which doubles as an easier difficulty mode really the best thing about the game is the commentator who loves seeing a good sausage roll six points let's also take a guess at what the most Australian name these guys could come up with this remember it's the 80s Michael J Crocodile Dundee thankfully it would only take until 1991 for a great footage aim to come out with the equally absolutely names Ozzy rules footy on the NES - everyone who's played this game that line is iconic and its existence is actually quite an impressive feat for a system which very rarely had voiced audio rather than being developed overseas this was developed and published by a pioneer of Ozzy video game development beam software who was situated right in the heart and birthplace of fully Melbourne this means that they not only understood the rules thank God they seemed to have understood the subtleties and flow of the game - because as this looks it's exceptional how much of our sport has been captured with just four buttons and a d-pad whenever a player catches a kicked ball we call this a mark and whenever a player takes a mark that play stops and they get to take a penalty from where they marked it or what we call a free-kick as you can imagine taking marks is hugely important in footy we love it when an up and under high ball is dropped above a pack and some superhuman player takes a grab over the top it's perfectly legal to jump on someone's head and take a mark which is what we call a specky the 90s in particular in footy were all about crashing packs and taking speck ease marking in this Nintendo game is remarkably fun no pun intended you basically need to intercept the ball in its flight path to take the mark and you have a very high jump to aid you it feels really nice to time everything right to jump above all the other players and mark the ball goal kicking is well done - obviously the further away you are from the posts the harder it is to score so being made this system where these two white-line scale depending on how close you are to the goal and to score a goal you need to kick the ball when the middle line is well in the middle it's basically impossible to time if you're not close to the goals or on a tight angle so you need to make judgment calls on whether you can pass the ball to take an easier shot or just to roll the dice from where you are and when you do get a lucky goal from far out it feels amazing stoppages are settled with what we call a ruck contest where two absurdly tall people or Rockman jump at each other and try to tap the ball above them to a teammate much like a jump ball in basketball in all the video games it's a fairly simple somewhat meaningless timing minigame with this being no exception again what impresses me most here is the subtleties captured you can risk stepping off the mark to sneak in that desperate extra few meters to open up the angle on a goal you'll be clamoring for a clearance kick when the contest gets too chaotic you'll be playing defensively near the boundary when you're ahead in the dying moments of the game you'll be pushing players out of marking contests you'll be drawing in defenders beforehand bowling you'll be bombing it in 250 just hoping or trying to pull off something more tactical that's not to say that it's flawless like I wish you could manually switch players with the otherwise unbound select button and the tackling is pretty random but man all things considered this is a very fun no-frills representation foodie and it's one of my personal favorite NES games I had to tell myself to stop playing it just to get on with this video and to this day a lot of people consider this to not only be the best footy game but also the only good footing game before moving on I can't not mention the character to the game the depressing loss screen the padded teams with Canberra perth hobart and darwin the practice mode played on a local ground and of course the small moments of commentary with an 8-bit brian taylor either saying the obvious or the oblivious he told me that my team was finals material while I was in the grand final all this and the outer bounds on the full thing gives Ozzy rules fully an extra memorable bit of retro charm on top of an otherwise great game in 1996 we've seen attempt at more of a simulation with the windows-only AFL finals fever by Blue Tongue entertainment 100% AFL gameplay Blue Tongue web at the time a Melbournians web dev that moved into video games debuting with this you might know them these days as the now-defunct dev of de blob there's a big emphasis on representing the actual league in this game with player name stats and photos and team logos coaches and some wonderfully to tea clubs songs [Music] the player stats really matter to particularly running speed Mikio is by far the best player on this one just because he can burn off anyone and everyone which is fun but this game is really only enjoyable in fleeting moments it was designed to be played with a 2 button joystick and one button is reserved for switching players which means the other button is used for pretty much everything else hold it for a short time to handle hold it for a long time to kick user to jump for a mark and tackling is just sort of running into opponents and hoping for the best the biggest problem with the game is just that it runs slowly and I thought that maybe that it was bugged but I tried this on different physical window systems and emulators with different copies of the game and it just seems that this is how it runs the game time is still ticks by in real time after all there's a high-res version of the game - which looks a lot better but runs far far worse just in case though if I can prove that my game is running wrong I'll pin a comment saying so I have a feeling that this is somehow just a me problem regardless it's annoying how it makes you retrieve the ball yourself for free picks or how you have to wait for the umpire to come pick up the ball on throw in zorb how you just have to rock with the nearest player to the ball up you have at all Rockman on the field but lord knows where he is you just need to use the nearest player and even if I wanted to find the ruckman or any specific player which I would want to do because the stats means so much they're all just represented by the same white guy which I know is likely a technical thing but given the AFL's discrimination issues particularly in the 90s it is a bit tone-deaf the one thing I do like is that hand bowling is a lot more useful in this game than others because they aren't that easily intercepted and they magnet to teammates very well training a few together for a goal is generally the best strategy I found and it does feel good to pull off all things consider this game pushed the bar forward in so many different ways you can play through actual seasons with ladders and look at post game stats and there's even wind you need to account for while playing and account for after the coin toss complete with an Australian dollar