(S23) - PT 5 - A New Leaf

[GoonerBear]

Until it happens, the number one thing I am always going to harp on is a new sim engine suitable for what the ISFL brings. As it stands, I have had several long-standing beefs about how Draft Day Pro Sports Football 2016 handles football logic. What is going out of bounds? What are timeouts? What is a two-minute drill? What is a Hail Mary? What is not running the ball up the gosh-darned middle every single time with goal-to-go?

And the number one thing which still ticks me off to this day is how the sim determines your player's field position. The ball carrier is marked down at the point where the rightmost pixel on the dot is. This is consistent for both teams. This very much favors the home team since they always go left-to-right and the away team always goes right-to-left. It appears as though the home team has barely done anything and gains at least a yard or two. The away team does the same thing, and they lose yards. Having home-field advantage is one thing, but that makes it feel pretty blatant.

While I was going back through old indices for an article, I recalled one particularly dubious call as well. It was the S13 Ultimus, between OCO and COL. Down 3, with 1:10 to go, COL kicks it deep instead of attempting an onside kick. A real football coach who did that would have been executed in the streets, never mind fired. And the heaps of run plays called when a team should be all-in on the pass in desperation mode. Those will never cease to infuriate me.

I am totally okay with playing the game and losing. Even losing a lot if that's just how the team's rolling that year. DDPSF16 makes it feel a lot like robbery, a black box which forces certain outcomes enough times that I would hope there's been an ongoing search for a sim with the game of football as we understand it in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty.