Collection essentials #128: Mutant League Football (Genesis)

Here’s another wacky sports title that tickles my fancy!

This game is from the same company that made the extremely popular Madden NFL series of football games, and it borrows a gameplay engine from one of them. I guess I ought to mention that, perhaps oddly, none of the 2D Madden games are actually making my list. It feels strange, but I wouldn’t include ALL of them, and I’d need to focus on a specific one that I’m attached to, and frankly I’ve never spent a whole lot of time with any of them. I do have old-school Madden games, but I can’t really narrow one of them down as an essential. There WILL be a Madden game that makes the list, but it won’t be until much later.

Anyways, Mutant League Football doesn’t have human participants, but rather, beasts and skeletons and the like. Characters you’d expect to see in a haunted house rather than a football field. And this game isn’t simply a reskin of Madden with weirder characters, as there’s a lot of gameplay differences too. There are different fields you can play on, for example, that have hazards. Each time has a limited supply of nasty tricks that can be used to give them a big advantage for one play, such as turning invisible or electrocuting the other team. You can bribe the ref and have him call bogus penalties on the other time for a while…until the other team inevitably kills him. And you can kill players on the other team too. It’s pretty wacky! I love creative sports games like this. It makes for a fun multiplayer experience.

There’s also another Mutant League sports game on the Genesis, as they made Mutant League Hockey a year later. I do own that one too, but it’s not going to make my list since it’s not quite as good, and frankly I stink at hockey games and don’t like the sport quite as much as football. It’s still a pretty cool game in my opinion, though. This game got a spiritual successor of sorts many many years down the road, but it’s gonna be a while before I get to that one.