Bill Parcells Football Camp Review

When it comes to games bearing the names and likenesses of any sort of celebrity personalities, it's rare to discover any notable influence by the celebrities in the games beyond the licensed use of their names and faces. Bill Parcells Football Camp is not an exception to this trend. It's abundantly clear that the Tuna's only interaction with this half-baked collection of football-themed minigames was to smile blankly as he was handed a check for the use of his likeness. There's very little football here to speak of, and what is here just isn't interesting for long.

Could this game be some sort of karmic retribution for Bill's leaving the Patriots the way he did? It sure seems that way.

Imagine if someone were to take the minicamp mode from EA's Madden NFL franchise, strip out about three-quarters of the minicamp games, dumb down the remaining games to the point of tedium, and then pack them onto a mobile phone. That's Bill Parcells Football Camp. Only three minigames are included. The first is a basic running game, where you start on the one-yard line and have to hurdle and dodge past a number of would-be tacklers. The second is a kicking game, where you try to make field goals--and make them as accurately as possible. The third is a passing game, where you try to hit one of nine different pop-up targets, each assigned to one of the number buttons on the phone's keypad. Each game continues for 60 seconds, at which point your score is added into your overall score for the day.

All three games are sort of pancaked into a day's worth of training camp. Each game's day has a point threshold that you must reach; otherwise you're "cut" from the team. This goes on and on until either you get to the end or you wash out. Also, as each day passes, the difficulty increases ever so slightly, as does the point minimum you must reach for the day.

Of course, even with these difficulty increases, Football Camp is far from a challenging game. The hardest of the three games is the passing game, since after day two, the targets start moving and become a bit more difficult to hit. However, the other two games are almost stupidly easy. The field goal game is just a simple three-button-press game, where you have to set meters for strength, angle, and height for your kick by timing your button presses accordingly. Even at the fastest speeds, it's quite simple to make nearly all your field goals. As for the running game, all you really need to do to achieve mastery is watch carefully for oncoming tacklers, dodging and jumping as necessary.

Run, turn, hurdle, repeat. Nope, definitely not very fun.

At the very least, Bill Parcells Football Camp does look nice on Series 60 phones. The menu screens are all crisp and clear looking, and on the field, the action is smoothly animated and features some decent player models. We probably could do without Bill Parcells' dour-looking face popping up after every game telling us how we did, however. There's really no audio in the game save for a jingle that plays each time you do something really good, and though it's a little grating, it's better than nothing at all.

Football Camp does also feature a practice mode, pass-and-play multiplayer, and an online component so you can upload your high scores to a nationwide leaderboard, but even with those additions, there's just not much to the game. Maybe with a couple of additional minigames, Football Camp would be worth extended play; even if the three games already featured were more interesting, that would be a start. When it comes right down to it, Bill Parcells Football Camp is just another perfunctory game with a popular name slapped on it to try to sell some downloads.