A year after Tecmo revealed they were working on a new Tecmo Bowl game, they've finally decided to give us some details. Tecmo Bowl: Kickoff is be coming to Nintendo DS this fall after the series' seventeen year hiatus. Good timing - the player roster from the last installment is starting to get a little out-of-date.

Kickoff won't be able to use real teams or players because of EA Sports' exclusive agreement with the NFL. The press release from Tecmo mentions you'll have 32 different teams to choose from, though - the same amount that are in the NFL - so I imagine they'll be thinly veiled replicas (e.g. the Green Bay Packers will be the Wisconsin Meat Packaging Guys). Tecmo is compensating for the lack of realism by adding a wide amount of customization. You'll be able to choose each team's colors, logo, playbook and hometown, so if you wanted to recreate the current NFL teams on your own, no one's gonna stop you (nerd).

To shake things up a bit, players will also be able to use special abilities throughout the game. There's no specifics on that yet but I assume they're what you'd expect - speed boosts, big stiff-arms, juicing your busted knee up with cortisone, etc. And yes, the game will support multiplayer over local wireless or internet via Nintendo Wi-Fi. The game's only a few months away so I'm sure we'll be hearing more soon.

Oh, and on a side note, I'm hoping this game ends up being awesome, just so it sets off a retro football video game war and causes Electronic Arts to make a new Mutant League Football game.