coin there's a good attention to detail here finals fever isn't that fun these days but it is an important step and I'm sure a lot of footy fans older than myself have fond memories with it going back a few years to 1993 British developer Creative Assembly signed a contract with EA to produce sports games particularly less American sports like soccer rugby cricket creative assembly are very well known these days for the Total War series and sure enough a lot of the same developers on the total wargames worked on these ea sports games two of which what Ozzy rules games with AFL 98 and AFL 99 and with the backing of EA the step up in quality is instantly felt 98 features polygonal 3d modeled stadiums with great looking smooth scaling apparently Moe capped 2d players even if they are all the same white guy again and like Finals fever this game has all the playing lists and player photos and teams to keep you happy including for the first time Port Adelaide and the Brisbane Lions you can play through the 1997 season and we're also treated to some ultra nineties menus and music and we get to hear the first audible commentary these games ever saw with none other than Bruce mcaveeney calling it it's very simple stuff and the fact that it's so simple makes it less wacky than a lot of future games you'll see what I mean later Crawford played it well as far as how this plays the ground feels like it's about a kilometre long but marking with the jump button is reminiscent of the fun marking in the NES game and hand bowling is useful and for the first time ever you can dash for extra speed and charge and bump into other players kicking on the run isn't great though it either just goes directly in front of you a certain distance depending on your kicking skill or if you're inside your Ford 50 it goes through the goal if you're running towards the goal unless it doesn't it's dependent on the players skill and it feels a bit random but generally it's way too easy to score free kicks on the other hands have done reasonably well with a powering accuracy bar just like a golf game I think that's the best solution for representing a free-kick but when you take a mark it just takes forever for the player to walk back and line up for the kick it's so boring that it's not worth waiting for so often I just played on instead with most of these games when you start playing them they're incredibly hard and you feel like you can't score at all but once you get used to how it all works they become far too easy and you start scoring like it's nothing AFL 98 is no exception for me learning the mechanics and getting good is part of the fun which is why I played all of these games on the as difficulty and hey most of these games do have multiplayer if I need that extra bit of challenge but finding someone that's played AFL 98b is pretty rare I had to run this on an actual physical Windows XP just to play it copies of it are pretty uncommon and generally I'd say the gameplay is solid but a bit overly slow that doesn't matter though because AFL 99 outclasses it in every way and runs fine on Windows 10 with it now being 3d accelerated we have polygonal character models that look great and for the first time they actually look something like the players they're based on we also have charming 90s 3d models of the real-life stadiums complete with sideline advertising for Cadbury doughnut King Vodafone and Puma coin tossing with the Aussie dollar more cutscenes between play cartoon mascots for each team I'm not sure what Frio was even trying to do here and Bruce is joined by Lee Matthews in the commentary box for some classic banter any hits but that time you leave over 99 is essentially a tightened up version of 98 mechanically with the list updates and the new season the controls are basically the same but three kicks are quicker and it generally feels more responsive again though overall kicking on the run is still overly simplistic scoring is too easy and it feels a bit too slow but there's enjoyment to be had here and it's a great attempt for the time one of the coolest things 99 does when looking at all of these games as a whole is that it makes you choose how your players will set up around a rock or before a kick in this makes the rap contests less nonsensical than any game before it and honestly most games after it because you'll generally know where you want to tap the ball and with kick ins it's nice to choose between playing offensively or defensively it's a very welcome added layer of depth and strategy and I wish future games adopted this mechanic and of course I can't talk about AFL 99 without mentioning its elephant in the room this game on ironically has one-on-one fights in it illegally bumper for a player and there's a chance he'll challenge you to a fight where you basically start a boxing match complete with four buttons for light and heavy attacks it's simplistic it's not particularly fun but it's so novel and silly that you can't help but laugh at it and love it imagine if they pulled this in a modern AFL game it would be such a controversy 99 also released on the PlayStation where it was simplified to 2d players again like 98 or the non 3d accelerated version of 99 on PC and sadly there's no fighting in this version but with the ps1 release AFL 99 reached a far bigger audience than 98 and it gets brought up with fondness a lot in online discussions about AFL games as it deserves to after EA's two games stint publisher acclaim was next to partner with the AFL with another Melbourne based studio called I our gurus set to develop with three horse-riding games under their belt their first fully game was the windows only Kevin Sheedy AFL coach 2002 a management game now in the interest of time and interest I'm not going to cover the handful of AFL management games in this video but if there's demands I'll cover them another time about a year after AFL coach I our gurus would release AFL lie of 2003 on ps2 Xbox and PC and with it came strategies by shades millencolin song most simple commentary from Gary Lyon and Stephen Quartermaine and the best AFL graphics yet running on criterions popular renderware engine the same engine ps2 era burnout and GTA games ran on AFL had never looked so digitally crisp complete with team banners and sponsorships from brands such as boost juice Brumbies and interestingly both grace brothers and Mayer but never in the same stadium of course more importantly AFL life 2003's grounds and players feel pretty much to scale this time around as far as how it plays it's similar to the AAA games but it just feels a lot smoother and faster taking the ball for a run along the wing and then snapping one towards goal feels particularly good and you can do it often because the AI are unfortunately really really bad if not hard they never sprint it's rarely a challenge to out mark them and with it being impossible to overcook the power bar on a kick this is the easiest AFL game to ever come out you'll be taking spec ease every minute and