In this age of eye-candy sports games, one would think that Jim Gindin and his one-man juggernaut, Front Office Football, would have left the scene years ago. This shows you that millions of dollars, dozens of programmers and athlete sponsorship doesn’t guarantee a great game. What Jim has done is make a game that’s good, accessible and just plain fun.
Front Office Football 2004 is a text-based football game. You take the reigns as the general manager for your favorite football club and try to mold them into a Super Bowl dynasty.
Graphics: 82
It’s often hard to grade the appearance of a text based sports game. The tell-tale sign of a great sports game is the interface and we’ll cover that a little later. Appearance, for most gamers, is probably last in terms of features they care about in a text-based sports game. Either the graphics are really good or just enough to be functional. FOF 2004 graphic’s are functional and do not take away from the game. FOF ’04 like its predecessors comes in one shape but with many nuances. If you hate the way Windows-OS looks you probably won’t like the way FOF looks.
There are some options as to what you can change. The menus can reflect your team’s colors. FOF has included some backgrounds so the landscape isn’t barren but overall it’s not going to bowl you over with its looks. And there is the option to install user created mods, like adding real NFL logos or changing a background from the standard FOF gif to your favorite player. Even though this isn’t done directly through the game itself, a large community of fans have taken the challenge to enhance the game.
Interface: 87
This is where a text-based game can live or die. In the previous versions of FOF, you always felt like you were three clicks away from the right screen. This year everything is right in front of you. A good text-based game has a menu system that doesn’t get in the way of the game. And this could not be truer this year. Let’s say you wanted to find the season stats for a certain QB but you were in league leader’s menu. No problem, as every player and team is “clickable.” The other big plus for FOF:2004 is that everything you need is always on the screen in front of you. Let’s say you are in the draft and you want to make a trade or find out your team’s needs. Once again all the buttons to are always on the screen staring back at you.
Player scouting and stat keeping in most text games can be a laborious click-fest. Once again, hats off to FOF:2004. Everything you need to know about a player is on the window or one click away. You can go from putting someone on the inactive roster to renegotiating their contract without going back a forth between too many screens.
While the menus and the appearance of the game doesn’t get in the way, there’s always room for improvement. When you load of the game, all the menus you will need are available on FOF’s “desktop”. The problem is each time you will have to set-up this up to you liking. The other problem is that FOF while the appearance if functional, it could use a make-over. At times you feel like you are playing a football game on your accountant’s tax program. Making it feel more like a game can at the least make the user feel like he’s a real GM.
Gameplay: 91
FOF:2004 remains very much true to form. Everything from controlling your coaches to trying to build a dynasty to removing the cancers in the clubhouse is available.
The game really comes in two parts, off-season play and regular season play. And most of these two parts remain true to earlier form but there is much more to do in your virtual football year.
Let’s start with the off-season. If this was the only playable part of FOF:2004 you would still get your money’s worth. This is how addictive the off-season is. Like any good football game it’s up to you to build a dynasty or create a profitable team.
The addictiveness is the player(CPU) involvement with the user. It’s rather easy to understand what you have to do in the off-season. You need to re-sign your quality players. You need to renegotiate player contracts or trim the fat. You need to fill holes with free agents or look to the future in the draft. All that sounds like a good plan until you introduce the best off-season AI in any football game. Players for the most part think like humans thanks to the way Jim has set up player characteristics. Some are greedy, some want a winner, and some are just plain upset with how you handled them. All of this information is on the screen for you to see. And how you are going to tackle the good players from the cancers in the locker room has great impact on the regular season play. If you gut a team to trim the fat you are going to take a hit in team chemistry. Likewise, if you start to bringing in star players while you have pretty good players team chemistry is going to be affected and you might get player’s upset about their playing time.
Another accolade for FOF is unpredictability. One thing I’ve learned in FOF is there are no guarantees. You could have the best recruiting class, bring in a lot of good FA’s, re-sign your star players; and one or two injuries later your season is a bust. Or you have a scout that sees everything with rose-colored glasses and then when these Free Agents or Draftees play you learn that your team isn’t going to be competitive.
FOF:2004 has done a good job of balancing out the off-season. There isn’t a way to cheat with Free Agents. You really have to scour the NFL to fill holes. And just like the NFL, just because you offer the most money, players might not want to play for you. The drafts are realistic in that they will grab star players that fit their needs instead of solely fitting their needs or loading up in one area and neglecting another.
Where FOF:2004 fails to a slight degree is when you fire up your season. There is really two ways to play. Either you play as a hands off GM where you sim out and get ready for next off-season or you are left with mind-boggling micromanagement with numbers and percents. I know this is called “Front Office Football” but for people that don’t want to micromanage their team during regular play there should be something more to do. For example a very passionate gamer might love to draw up percents for how your team should play in every possible situation and package. Why then, have coordinators or coaches if the GM is doing all the work? The happy medium would be to have the GM bark orders to the coaches about who should play and maybe deal with the press. As it stands right now there’s very little to do as the “GM” during the season.
There are plenty of options if you want to dive deeper into the game. Like I said you can choose your packages and basically how your team plays in any situation in any game. Or you could take the role of coach and call plays. However, calling plays because of the interface doesn’t really feel like real coaching. How it works is you fire up a game, and you take the reigns of your coach. They will make suggestions but you can call any play from any package and see how it does. There are two problems with calling plays as the coach in FOF. First, you feel like you are always two or three clicks away from calling a play. Mostly on the main screen you are given the name of the play and you have to click to see what it does. Second once you see what play you have you don’t have the right information to make adequate calls. It feels like calling a play is like playing the slots, some plays work, some don’t but mostly it’s just about getting lucky.
Now that’s not to say that the season mode is bad. It’s not, there’s just not a lot of stuff to do if you take the role of GM. The positives of regular season mode come in the details. I’ll just list a few that I’ve experienced. After major injuries players come back with a hit to stats. It seems that with more gametime they can recover a bit but if you lose a guy for a whole season or for a few months he might not come back the same. QB’s don’t have the same brain. You would expect in a game that a QB like Manning would have full command of his offensive arsenal. What FOF:2004 did to raise the bar is to make backups or rookies limited in their of the offensive playbook. And most importantly to FOF is team chemistry. There are going to players that want more playing time or have a problem with so-and-so. You live and fail through the team chemistry.
The game also comes with the ability to have online leagues. This feature was not adequately tested so it would be unfair to score this aspect of the gameplay.
Overall: 90
Front Office Football:2004 is a stalwart of text-based gaming. If you want a cerebral game that challenges your mind not your fingers, FOF is the way to go. While the gameplay is very solid, FOF needs some much needed renovation. More options for the GM during the season and most importantly a new look or cleaner interface. The positive about this last sentence is that these are the only two “major” complaints I have, and in reality, if a game has those nitpicks you know you have a classic.
