The 2005 Tecmo Bowl Playoffs

Divisional

As I was nearing completion of the Redskins-Buccaneers video, I watched the New England Patriots get dethroned by the Denver Broncos in the Divisional round of the playoffs. Being a Bronco fan, I knew this had to be the next video I'd work on. Initially, I didn't do much with this one, as I knew it would be just as big of an undertaking as the previous video. So I set this project aside for a few months.

It was around this time that I moved, and as a result I had to return my cable box/DVR back to the cable company. Unfortunately, I didn't remember to back up any of the games I recorded on it before I turned it in. This meant that all the game footage that I had recorded - nearly every game of the playoffs - was gone. My only saving grace was that I had transfered the highlights from the New England-Denver game to my computer at some point beforehand. It was enough to produce a video much like the Wild Card one, only this time I wanted to do a little bit more.

First of all, I knew that two important players were returning from injuries - Teddy Bruschi of the Patriots and Darrent Williams of the Broncos. I wanted to recreate the "recovered" sequence for these guys, but I wasn't sure what I wanted to do exactly. In the first video, I decided against using the video game scoreboard and recreated my own. In this instance though, I decided against completely recreating the "recovered" sequence. Instead, I captured the sequence from the game, edited out the text and NFL logo, and added my own.

I also wanted to include a lot more animations in this one than I did the first time. In the Wild Card video, I used a lot of the same ones over and over, and I kind of wanted to get away from that a little. The Patriots-Broncos highlights also had a lot of different plays, like kick-off and punt returns, field goals, and jumping catches. So I went to work capturing the necessary animations from the emulator.

One great thing about emulators is that there can be a lot of different hacks of a single game. In the case of Tecmo Super Bowl, people have found out how to modify the players, helmet logos, and uniform colors. So naturally, there are many different versions of the game floating around. I had picked up a few that had good uniform colors for the modern-day Patriots (and Bucs, as witnessed in the Wild Card video), but I couldn't find one that had Bronco colors that I really liked. Most of them had the Broncos in all dark blue, or with pale blue helmets and pale orange jerseys. I wasn't happy with any of those, so I just used the old-school animations from the original game.

Capturing all the animations is pretty easy to do, I just record a game or two of myself playing and usually all the ones I need are there to edit into the video. But there is one animation that hardly comes up in the game: the "double jump" animation that happens when both a receiver and defensive back jump for the ball at the same time. I must have played the game for hours without getting it to happen. I was about to give up when I finally got it to work. I threw the ball with my quarterback at the top of the screen to a receiver who was all the way on the bottom. And even though the animation I captured was with the Dallas Cowboys (slightly different color than the Patriots uniform in the game), I figured it was close enough.

The highlight of the Patriots-Broncos game is undoubtedly when New England quarterback Tom Brady throws a would-be touchdown pass into the the hands of Broncos cornerback Champ Bailey. Bailey intercepts the ball in his own endzone and runs it down the sideline for what looked like a sure touchdown. Tight end Ben Watson comes out of nowhere and knocks Bailey out of bounds at the last second. For this play, I decided to add in the sound of the crowd cheering while Bailey is running with the ball, slowly raising the level of cheers as he gets closer to the endzone. It's not the way it would have sounded in the video game, but it makes for a fairly dramatic sequence.

I spent a lot of time on this video making sure I had the right defensive players showing at the top of the screen. In the video game, the defensive player selected is always the defensive lineman closest to the top of the screen. Wanting to be as accurate as possible, I zoomed in on each play to figure out which defensive player was in that position. This is why there is a different defensive player named on almost every play. For my next video, I'm thinking about adding in the big "1" and "2" icons indicating which players on the field are selected. I'm thinking it might be more trouble than it's really worth. But we'll see how well that works out.

Download

View the video on YouTube.com. Or, download a DivX version:
Medium Quality [320x240, 40MB]
High Quality [640x480, 82MB]
(Please right-click and choose "save as" to download.)