SNES Game Review: Sports Illustrated Championship Football and Baseball

 Sports Illustrated is one of the most, if not the most, recognizable magazines to grace a stand in printing history.  It's covers of championship teams, cursing teams that should win it all, and much more.  They also attempted to get into the video game sports industry in the 1990's with Malibu Gaming with Sports Illustrated Championship Football and Baseball.  To put it nicely, they probably shouldn't have had Malibu make this game or just should have foregone the whole video game concept altogether.

Positives:

1. Graphics: Yeah there aren't many but the graphics are good overall for this game and I feel that this is the one main positive about this game because like I said.. there aren't many.

2. Frame Rate: This is actually quite alright as well.  Not a bad thing at all, and I feel it is quite okay for all reasonable ideas.

Negatives:

1. Cameras: Yeah like I said there were not many highlights to this.  The cameras in both the football and baseball are just bad.  I don't know why the football one is just diagonal.  It just doesn't make sense.  The baseball one with the batters eye is fine, but after the field in play is just awkward as well. 

2. Not a single license: Imagine having no license for the NFL, MLB, MLBPA or NFLPA and you have to be so generic on a game.  Yep that's this game actually.  I can't find a single excuse as to how that happens and it really brings the game down a lot.

3. Speed: Yeah this is spotty at best, slow at worst.  The bat swing for hitting on the baseball game is just so awkward in speed, the plays in football take forever to develop and it is just not a good mix at all.  

4. Passing windows: They are on the side rather than the top for the passing part of the football side of things.  I don't know why they are so clunky, take up so much room and make it so bad.  But they managed to not do what Madden did and screwed it up.

Overall Rating/Rank

As you can tell, this game just isn't good at all.  I wish they wouldn't have tried it and/or if they did re-try it then get the licenses at least? You can work on legitimately everything else in development, but no licenses really destroyed this game as did the production minus the graphics/speed of the game.  You can deal with the awkward passing windows if everything else is good.  But it isn't. Overall rating, 3 out of 10, and 560th on the overall rank.