I made it all the way to the grand final my first time playing it that said I didn't win that grand final so it can't be too easy I've lost to the dogs too which gave me some heavy 2016 PTSD those goddamn umpires something they have thankfully overhauled is the goal kicks where now you have to time your kick with this heartbeat indicator at the bottom of the screen to kick accurately which is challenging and so much better than how EA did things AFL 2003 is simple fun and if you want to start learning about AFL through a video game I think this is a digestible place to start especially because it runs perfectly on modern pcs ir giri's went on to release AFL games every year up until and including 2007 with their next game 2004 considered to be one of the best what they did with 2004 aside from opening with an edgy Grinspoon song is finally add a lot more of the sports complexities and in comparison 2003 feels much more arcadey what I mean by that is instead of just being able to kick the ball normally with what we call a drop punt you can now use the different kicking techniques with different buttons and combinations to perform spiralling torps around the body snaps outside of the boot bananas and stab passes all of which are useful in different situations there's also wind again which was absent in 2003 and it seems that more often than not you're playing in torrential wind storms with how often the ball wavers around in the you'll notice that this is a thing in most of these games going forward the AI has been improved to be more challenging particularly on heart and there's a wonderful mechanic where you can want to hand pass with players making hand balls actually somewhat useful though they're still usually not that worth doing for footie fans this added complexity makes AFL live 2004 a massive step up from any game before it and the way at ABS and flows feels a lot more intense and high-pressure you need to think your way through playing on from a mark or consider which kick is the most high percentage play and you will get punished for doing things wrong backing up the gameplay is more features across the board you now have the wizard home loans pre-season Cup with its own rules there's now brownlow norm Smith and Coleman metals at the end of each season there's unlockable videos to watch there's some decent minigames and there's the best training mode in any AFL game there is where you run through drills on a local field it's not hard to see why this game is considered a crowd favorite but as usual it does have issues like all of these games the rocking is a bit nonsense because the best route is just to punch it forward and hope for the best gold kicking here is incredibly easy you just need to have a mat left or right and account for the winds and you'll be fine holding the ball rally gets cold you can run 10 meters with it and you'll still get a ball up if you're tackled and the gameplay still mostly involves just kicking the ball forward and hoping for the best but it's even worse here because they took away the player radar so you can't have no idea what you're kicking towards still though 2004 is a fun time once you master all the controls and with all this added complexity in retrospect Live 2004 can be seen as the first of the modern games this really is to this day the prototype and basis of virtually every AFL games since a year later AFL life Premiership Edition disappointed everyone by basically being the same game as life 2004 same flow same commentary basically the same everything except for updated lists and Guernsey's it was still a full-priced game speaking of the commentary this and 2004 with first games to feature the legendary Dennis committee who would rotate between Coe commentators in future games with these games having Jarrod Healy and Kristy mult housin you can really feel the awkwardness of this commentary really starting to take shape the way they inter splice words into sentences and react to everything too late is so clunky but this is just the beginning go by rulings Betsy's second let's have a look at the replay Bulldogs in front seven points Premiership edition does add a radar into the corner which is extremely welcome and it's far less buggy than 2004 was - so really Premiership Edition is an improved version of 2004 and though it was barely more than a greedy repackage it does make 2004 obsolete it's not surprising American publisher acclaim were being greedy though because they are on the verge of collapse less than six months after Premiership Edition came out and after a poor financial year a claim filed for bankruptcy which left IR gurus in need of a new publisher none other than Sony took the publishing and distribution rights which means that the next AFL game AFL premiership 2005 was initially a ps2 exclusive at least until the THQ were allowed to publish it later on Windows and Xbox it was also both released in 2005 and actually titled 2005 which is somehow a novelty in the sports video game world with Sony o 5 brought an online mode and EyeToy compatibility being one of the handful of games to support a system called I toy cameo this means musing I toy you can map your face onto a player and become one of the players so here I am with my embarrassingly seedy isolation beard going through the tedious process of making myself and sure enough this horrifying monstrosity came out of it God has truly abandoned us the game doesn't let you create a player to put your face on you have to put it on an existing player which is really weird to me because what kind of freak would want to map their face onto someone else because Barry Hall has hair in this game for some reason I decided that I'd instead be Barry Hall and the results are spectacular finally I can live out my dreams while I use Photoshop for my thumbnails when I have this as far as how our 5 plays it's a bit all over the shop the back of the box says it's running on a new engine yet it still runs on the renderware engine so maybe it's like a new version of the engine and it does feel very different it takes control away from you a lot like your players will chase the ball even when you're pulling the stick in the opposite direction at times and tackling and player switching feels unresponsive it's picky and it's a real downgrade from Premiership and o4 weirdly you can't kick the ball very far in O 5 even if you top it which is what I have to assume is an attempt at making the hand balls more useful by no finger kicks it kind of worked to hand balls are more useful which is cool because stringing together hand balls is always kind of fun but basically not being able to kick a set shot from 50 is awful as a result full-forward seem to get 90% of the golds in every game because they're always in range which is great for me because I'm big bad buzzer I've almost won the Brownlow with him just taking a step back for a second I want you to imagine that you're designing an AFL game think for a moment about how you translate a marking contest into a video game a group of people are all standing where a ball is going to land how do you turn that into fun gameplay where one player out does the rest and catches the ball in past games a simple jump button was enough time your jump right and intercept the ball before anyone else and you'll be paid the mark if you jump within a perfect timing window in some of the other games you might do have fancy animation to catch the ball in a way that looks more realistic AFL 2005 removed that jump button and just replaced it with the timing window and it is so much worse you have to press the button when the game wants you to and then cross your fingers and hope that the game thinks your player stats and positioning is superior to the opponents it takes control and responsiveness away from you in order to show more realistic marking animations whereas simply having a jump button felt way more tactile and fun even if it didn't always look as good what's worse is most future AFL games would continue this marking system to varying degrees of success despite all this there is some big leaps forward in oh five goal kicking now has this silly looking arrow that's hard to control and you still need to account for wins on top of the arrow so it's appropriately much more challenging which I like another great thing they've done is highlighted when players downfield are alone so you can try and kick it to them for an uncontested mark it's a little inconsistent but it's a step in the right direction they've also tightened up the button mapping and snap kicks in particular are really fun here players get injured all the time instead of almost never which adds realistic challenge to the season mode and they can even get reported and sent to the tribunal the biggest addition though is the trading and drafting at the end of each season which gives it also much more longevity as you can train players up and build little narratives in your head about them that said the trading is insanely bad I traded pic 10 for Chris Judd who is the best player in the game coming off his o for Brownlow and then I traded pic 42 for Jay Sonic and Manas you can virtually form a super team for your second season without sacrificing anything 2005 was a great year for the Swans in real life that is we won the grand final it was our first Premiership since 1933 and that playing list has been engrained into my mind this 2005 game was also the AFL game I had as a kid which helped H in the players alongside Dennis and derms legendarily bad commentary just a minor score Snider with the Miss jerseys human the Swans in front by a huge margin so when I played this game and all the games that followed it as a footy fanatic I often just let my mind wander remembering all these players and all the big games and drama surrounding them and I think that's a big appeal to playing these especially the older ones because they're like time capsules in a way especially for bringing back memories of those players that aren't that well talked about like remember Nick Fosdick or spider ever it or Eamonn Buchanan these games just let me tune out and dwell on all my useless AFL knowledge and I love it I augurs would also release a Gaelic football game in 2005 published by Sony of Ireland Gaelic is like afl's Irish cousin they're very similar sports and there's even been exhibition matches pitching AFL and Gaelic players against each other in a mishmash of the sport called international rules IR released a sequel in oh seven and though these games have poor reviews they sold very well in Ireland after 2005 was a bit of an unresponsive mess I arrange things in with Premiership 2006 there's a real focus here on accessibility and smoothness it feels way nicer to play it has a friendlier UI which shows the controls on screen a bouncy or more cartoon graphic style and all-around it's a far better game pulling off mostly the same mechanics with much more grace one thing they did change was the goal kicking and I love how they went all the way back to how the NES game did it because that really was a great way of handling it it's just as satisfying to use here the kicks go more than 30 meters again which makes the hand balls nearly useless but it's still better overall and I also really liked how badly you can mess up kicking if you overcook the bar it really keeps you on your feet so to speak still the marking is similar to O 5 but the UI helps clear off when you're meant to time them at least it otherwise absent flows nicer than any IR game before it though there is an obscene amount of smothered kicks outside of the gameplay trading has been more or less fixed web there aren't any more cheap trades and you now have to worry about the salary cap and if a player masters a certain skill or wins the Brownlow or Coleman that'll give the entire playing list a stat boost which I absolutely love it's like the players know they're playing with the star which lifts them all up collectively oh six really is a great refinement of oh five and I guess with how good it is that begs asking if it's better than oh four and Premiership Edition but this is a question that doesn't need to be answered because Premiership oh seven makes oh six completely redundant opening with this ain't a scene it's an arms race which kind of been cheap as a license you'll be transported right back into 2007 with another wonderfully cheesy intro video I our gurus expanded the feature list hard here with stuff like selecting match currencies and showing crowd numbers and the main change is a revamp to the training system now you can refine the weekly training schedules with different intensities which will affect your chances of injuring players and unlike a lot of other games players will get injured all the time here which is realistic and though this is a really small gameplay leap from oh six the refinements here are fantastic previously rucking was really annoying because the camera would always face weird directions and that's been fixed and more importantly holding the ball will finally get called on time which makes it far more intense to play frankly oh seven has a really ugly depth of field effect glazing over at all that I'm sure you've noticed a bit showing the player names under the players helps a lot with figuring out matchups it's uglier to look at the No 6 but it is more practical so coupled with all the great improvements from oh six oh seven is really really great for seasons on end it's the last footage am I our gurus would release and I comfortably think that it's their best there are things that are for does better particularly with the marking but basically everything else is more satisfying here as far as the deep management system goes no footy game that wasn't a dedicated management game came even close to this for over a decade now we wouldn't see another full console AFL game release until 2011 with a couple of games coming out in 2009 for handhelds but before moving on I think it's why noting just how successful