Football Mogul, the younger, less talented cousin of Sports Mogul’s flagship Baseball Mogul series, has yet to find its stride. The idea is to create a text-based football game that is more on the ‘lite’ side compared to other more hard-core games such as Front Office Football. The problem is that just because a game lacks every bit of football detail that you find in other games doesn’t mean it’s allowed to fail on nailing down the basics.
The game puts you in the role as coach, GM and owner of an NFL team. The game is not licensed by the NFL but you do get real players and team names but just no logos (I’m still not sure how Sports Mogul managed to pull that off) and even some of the incoming rookies are available in the draft such as Brady Quinn and Ted Ginn Jr. You can also start up a fantasy league with fake players if the real ones don’t perform to your liking – which is likely to be the case. The player ratings, for the real players, are really bizarre and the rosters are nowhere near up to date and there are several players on a team that seem to be flat out made up. If the Browns have a rookie starting DT out of Houston named Adriano Belli – it’s news to me. Center LeCharles Bentley, who was hurt all of last year, is on the roster and rated a 66. He’s not hurt. He’s just an awful player.
The stats that the game pumps out are also a bit odd. It’s very unfair to slam a text game for producing stat results that are not 100% on par with real life. In a game like this, you expect a little statistical leeway. However, Jon Kitna throwing for 4,300 yards and 31 TDs? 14 quarterbacks finishing a season with a 90 or better QB rating? The world of Football Mogul is a world in which I am not familiar. If your QB ends a season with a rating in the 80s – he’s a below average player who needs to sit the bench. On the plus side, the good teams usually do better than the poor ones so constructing a solid roster, which really is the meat of the game, works pretty well.
The games themselves can either be simulated (which takes a surprisingly long time) or you can call the plays yourself. When you simulate you cannot set game plans or anything of that nature – you just set your lineup and sim it. This can be dangerous because when you check the game log, the play calls, on both offense and defense are a bit strange to say the least. Who is the defensive coordinator that calls a 4 deep zone when it’s 2nd and goal from the five? It’s safer to call the plays but that sort of takes away the whole idea of this being a quick, ‘lite’, game. Still, the play calling needs to be at least moderately realistic, otherwise what’s the point? That said, Football Mogul’s play calling and play diagrams are fantastic. Not only do you get a look at the play in question but it also tells you what it does. The Tampa 2 React for example, keys the run and is vulnerable to deep passes. Stuff like this is essential in allowing casual fans the ability to call a smart game.
The off-season is both engaging and yet highly frustrating. When it’s time to resign players who may become free agents, a screen pops up asking you to sign them or not. You cannot look at stats or ratings at this point – it’s either do you want to keep them or not? If you say no – they go off to the FA pool. For all of the fiddly interface issues in Solecismic’s Front Office Football – it doesn’t force you to make decisions like this without allowing you to survey all of the info you need. The free agent period also lacks any sort of drama. You are presented with the FA list and you simply click on who you want to sign and if you can afford the player…boom…done. There’s no haggling back and forth over price and no bidding wars with other teams. It’s just not as involved as it needs to be.
The rookie draft moves along at a brisk pace, and it’s pretty cool seeing real incoming rookies in the pool even if they aren’t technically accurate – Troy Smith is not 6’7 (he’s actually 6’0), and Brady Quinn did not throw 33 interceptions his senior year at Notre Dame. The money in the game, particularly in the draft, is just plain weird. In the initial draft, the Browns could not sign QB Jamarcus Russell even though they had 18 million in cap space. They couldn’t sign him in the draft because the team didn’t have enough signing bonus cash on hand. He wanted four million and the Browns had 3.5. That’s ludicrous.
Also ludicrous is the fact that when putting QB Charlie Frye on the trade block, a player with a very average quality garnered a few 1st round offers in return. GM trade AI is a very tough thing to nail down, but like moist NFL text sims, it tends to over value average quarterbacks.
