I won both tournaments - one with the teams from 1992 and one with the all-time teams (taken from 1978-91). I also watched the 25 or so minutes of videos of Bill Walsh's musings about football. I only played one player, but the game does support up to four players, and you can play up to 2-on-2, 1-on-3, or 4 vs. the CPU.
Because this doesn't have an NCAA license, all the schools are either the state or city they're located in, with the exception of the University of Southern California, which is named "S.C." -- this is because the University of California at Los Angeles is also in the game (both USC and UCLA are in Los Angeles, and UCLA is named "L.A."). There also aren't any player names, just their jersey numbers. It also only has 24 schools in each group (1992 schools and all-time schools), so there's a decent chance "your school" isn't here.
You can choose to play either an exhibition game or a tournament with the 1992 schools or the all-time schools. There is no season mode. The tournaments are 16-team single elimination tournaments, so 8 of the 24 schools are left out. You have the option of 20, 40, or 60-minute games. With the 20-minute game taking 40-60 minutes to play, I'm guessing you'd likely never choose anything other than 20-minute games. Maybe if you're playing against other humans, you might choose the longer games. From what I played, the scores in 20-minute games were all pretty representative of scores you'd see in actual football games. The only other option is from four weather conditions, and it's not limited by location, so you can play in the snow in Honolulu or Miami if you want.
The game itself is very easy. Of the 12 games I played, I lost 0 of them. I was losing by less than a TD at halftime of the very first game I played, getting used to it, but I had to do something and couldn't finish the game. The game does seem to be programmed to attempt to be a close game, as my QB would get picked off, or my defense would get called for pass interference, quite regularly late in the game if I had more than a one score lead. Even using Hawaii, which I think is one of the worst teams, I had little issues winning the tournament.
I don't know how common it was to have these options at the time (1993), but it does allow for calling audibles on both offense and defense, and you can run a no-huddle offense. While there are a few differences in the teams' playbooks, you can't create change the playbooks. You also can't substitute players and there are no injuries, which makes having player ratings for multiple QBs in the manual rather pointless, as the 2nd QB will never appear. It does have penalties, the only ones I encountered being offsides and defensive pass interference, and the manual states delay of game is possible, although I never encountered it.
While there is no coaching mode (where you would just call a play and let the CPU actually run the play), the CPU will fully control your team if you do nothing after snapping the ball. Same on defense, just choose the defensive formation and then don't push any buttons. The only thing you really need to control is kicks, although it seems to kick extra points well. If you do nothing on a kickoff, other than initiating the sequence, it'll kick an onside kick at the lowest power. It has a manual and automatic pass catching mode, but I couldn't tell the difference, as in manual mode, if you don't take control of the receiver after the QB throws the ball, the receiver will catch it, just like in auto mode. Plus, you can override the auto mode by taking control the receiver after the QB throws the ball. After every game, all the default settings (catch mode and the audibles) are reset, so it's pretty much pointless to change to manual catch mode.
If you have a half hour or so to kill, you can watch some 30-60 second long clips of Bill Walsh talking about various aspects of football. I guess with all that storage space on a compact disc, they had to fill it with something. The disc access times are actually pretty good for being a single-speed CD-ROM, so it's not a chore to watch them all. Unfortunately, the volume during the clips is low. One neat little thing that can happen during the tournaments is it'll show highlights of other games if they have a possible game winning play at the buzzer, showing the final play.
Being "from the designers of Madden Football", I'd imagine it plays much like the Maddens of the time. The only Madden I've ever played is '95 briefly many years ago, so I can't speak to this. On the plus side, they didn't go crazy with having all the storage capacity of CDs and try to add features like cutting to video clips for big plays or audio commentary during gameplay, like I've seen with other sports games of the time released on CD, causing obnoxious loading times and killing any flow to the game. Otherwise, it's just an average football game. I can't complain about what I paid for it.
