What if year after year EA revolutionized Madden? What if
its look were tailored and playbook expanded? What if it added more stat
tracking and exploited the NFL license to its full potential? And what if it
were free?
That's the elevator pitch for QUICKHIT NLF Football, the
free-to-play browser-based football game that in its second year seems
paradoxically closer and further away from Madden, the biggest (and hitherto
only) football video game around.
If you're a football fan, you may be familiar with Quick
Hit. In its first year, a modest user base took interest without what casual
Madden fans might call the essentials. By order of importance: controllable
players, 3D graphics and most damningly the NFL license were all absent.
An exhibition game at that time meant The Bulldogs versus
The Tarantulas on a 2D gridiron in a menu-operated match that played like
Dungeons and Dragons.
Before shock takes you, know this year Quick Hit strikes
back with a 3D graphics option (running on the fantastic Unity, familiar to
Blurst fans) and the NFL license (just teams, no players, with an option to rename
rosters NCAA style).
Quick Hit's sticking with the menu system and after a
healthy amount of time with the update, the choice seems smart and measured, considering
not simply how we play games, but where. After all, where we play Quick Hit is
very different than where we play Madden.
Quick Hit is a browser game, a genre essentially made up
with the exception of time wasters. They
are enjoyed socially, often at work. Thus there exist a few requirements for a
browser game to be a mainstream success:
A successful browser game must be droppable, which is to say
if the boss strolls in, one can conceal the game behind an inbox without fear
of returning five minutes later to a Game Over screen.
A successful browser game must be low-impact, both on your
work computers CPU and your mental CPU. Your computer must be able to run the
browser game while feeding RAM to Firefox, AIM, Outlook, Excel, Photoshop and
whatever YouTube video's on theDailyWh.at; your brain must be able to play the
browser game while juggling spreadsheets, data reports, the attention of that
cute girl across the office and a cup of coffee, which by the end of this
paragraph is probably at room temperature.
A successful browser game must be mouse-centric. I suspect
casual gamers like PC games that play like working on a PC. Solitaire is just
moving around windows. Minesweeper, clicking boxes. A menu system is familiar
to non-gamers, making it the most accessible.
Quick Hit meets these requirements, building on them a
football game with role-playing, team building and fantasy managing components.
It's a success at what it does. The real trick: will it find its audience?
Quick Hit, with the paint job and NFL license, is much more
like Madden, because it looks more like real football, attractive to a much
broader and needed user base. But with improved stastical analysis, playmaking
and radial menus for selecting special attributes (think spells (see, told you
it's like D&D)), it is a bold and unique venture. That could be the hook
for user retension.
Quick Hit may even be more mainstream. Easy to control, easy
to understand, easy to play at work without fear of getting caught and now
with real NFL teams, its what Fantasy Football fans have been waiting for.
Experience browser football for yourself at Quick Hit Football.
