Jerry Rice & Nitus' Dog Football

*Jerry Rice & Nitus' Dog Football* is the twenty-second episode of Just Bad Games. It was released on October 9, 2020.

## Transcript

**Pink Money Ghost**: What are you in for?

**Green Money Ghost**: A game about dogs playing football.

**Money Ghosts**: F\*\*k.

**Pink Money Ghost**: How does a game like that even exist?

**Blue Money Ghost**: What god would let that happen?

**Green Money Ghost**: Gather round, fellow monetary apparitions, and let me regale you with the harrowing tale of-

**Adam**: *Jerry Rice & Nitus' Dog Football*. A game by Judobaby about dogs- that play football.

**Shane**: Released in 2011 for the Wii and PC, *Dog Football* is the very first title in the Pet Sports League franchise.

**Adam**: Pet Sports League?

**Shane**: Yep! Developer Judobaby created the Pet Sports League line to bring the love of pets, excitement of sports, and family-friendly celebrities together into one games package.

**Adam**: Hot dog! We can finally pitch our Anthony Hopkins tortoise chess boxing RTS.

**TTS Voice**: Tortoise boxer ready.

*(Anthony Hopkins appears as Hannibal Lecter)*

**Shane**: That might be a hard sell. In the nine years since *Dog Football* was released, Judobaby hasn't expanded the PSL to any other sports outside the football genre.

**Adam**: Uh, please, tell me more about American football.

**Shane**: Uh, did we mention Jerry Rice's dog is also in this game? His name is Nitus.

**Adam**: Look, truthfully, the two of us- we know next to nothing about form of football.

**Shane**: The one thing we're both sure of is that dogs don't play it on a professional level.

**Adam**: We think.

**Shane**: Probably?

**Adam**: Okay, so we don't know that either, but we're always willing to learn new things.

**Shane**: That's right. And no better time than the present. Let's bat the puck out of the sand zone and four-point a 1080 McFlurry into the tennis hole with-

**Adam**: Good gosh, we don't know sports.

**Shane**: Let's play *Jerry Rice & Nitus' Dog Football*.

**Adam**: If you were expecting a simple, good old-fashioned football game with a puppy twist, than you were sorely mistaken.

**Shane**: Again, we're no experts on competitive athletics, but this looks less like an official sport and more like something you'd play in international waters.

**Adam**: We've got a lot of questions, but maybe the man himself, Jerry Rice, can clear things up for us.

**Jerry Rice**: Hello, this is Jerry Rice, and my dog, Leonidas.

*(Scene replayed shows Nitus' bark was edited in)*

We're here to talk about our video game, *Jerry Rice & Nitus' Dog Football*. I am so proud of our proud team at Judobaby for their high-quality football that they have put into this game, and for creating a fun experience for the whole family and their pets.

**Adam**: A fun experience for families AND their pets? My sea monkeys are totally jazzed.

**Shane**: That's an old glass of water you left out.

**Jerry Rice**: Now if that didn't bring some smiles and tail wagging, then let me show you a few tricks in the game that can only come prom pros like Nitus and me.

*(Gameplay edited over Jerry Rice talking)*

Grab this game as quick as you can. We'll be looking for you.

**Shane**: That wasn't much help, but thanks anyway, Jerry. We'll take it from here.

**Adam**: Speaking as two people with zero football knowledge, dog football is definitely a football game.

**Shane**: You've got a team that is trying to take something that symbolically resembles a football and bring it to the opposite side of a space that vaguely resembles a football field, while an opposing team tries to thwart their advance.

**Adam**: But like we warned you earlier, this is not your pappy's football game. We're gonna reveal all the surprises that Jerry and Nitus have in store, but we have one important feature to discuss first: this game was developed for the Wii, right?

**Shane**: Yeah.

**Adam**: So, this whole game is controlled with-

**Shane**: Don't say it!

**Adam**: Motion controls!

**Shane**: A-ha! But we were smart. We dumped the Wii version in the trash can, switched over to the Steam release on PC, so that we could avoid motion controls.

**Adam**: Oh-ho-ho, but how naïve we were. Look, here's the Wii version playing on a real Wii, and here's the PC version. Notice the difference?

**Shane**: I don't- I don't see a difference.

**Adam**: There isn't one! The PC version of the game IS the Wii version!

**Shane**: No! No, that's not true! That's impossible!

**Adam**: Play the game, you know it to be true. The on-screen keyboard you type on with a mouse doesn't respond to your actual typing on your real keyboard. The whole game is controlled with the mouse cursor replicating the Wii's on-screen pointer. Game files installed with the PC version are associated with Wii hardware like the infrared sensor and pointer for the Wii sensor bar. The game is locked to the 4:3 aspect ratio of the console version, with no resolution or graphics options. I mean, just look at the Steam icon. It's literally the Wii box art with the word "Wii" removed.