these games are I know they might sound like the most niche games ever made even if you're Ozzie they don't seem like they do particularly well but every single one of I use AFL games debuted at number one on the Australian sales charts even 2006 and 2007 did while we were transitioning into the next gaming console generation 2006 even stayed at number one for six weeks on end and I think that speaks to just how fanatic we are about this sport despite Australia only having 20 million people or so there was and is a demand for footy games to be made here which is why they're still being made to this day around this time the publishers switched from Sony to absentee based company called true-blue Entertainment who specialized in Aussie sports games rotating through budget AFL rugby and cricket releases with their first AFL game being something completely different AFL mascot manner on the DS is based on what was basically an advertising campaign for kids where they gave all the team's new mascots whether they were reimagined or brand new this inherently bothers me because a lot of the mascots were just needlessly changed as part of this mascot manner thing like this one's got swanee naturally but we just kind of ignore swan E's existence and continue with siggy that said we at least got some horrifying mascots out of this like look at Port Adelaide's I I swear I've seen this guy in one of my nightmares the game has you choosing a mascot and playing through all the different mascots worlds as a fairly decent and straightforward 3d platformer the characters have a bit of a weird momentum to them but once you get used to that it's very responsive and controls well there are some annoying issues though like there's a few too many blind jumps and there's no way to tell between an instant death pit and absolutely get damaged pet vet generally it's a much more competent game than I expected I think what's most impressive about it is the sheer variety and distinctness of each level no two mascots homes are the same and they're really dripping with character not to mention their dare I say graphically impressive Brisbane goes really hard on the breeze Vegas joke Frio is as beachy as it gets Sydney has its harbour the dogs have the dingy streets of Footscray it's nicely constructed and though the levels play similarly they aren't lazily thrown together and rarely it feels like they copy and pasted areas also just by the nature of how it controls and how there's no full damage feels like it could be a great speedrunning game emulating this I couldn't seem to unlock a lot of the content so bear with me as we truly pretend it's 2009 because I'm aiming a camera at a deer screen you battle enemy mascots at the end of their stages in a goofy simple boss battle and there's plenty of minigames to unlock and there's even a very basic footage side game that's not completely terrible for a bonus mode it pitches and it takes away control too often and it feels imprecise and sloppy at times but again all things considered it's neat and it's a welcome addition a big aspect to the game is collecting fully cards which you can trade with friends which works as a good way of getting the kids hooked and rounds out what's a surprisingly content-rich game it's janky budget II and somewhat standard but if you have a kid who's into footy and is still playing games on the d/s there's no reason that they wouldn't enjoy this the same dev also made an extremely similar mascot manner NRL game at the same time that naturally was also well done returning back to normal that PSP got a FL challenge later in 2009 which I think you can just sort of guess isn't great but it is briefly enjoyable in its simplicity jaunt marking and simple animations afford the game a certain responsiveness that I don't mind though it's only fun when you switch the camera to the behind player view otherwise marking is just impossible because the camera doesn't keep up the season mode has a basic training system and on hard mode your players have the worst stats ever and over the course of the game you level them up the difference between a player with low stats and high stats is astronomical and it's fun to develop like perfect super players on your team they're just outshine everyone else it becomes a game of getting it to those players while grinding up your team what annoys me most about challenge though is that there's so many invincibility frames unless a player is in there running animation they can't be tackled at all which is extremely frustrating and clunky also the game feels very cheap it's the first and only game with no commentary at all since 1996 and the ball can hit the post and somehow be counted as a goal I guess is the only option on the PSP it's fine for a couple of hours AFL live from 2011 is the best AFL game ever made sort of it was the only game developed by big ant studios also from Melbourne and as the unconfirmed story began to went way over budget which is why they were drops for any future AFL games and I guess all that budget went into refining the responsive and fun gameplay everything in this game just feels right when you press a button it immediately responds and does exactly what you want it to which is particularly impressive with the kicking in most games you often don't feel like you can or you have enough time to actually aim your kicks so you just hack them forward but here it really does feel like you can pinpoint where you want your kick to go on the fly and your teammates will create leads to mark the ball on the run if you kick it right the UI makes it clear how far you need to kick in when you do pull off a perfect delivery it feels amazing though the marking controls the same as oh five oh six and oh seven it feels like it's 95% about positioning and only 5% about the actual players marking stats if you kick the ball to your teammates advantage they will reliably market even if their opponent has a perfect marking skill which is really how it should be what's also great is no matter what animations are going on you can always lay a tackle it virtually doesn't have any invincibility frames for tackle so again it's ultra responsive all you need to do to tackle is hold down triangle and every player runs it around the same speed which is honestly pretty weird so the game turns into a complete tackle fest which is a criticism towards it and it does make dashing away from opponents near impossible but honestly footy is kind of a tackle for these days anyway the flow ends up being flicking the ball around in a contest until you have enough time to get a proper kick away then it's up to you to make the most of that kick which is how footy is it's logical there's no extreme exploits no aimlessly hacking it forward when you don't need to you actually need to get the ball to a man in open space and just go from there and with how responsive it feels it's just awesome pulling off a perfect kick or play but AFL live isn't flawless set shots are way too easy in