How to play Play Action Football on Mac

Game summary

Nintendo takes its game to the gridiron with NES Play Action Football. While Nintendo did not get the NFL license for this one, it did secure the license of the NFL Player's Association, so the 8 teams to choose from (all named after the appropriate NFL cities) are all stocked up with real pro players from the 1989 season. You can even substitute second-stringers for the "skill" positions (QB, RB, WR, TE, and FS/SS) when your starters get tired. Play perspective is very unusual: top-down slightly modified with a three-quarters tilt behind the offense, and the scrolling is diagonal, from the bottom left to upper right of the screen. Each team has 12 passing and 12 running plays on offense, and the option to reverse play designs effectively gives you a total of 48 potential plays to run. The defense has 8 cover plays and 8 blitzes to select from. The kicking and punting games are handled with a fairly typical directional arrow/power meter system. Games are divided into four 15-minute (accelerated real-time) quarters. There are no penalties, but referees do appear onscreen to signal touchdowns/field goals, take measurements on short yardage plays, and shout "First Down!" (in audio) whenever a team moves the chains. Team stats are displayed on a summary screen after every quarter of play. Highest scoring team wins, which in playoffs mode means moving on to the next round--and an eventual shot at winning it all in the Power Bowl!
First released: Jan 1991

Play Play Action Football on Mac with Parallels (virtualized)

The easiest way to play Play Action Football on a Mac is through Parallels, which allows you to virtualize a Windows machine on Macs. The setup is very easy and it works for Apple Silicon Macs as well as for older Intel-based Macs.

Parallels supports the latest version of DirectX and OpenGL, allowing you to play the latest PC games on any Mac. The latest version of DirectX is up to 20% faster.

Our favorite feature of Parallels Desktop is that when you turn off your virtual machine, all the unused disk space gets returned to your main OS, thus minimizing resource waste (which used to be a problem with virtualization).

Play Action Football installation steps for Mac

Step 1
Go to Parallels.com and download the latest version of the software.
Step 2
Follow the installation process and make sure you allow Parallels in your Mac’s security preferences (it will prompt you to do so).
Step 3
When prompted, download and install Windows 10. The download is around 5.7GB. Make sure you give it all the permissions that it asks for.
Step 4
Once Windows is done installing, you are ready to go. All that’s left to do is install Play Action Football like you would on any PC.
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