**Shane**: Shock! Huffing in air. \*gasp\*

**Adam**: You fool! Don't you see? You just bought the same game twice!

*(The green Money Ghost farts and expands)*

**Green Money Ghost**: Pardon me.

**Shane**: So what we have here is a Wii game that's been poorly optimized for the PC, with badly-translated Wii controls baked in.

**Adam**: But, we digress. Let's talk about what actual gameplay is like. When you go to start a match or season in dog football, you get to select your own quarterback avatar from a stable of characters, most of which have nothing to do with dogs or football.

**Shane**: You've got your alien, your grizzled biker, your horrifying clown, your half-Scottish half-Irish fellow who only talks about Scottish things and wears an Irish flag on his face- which is not confusing at all, oh, and about a half-dozen other super generic choices.

**Adam**: And then you got your team of dogs.

**Shane**: Look, we could go on about the slew of different breeds and stats here, but we know what you really wanna see from *Jerry Rice & Nitus' Dog Football*:

**Shane and Adam**: Doggy fashion!

**Shane**: Right. Once you've got a team selected, you take to the field, and uh- oh. Okay. Again, don't know much about football, but aren't we supposed to be playing on some kind of rectangle?

**Adam**: Yeah, you'd think, but there are no rectangles here. At least, not in regular play. These stages have warps and turns, making the spaces a literal crash course in doggy football.

**Shane**: Every time you enter a map, you have to consider things like hills, large puddles or ponds, and anything like that messing up your plays. And then, you've got other things, like obstacles that can be climbed, tunneled, or jumped over.

**Adam**: None of these obstacles are easy to get around or interact with. Remember, this is just the Wii version of the game running on PC, with the Wii's motion controls half-heartedly layered onto your mouse movement.

**Shane**: And that's it! We don't have options to adjust the controls or change them to physical buttons to properly and precisely move our doggy players around at all.

**Adam**: Nope! It's all operated with a pointing mechanic that laughs in the face of accuracy. You need to make use of a strange blue floating bone cursor that the dogs follow.

**Shane**: We don't know if this game is supposed to feel like these dogs are poorly trained, but they often completely ignore everything the bone cursor is suggesting.

**Adam**: For example, you can point directly at an object you want a dog to leap over, and the pup will bash snout-first right into it. And then your play's over. Awesome.

**Shane**: This control implementation has dogs struggling just to walk up to a free ball sitting on the field. How is it this difficult?

**Adam**: And then, of course, you're expected to pull off defensive moves too, like tackling a dog on the opposing team. The dogs simply won't go where you want or do what you want them to do regardless of how directly you point your stupid blue bone at the obvious.

**Shane**: I can't believe we paid money for this game.

**Green Money Ghost**: Twice!

**Blue Money Ghost**: (inner monologue) No matter how many time we've warned them, it doesn't matter. They keep buying these terrible f\*\*king games! The madness must end. How can we get these two dum-dums to stop buying them? (spoken) I got it! (inner monologue) I'll cross over to the land of the living, find them, and end the cycle of suffering. (spoken) Squadala!

*(The ghost disappears and reappears as a plushie in the real world)*

I did it! I crossed over! Now to find those two morons and get them to stop making these terrible purchas-

*(The ghost is kicked into the sky and disappears in a flash)*

**Shane**: Really, there's no reason they couldn't get this gameplay to work in 2011. There are plenty of arcade and fantasy-style football games that have reasonable controls and fun twists on traditional play, all of which came out way before the Wii. We're talking games like *Tecmo Bowl*, *Mutant League Football*, or *NFL Blitz*.

**Adam**: In those games, controls were intuitive and reasonably precise, and it wasn't a crapshoot as to how the field would be shaped.

**Shane**: Yeah. The levels in *Dog Football* are just one crazy obstacle course after another. But believe it or not, after hours of playing and research, we did find a real-looking football stage. It was hidden with a cheat code.

**Adam**: And through a cruel twist of fate, the level is so bland-looking that you'll likely never wanna play it. Even if you take away the weird field designs and obstacles, you're still left with controls that will make you beg to play the most mediocre, bargain bin, Game Pak-controlled sports game you can find.

**Shane**: But let's say you do find some magical, peanut butter-less way to get the dogs to do what you want in a match. They way you win a doggy football game is, well, kind of stupid.

**Adam**: You see, the central mechanic that decides who wins or loses a match isn't getting the ball into the endzone. No no no. In doggy football, it's all about the ARF points system.