that it's basically the same as 2004 the button mapping with the triggers is questionable and like all of these games you will eventually get way too good for the AI but the biggest problem here is simply the lack of features the career mode is just a single playthrough of the 2011 AFL season Gold Coast first season and I like to play as them and pretend that they shouldn't get bulldozed into the ocean there is some team and player some ization but you won't be managing your team in any meaningful way AFL live is a game with really strong maybe even the strongest gameplay of any of these games but the lack of systems or meta games outside of that gameplay does feel like a massive missed opportunity it's also worth pointing out that with the move to the ps3 and 360 gen of consoles the lower budget of these AFL games is becoming all too apparent this is an ugly game for 2011 there's no two ways about it and from this point forward so that games are frequently mocked for looking like ps2 games whether that's fair or not on the one hand the target market is so small that it's understandable but on the other hand they're still charging full retail for these games I personally find it completely forgivable also you might have noticed that my copy of the game is the game of the Year Edition which includes GWS and list updates no one actually awarded this game with a game of the Year award obviously is just like a hilarious misleading attempt at repackaging the game and true-blue did the exact same thing with the next game AFL on the Wii AFL Wii is kind of the opposite game - AFL live in that they went really hard on the management stuff in the content instead of the gameplay there's plenty of teams and leagues and those training and drafting and trading and you'll even get job offers from other clubs at the end of each season there's also some light financial management where you can hire staff to boost some stats and choose the price of your membership and merge depending on how popular your team is or how successful you are it sounds more complex than it is but it's still super addictive if you're a fan of the sport and if you're familiar with the more recent AFL games you'll recognize these systems since they've been reused and built upon ever since I don't think it's quite as good or in depth as o7 was because that had other teams offering you trades and the training intensity thing but it's the second best so far at management unfortunately the gameplay itself can't quite keep up the AI are pretty bad and don't position well the performance is terrible the visuals are blown out with post-processing effects and to top it all off there's lots of waggling and flicking of the Wii mode you do get used to it and you can use a GameCube controller if you want to but it's just not that worth doing and at least against the AI you'll be slaughtering them on the highest difficulty within a handful of matches still though the game does some admirable things the power bar being visually represented on the field is absolutely fantastic and though the game has some silly minigames sliced in for marking rocking and tackling they actually take out a lot of the randomness and ambiguity that the other games have it's more clunky than it is fun but the whole game feels like an attempt at reinventing the wheel as something less chaotic and I appreciate that because the reality is between marking and kicking and the ball that's shaped like an egg you're relying a lot on random number generators in pretty much all of these games more so than most sports games at least so with all that in mind there are worse options with AFL games and with the management stuff being pretty solid on balance this actually isn't too bad there's some decent side challenges and training modes to familiarize yourself with the mechanics and if your only console is a Wii then I have to assume you live in a nursing home and this is a decent way to get your offseason AFL fix AFL live to features Sam read on the front cover which is extremely bizarre it's genuinely like they put a blindfold on and just threw a dart at a wall of players and I guess that should have been a warning because talk about a disappointment let me introduce you to a developer named - wicked which we aren't unfamiliar with their work they're actually behind mascot Manor the PSP game and the Wii game and while they were making side games it was fine but with AFL life - after true-blue gave the developers of AFL life one the boot wicked which took over the main series naturally this is an evolution of the Wii game with virtually the exact same management stuff which is really it's only positive visually it is the best yet but if you're playing these games for the graphics you're doing something wrong and at first it seems like it is a fun game like the player movement is responsive and the animations are quick but man this has so many problems advantage gets called way too quick for you to react and it's always at the worst of times there are way too many ball ups and stoppages that it gets annoying the AI are awful spamming hand ball to gain ground is all too easy you master the game too fast the tackle button is the same as the muck button and if you go for a tackle while someone is kicking you'll attempt to mark no matter where you are on the ground which means you consistently have players just randomly diving to the ground all the time the biggest problem though is the marking itself this is the weird pressing the mark button in the right timing window thing at its unreliable players will often just zoom a few meters to instantly out mark or spoil their opponents and even when that doesn't happen it just feels totally random who marks the ball at times which is so annoying and that really sums up AFL life too it is so annoying I had a really great time playing all the games so far for this video but this game put me in a real rotten mood and I couldn't play much of it part of the reason this is so bad is because it was also developed for mobile and I guess as a mobile game with those lower standards it's okay but after how good AFL live was to serve up this is just shocking and AFL life could have really benefited from AFL life two's management stuff but instead they just took half a step forward and infinite steps backwards finally we reached the current generation of consoles with AFL evolution and this is the first one of these games that I closely followed the development of before it came out most of the pre-release previews were about how the players faces were getting scanned into the game and the players that did get scanned in look great most of the players weren't scanned though and they can look way off like Jack Watts couldn't look less like Jack Watts but for the players that were scanned it's impressive to see and knowing who you're passing to just by looking at them makes a huge difference in gameplay one of the coolest things about Aussie Rules as a sport is that players of such different heights