SNES Game Review: Madden NFL 95

  In this edition of SNES game review, we review Madden NFL 95.  This would have taken place during the 1994 season and by now this is the fourth Madden game made under the branch for the SNES (There were other Madden games made for Sega and other consoles.)  This was also the second game with the Madden NFL moniker (the first two being called John Madden Football.)  This rendition did more for the progression of the franchise and honestly in my opinion is the best on the SNES platter of Madden games.  What did they do well? What needed improvement? All that and more below.

Positives:

1. Pacing: This game is pretty fast paced.  It's easy to pick up, play a game in 30 minutes if not less and move on to the next game or what have you.  It's a good pacing that I wish they had for the earlier and later games of this franchise on SNES.

2. NFL/NFLPA license: The first of the games for Madden to get the NFL and NFLPA license makes this major plus as it gives the teams with trademarks and the players.  This was a huge get for the Madden franchise and helped it get better and better as time went along.

3. Graphics: I felt this improved year over year.  And this was no different from the previous games to this one.  The graphics are more crisp and Visual Concepts did a pretty good job with this overall.

4. Playing offense: The playbook is pretty watered down, which is good for young people who grew up with this game.  In today's gaming it would be looked at as a negative, but remember this game and others was wanting to use the kids to play, not necessarily adults.

Negatives:

1. Playing defense: Yes if there was the offense side, defense is lackluster.  There are times where the score will be 42-35 or something of that nature.  If you have any offensive skill players you will win all the time.  Seriously when I ran the table with Green Bay, the Super Bowl was 49-42 to end it.

2. The sprites: Yes this is a negative but not for the reason of what I want to say.  This was the first edition where finally black players were represented.  I am glad but here is why I say it is a negative.  I would love to say it was a graphics issue but Tecmo had these sprites, as did Troy Aikman Football so why didn't Madden?  Obviously this isn't on Madden himself, his name is just on the game.  I don't think it looks favorably so many years later about this but it finally stopped being a detriment here and players sprites/likeness were finally represented in full.

Overall Rating/Rank:

This is probably the best of the Madden games on the SNES.  That isn't saying much by the way.  They are still worse than the Tecmo Games.  This is still best of the Madden games.  If I rated it purely on its genre of games, I have to give it a 7.7.  I think this is a game in the top 250 of SNES games, probably just throwing it around 236 is good.