**Shane**: What are ARF points, you might ask? Here's how they work.

**Adam**: Like we mentioned earlier, while playing a stage, your dogs can leap or use objects. When a dog successfully traverses a path with obstacles, their team gets ARF points. These points change depending on the difficulty of the objects in their path.

**Shane**: Basically, you can get a whole whackload of points just by running around the football field.

**Adam**: The game also has a currency-driven dog treats system. One of the available treats allows a team to double ARF points earned, meaning that if you play strategically, you can get multiple dozens of ARF points in a single run, putting your score way over your opponent's.

**Shane**: Unfortunately, your opponents have the same ARF point opportunities, and because each stage is so random, one side of the field might have different objects to interact with compared to the other, so you might not be able to earn enough ARF points simply because you happen to be on the crappier side of the stage.

**Adam**: Oh, and by the way, collected ARF points are not actually added to your score until after you make a goal. From there, you'll need to run or kick the football again to actually earn the ARF points you previously collected, Sound dumb? It is.

**Shane**: Basically, what you're getting here is less a football experience and more of a doggy obstacle course game with style points awarded to pups that jump over, crawl under, and interact with things.

**Green Money Ghost**: Seriously guys, it's unbelievable! The game gets so many things wrong about football. Here! Let me show ya!

Raccoon on field in play! Get him outta here!

*(The character runs into a fence chasing the raccoon away)*

How are the dogs more competent than you?

Is that pee-pee?

Foreign object on field. Get a real football in play!

That's not a football.

Neither is that!

Or that!

Or that! Look! The game is called *Dog Football*! You need a f\*\*king football to play football! What is wrong with you people?

**Shane**: I can't stress how strange of a mix *Jerry Rice & Nitus' Dog Football* is. And from what we've deduced from an interview with CBSNews.com, this was all initially Jerry Rice's idea. He wanted to creat a dog football game with his real dog and best friend, Nitus.

**Jerry Rice**: Leonidas is my- you know, he's my best friend. So you know, we look after each other that way.

**Shane**: Isn't that sweet? We can only assume Judobaby jumped on board later. And while we could find plenty of information about Jerry Rice, we weren't exactly familiar with Judobaby.

**Adam**: When we looked for answers into the dev team and what other games Judobaby possibly had in the pipeline, we fell down a staircase of mystery and horror as we were slammed with chunk after chunk of head-scratching media.

**Shane**: Like this ad, which seems to be saying that playing *Dog Football* is only slightly more appealing than picking up feces. This is true.

**Adam**: Or this ad, that looks like it was built using a random word generator.

**Shane**: I think someone at Judobaby had their grandmama head the marketing campaign.

**Adam**: As confounding as these promo pieces were, we were ill-prepared for what we found next.

**Shane**: Through various postings, we discovered that Judobaby was actually in the midst of prepping a brand-new game.

**Adam**: One that would be funded by investors.

**Shane**: And in fact, the opportunity to invest in said project was being advertised directly on the store page for the Steam release of *Jerry Rice & Nitus' Dog Football*.

**Adam**: It seems really bizarre that the Steam page would feature actual posts trying to convince people to invest in their next title, but hey. After the touchdown that *Dog Football* was, maybe their next game would expand upon what they were creating.

**Shane**: What was this new vision? What possible new experience could Judobaby take in expanding their Pets Sports League brand?

**Shane and Adam**: *Dino Dogs Football VR*.

**Blue Money Ghost**: You gotta be f\*\*king kidding me.

**Adam**: Because we don't want regular dogs playing a screwy version of a beloved pastime with sideshow quarterbacks, we want it all in virtual reality. Ah, and with a terrible dino chimaera twist.

**Shane**: That's right. Dinosaur-dog hybrids, complete with gross, tiny doggy paws.

**Adam**: If you ever wondered what would happen if a T-rex mounted a rottweiler, this game is for you!

**Shane**: This team has invested far more time, energy and money into the concept of a game originally released on Wii than any other company we're aware of.

**Adam**: So much so, that they're willing to double down on dog sports in a semi-sequel utilizing the very popular and extremely lucrative VR industry. Uh-

**Shane**: This sounds absurd. All of this. Real star athletes connected to digital dog sports games that continue to evolve in technology and evolve in biology. People sat in a room and envisioned dinosaurs that looked vaguely like dogs and convinced others to invest over $12,000 into that dream. That takes skill.

**Adam**: Maybe in the future, dog football will become a widely-celebrated genre, with Judobaby sat at the head of the table as its original creator and innovator. But for their first attempt, the only thing we can say about *Jerry Rice & Nitus' Dog Football* is-

*(The blue Money Ghost lands after being kicked)*

**Blue Money Ghost**: **IT'S JUST BAD.**