and weights play useful roles in teams so knowing which player is which is massively important in the video games they also taste a mode where you can only play as a single player through their career which ended up not nearly being as in-depth or interesting as it could be management wise but I do at least get to live out my fantasy of Callum Sinclair winning the Brownlow Coleman Norm Smith and Premiership in a single season you really realize how much of a team sport the game is but there's not a lot to get out of this mode and the camera is really wonky so we're left with the main game and of course AFL life - and AFL live wise management systems return here only now I feel it's way easier to enjoy them because the gameplay is actually pretty good it's modeled off live one in that it's basically a tackle fest since you tackle by holding down triangle again so burning off opponents is extremely rare but finding opportunities to get decent clearances is the name of the game again but you can't quite pinpoint kicks as well as you could in live one there are a few too many in Vince ability frames and unfortunately the marking while mostly okay still has it's frustrating moments occasionally where logically the wrong player marks it though I do love how lenient the amps are with letting you push opponents over in marking contests also the UI in live used color to show the exact intensity you needed to kick the ball to get it to a targeted teammate that this game doesn't have that and obviously the kicks go different lengths depending on each player's kicking skill so you can be too in the dark to really kick properly so it is all-around rougher and more imprecise than life one is but really this gameplay is the second best so farther it's probably tied with a seven and oh for Premiership the sheer pace of evolution is so much faster too it feels a lot more demanding to play without tipping over into being too confusing though the AI on hard does cheat a lot getting off some powerful kicks too quickly or some incredible hand balls which can be frustrating set shots are again too easy but that's a problem with most of these games it seems and rucking is still pretty nonsense but no game does rocking well honestly there's a level of dodge enos to like all of these games that you will need to look past and that da genus has only become more apparent as industry standards have increased like visually this looks nowhere near as nice as a typical ps4 game since I personally can look past its problems and maybe that's just because I love Ozzie rules so much I found AFL evolution to be extremely addictive I played it way more than any other AFL game on this list I loved trading and recruiting for teams that were only absurdly tall or absurdly fast and it was fun watching as the league fictionally evolved over many seasons and all the players got jumbled between teams and there are some cool additions to the game - you can now dribble kick which is a bit overpowered since it goes too straight and you can do it too quickly but it's fun to do and it gives you more options particularly in front of goal the AFL W is here in its debut season which is great and there's an online community where you can upload and download custom players and teams including the 2005 Sydney Swans which I'm very happy about it feels like wicked which knew they had to make something more like AFL live after the disaster that was a FL life - so they tried their best to do so and there they didn't get super close but they ended up making a much more competent game really it's the marking that lets this down most it would be the most frustrating thing about the game if it weren't for the constant crashing on ps4 if you skip through the menus too quickly the game crashes if you're a few seasons in the game crashes too often if you look at the game the wrong way it just seems to crash I really really like the game but man does it not want me to play it wicked which would finally follow up with AFL Evolution 2 which only just came out releasing in April of this year after plenty of delays because they were switching to the Unreal Engine and though a lot of the same animations and menus carry over the graphics are vastly improved way more player phases have been scanned into the game and it all comes with a performance increase also if the game hasn't crashed on me once thank God unlike the first game AFL evolution 2 is not trying to recapture what AFL life did tackling is a button rather than a hold and tackles can miss meeting fast players can break away and you can go for runs and honestly it is absolutely brilliant no game has captured weaving through traffic bouncing hand balls between runners nearly as well as this game has it feels amazing to have an opponent fail to tackle you as you sprint away and you need to make sure you're bouncing the ball every 15 meters and focusing on who's making a lead ahead of you which is why I have the camera set up like this the AI in this game are actually quite good at running with making leads and finding space and the UI doesn't make this too clear from the usual side view unfortunately you have to deal with the camera swinging around like crazy and that can get you in some sticky situations with players tackling you from off-camera but passing a ball to a player that you saw downfield just feels great as far as everything else it is quite a similar game to Evo so much so that I was a bit disappointed at first but after some time with it I realized it handles the same mechanics much better particularly with the marking while I'd have liked to see it completely overhauled it is at least much improved in that like 95% of the time it's consistent with whose marking it like live 1 it's all about positioning which is great because it means kicking to advantage works like it should there is one new mechanic that I'm not too fond of though and that is the clearance kick our press triangle while you have the ball and you'll do a near instant random high kick forward with the idea being that you'll gain grounds but players will have enough time to get under the ball to create a contest it's a quick low quality kick forwards but even still it is way to over thankfully a lot of the time in contests handballing is the better option but clearing usually isn't a bad option and that's a problem the triangle button is also used for tackling so when things get too chaotic just keep spamming triangle because you're either going to clear it or tackle the ball-carrier also often this clearance kick will actually make for a pretty decent Ford 50 entry and most of the time it'll just create another contest downfield which usually isn't a bad thing it's a lazy easy way out button that won't necessarily win you the game because you'll miss all your shots a goal with it and of course your opponents can use it too but I can't help but feel the game would be better without this mechanic at all in a game that's already very random that doesn't need to be what's