NES Game Reviews #13 – Soccer
Football or soccer didn’t exactly get the best representation on the NES. Probably the greatest early footy game, sensible soccer, didn’t even get a NES release, instead it got a poor SNES port but that’s more to do with Nintendo’s policies than Sensible Software.
Soccer was one of many ‘Black Box’ launch titles for the NES. These mainly consisted of short arcade ports of already existing Nintendo games, along with some original games including crackers like Super Mario Bros, Duck Hunt, Metroid, Zelda, Kid Icarus to name a few. It also included Soccer! Quite possibly the worst, (though there’s still a lot to come) football game on the system.
There really Isn’t a lot to say about this. It’s football, with half a team ie you have 5 players and a goalie. The game is insufferably slow, the AI is basically completely useless, you can pass and shoot, though its hard to decipher between the two. I think you can also change player off the ball but that might have been luck? What is unusual is that you have control of the goalkeeper also! Yeah, that’s fun isn’t it?
Mercifully for me there’s no competition mode to playthrough, just a single match to win. You can select the computers skill level which is laughable at any level, and the length of each half, 45 mins actually being an option ! The idea of 90mins of this sounds like a torture method. I opted for 5 min halves, the lowest option and selected my team, GBR, you know that famous Great Britain team. Maybe its the Olympics? Olympics or not, I’ve not seen a game of football where pom-pom clad cheerleaders run onto the pitch for a half-time performance.
Anyway…
I beat Spain 2-0.
Next!
