I think anyone that's around my age will be happy to admit that they played quite a bit of Tecmo Super Bowl when they were a kid, whether they were a football fan or not. It was one of the few sports titles that could appeal to just about anyone out there, with simple pick up and play mechanics, and an addictive nature that was only enhanced by playing thru a season with a friend or two. In fact, myself and two other kids I went to school with at the time would run thru seasons for most of the school year, playing the game on a small 13 inch TV in one of their parents basements after school every day, and loving every minute of it.

I was pretty excited when Tecmo finally announced a new Bowl title, not only for the DS but also as a throwback to the NES/SNES style games. It's hard to say how you could go wrong with a remake of one of the best football games ever made, however, there's something about this title that doesn't quite mesh with my memories. Once you remove the rose tinted glasses of nostalgia, you'll probably realize that Kickoff isn't exactly best served by sticking so much to its roots, and while the actual gameplay is fun, everything else that surrounds it, from stat tracking to menu navigation, feels really dated or just cumbersome all together.

The single player experience offers up a few different season modes, so you can play starting from Preseason, the actual Season, and then the All Star Bowl. Once you choose your pick, at least from Preseason and Season, then you pick the teams you wish to control, and you can pick multiple teams if you want to play a few games every week of the season, just like the original. The teams are obviously not going to be culled from the NFL this time out since that license is long gone, but there are edit options for the team names, colors, and player names, so the more hardcore players out there can pretty much recreate current or past NFL teams to their choosing. Along with the team edits, you can also edit out individual player stats up to a certain point number for different skills, and you can also assign super skills, which are new to the game. As you win or advance thru seasons, more points unlock that you can use, and by the time you finish up a few seasons you can pretty much make your entire team an overpowered beast.

The only big problem with going thru and doing the team edits is that the menu is a chore to navigate, even with the touch screen controls. Everything you do seems to need a double confirmation, from selecting a team or player, to typing in the text, to submitting the text, to changing the colors, and so on. Once you finish up a few players it's hard to maintain the drive to continue with the edits, but then again the fake teams that Tecmo has created really don't cut it either, with some really goofy team names that are almost designed simply to make you want to change them.

Gameplay on the field though is pretty much spot-on in look and feel to the original Tecmo Bowl titles. It's an overhead view with the field scrolling horizontally, and the players are lined up vertically on each side. You can switch command prior to the snap, and then once the ball is in play you're locked into your selection. The playbook remains small, with only 4 rush and 4 pass options, all of which are pretty simple. You can do some playbook edits for teams though, but you can't come up with anything too complicated either. On the offense, when you pass the controls are set up to make you cycle thru receivers, instead of assigning a button for each player, which feels a little backwards nowadays. Defensive play is much better, and is relatively intact from the original, with just simple dives for taking down opposing players, and the old school lock ups that players can randomly kick out of.

The only big addition to the gameplay comes in the form of the super skills certain players possess, which will randomly give them some type of bonus, whether that's a pass that's almost guaranteed to hit its mark, or giving a defensive player the ability to out juke a line man, these skills have no real rhyme or reason as to why they kick in when they do, but every time one pops up you'll get a quick animated sequence to let you know what's happening. You can assign these skills to players, but without any real direct control over when the abilities occur; they don't feel nearly as useful as they should.

Of course, the other side of this is that the abilities are largely unnecessary when playing against the computer. The challenge is pretty low here, and while it's a bit harder to pull of a ridiculous amount or yards thru a single play, it's still easy to constantly achieve first downs, and on the flip side it's pretty easy to get in for a sack or two here and there. Of course, on occasion the computer will pick the right defensive play to completely foil and steamroll your offense, but that rarely happens. Then again, pulling off a massive running play doesn't hold as much appeal as it used to, since the game doesn't track individual player stats and sticks only to team numbers, which is a big let down for me.

There are a couple multiplayer options, either thru wi-fi or local connections, and they both seem to work pretty well. Playing against an actual opponent provides a much greater challenge, and is far more fun than the single player experience was, so if you do pick this one up, definitely try it out.

However, if you're looking to enjoy the single player game, keep in mind that this might not be all you were expecting. The gameplay is pretty much the same, outside of the addition of super skills and the fact that the defense has an uncanny ability to always catch up to you, but if you're interested in the team editing to really recreate your old school memories of the original games, you might end up being more frustrated than amused by the final product. Still, I'm glad the game actually came out, and I hope that Tecmo uses it as a stepping-stone for a better game in the near future.