essentially an rng kick one of the best things evolution games do is let you tweak the game play with different sliders like how far you can kick the ball how far the power bar feels how strict the umpires are so you can tweak the games to your liking and you'll want to unfortunately the clearance kicks can't be tweaked though if anyone over at wicked witch is watching please let me make the clearance kicks really pathetic on that note wicked witch have done great work patching the Evo games Evo one was awful on launch but they've turned it around entirely with rebalances and bug fixes and Evo two patches are still consistently coming out which is fantastic so these clearance kicks might actually get a slider to nerf them which would be amazing finally wicked which have expanded the management stuff a lot there's now training intensity like oh seven and with that comes way more injuries which means more worrying about your lineups and if you underperform or overperform in a season you'll get contract offers from teams in other leagues if you suck as an AFL coach for example you might only get a job as an e4 coach or if you're a fantastic lower league coach you might get an opportunity for a shot at the big time and the same goes for the individual player mode you can play a career all the way from under 18s to an AFL premiership which is really cool so how does AFL evolution to compare to the rest or really to the best with AFL life at this point I think it's just a matter of preference AFL live is more responsive and the kicking is more pinpoint but it doesn't have the depth and importantly the outside running that Evo 2 has and with Evo 2's management stuff on top I'm glad to say that AFL evolution 2 is comfortably the most well-rounded footy games so far but if I only want to sneak a game or two in I'm likely gonna choose AFL live it took wicked witch a few too many tries to get here but now that we are here I'm more excited than ever for future AFL games especially as the switch to the Unreal Engine was done so that Evo 2 can be scaled up and built upon in upcoming games something that has only gotten worse over the years is the commentary though and after years and years of wonderful comedy nonsense Gary lion and Hutto provide the dodgiest chatty yet somehow hello and welcome it's Saturday afternoon football Anthony Hudson with you today join now by Gary Lyon oh I'm excited for this one focus matches offer the ideal scenario for experimentation hello both teams will still be looking for the result today's match Sydney and GWS Giants and that's the end of the roundup of all the janky footy games imperfect doesn't even begin to describe them they all have issues with something what's funny is almost every game does something better than all the others though the NES game has great simple marking 99 has leap on-the-fly rock and kicking strategies oh four has great training in minigames oh five has a really good set shot system oh seven has that interesting brownlow world coleman stat boosting live has great kicking and flow we has a good clip kicking in passing UI and Evo 2 has the management and outside run game down pat you could really toss together different parts of all of these games and make something greater than ever before I think just to like temper things I need to stress again that as much as I praise these games they are really dodgy a lot of the appeal for me as a footy fanatic is just letting myself switch off pop on a podcast think about fully grab a drink I find these to be the perfect games to zone out too they certainly wouldn't work as eSports or anything because they're all just a bit ball over the shop and again they rely very heavily on random number generators but I also think they're way to over Hayden should be given more of a chance Ozzy Rawls is an absurdly difficult spot to simulate because it's just so complex and despite the low budgets almost all of these games are putting in real cracker trying to recreate footy accurately the fact that most of them are fun on top of that is just awesome and I hope that they continue to exist in their niche space in the world and continue to get better and better and with that we wrap up the video thank you all for watching hope you enjoyed it if you want to help out the channel you can you know click like and subscribe and comment and get the algorithm going or you can support me on patreon and I'm about to thank all my patrons this is this is by far the sort of biggest effort I've put into a video and I realized that it's a huge sort of passion project desk video and I have no idea how well it'll perform on the channel it was just something that I've been working on for actual years now and it's it's it feels good to finally be wrapping it up if you want to watch AFL yourself it's actually about to just start up again unless I'm slow in which it just started so yeah I think it's from what I hear it's gonna be sort of dominating the sports channels in other countries because it's starting up before most other sports in the world are starting up again so if you're interested I'd recommend checking out a game or two it's it's a really really sort of fun interesting and unique sport just to watch even let alone play yeah so hope you enjoyed it and now I want to thank all my patrons including the ones coming up on the screen and especially including my $5 patrons by name Adam Beals Adam Davison analogue man Anthony Gallagher Anthony hi sell big Jay Blake Barnet buggy online Katyn the dingo Conor sallowness Devin Grand Isle Dominic jucoky dough pants evil chicken Gary pay hazardous Kirby Casey Kayla lab cat Lachlan Jones little Jake lucky the French dude Lucas ray civic Maximilian Kunzman may a Rhys mazaki Melanie G Michael Brennan mini-me uses amid Jesus Christ amid as Lydon own organ organic catalyst ok organocatalysis to synthesize warfarin via addition of for hydro hydroxy Cameron and benzene benzene Lydon jeez benzy lid and a exit turn I'm trying I'm sure mrs. mini-me massage duct-tape peaceful kumquat plague Ritalin for kids guide Panthera tia test drive unlimited to the last great opium den thomas dams guard trap LaRose travis traffic or been riding on games and was indicative thanks again off for watching hope you enjoyed this sort of one-off unique passion project of a video back to regular viewing soon take it easy

Channel: minimme

Views: 166,586

Rating: 4.9270759 out of 5

Keywords: aussie rules, footy, afl, aussie rules football, australian rules football, afl evolution, afl evolution 2, afl live, afl live 2, afl wii, afl ps2, afl 2005, afl nes, aussie rules footy nes, nes, ps2, playstation 2, afl live premiership edition, afl 98, afl 99, tru blu entertainment, tru blu games, wicked witch, minimme, mini me, minime, sydney swans, richmond tigers, collingwood magpies, west coast eagles, hawthorn, games, video games, afl games, afl video games, australia

Id: c5WmLtKpAIw

Length: 53min 48sec (3228 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 10 2020