NES

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.

Besides being based on the same movie, the two games couldn’t possibly be more different. Activision’s offering had all the charm and aesthetic you’d expect from what was essentially a cobbled together collection of mini-games, none of which were particularly fun to play, all of which felt particularly phoned in. It was also a difficult game to beat. Hal Lab’s entry is the polar opposite. Perhaps not crafted with quite the love of their later Kirby game, but nonetheless created with a seemingly effortless expertise that instantly shines a proton beam at Activision’s lacklustre failure.

After MANY attempts, I still couldn’t make it past the first level. With only 3 lives it just didn’t seem possible! The manual eluded to there being continues though I couldn’t find one and with Google results being anything from misleading to completely wrong, I was fighting a losing battle to find it. Eventually, I find if you shoot either the word ‘game’ or ‘over’ you can continue from the beginning of the stage. You get one chance at this, miss and your back to the start of the game! Its Adventure Island all over again! What is wrong with these developers? As if the game isn’t already hard enough. Inevitably you’re going to mess up the continue at some point (4 times for me), its a cruel, final middle finger to the player.

Remember Bucky O’Hare, the fearless green rabbit and his band of intergalactic do gooders? No? Well neither do I to be honest bar the theme song for some reason. It was a short lived cartoon in the 90s. I do remember buying a figure off the show as a present for a party of a primary school friend. He cried when I gave it to him. It’s okay though, I didn’t like him much anyway!

o a degree my assumptions were correct. However I was pleasantly surprised to learn that many of my criticisms were significantly improved over the more technically superior Super Nintendo version. The control of Asterix is far less slippy, and the hit box is tighter. Asterix still only has a punch and no projectiles for his attack, which while staying true to the source material, makes for a more delicate approach to attack than I would have preferred. However that too is improved over the SNES version, meaning you don’t need to be as careful when attacking as you need to be in 16 bit.

Well it’s a crime that we didn’t get anymore of these games because this is a masterpiece. If you like an old school puzzler, I highly recommend this game. Ten levels, five stages to each (so fifty levels really), each demanding slightly more brainpower to finish. Whilst you’ll need to utilize techniques you’ve already learnt throughout your journey in more challenging environments, you’ll also need to constantly learn new ones as you go.

Armed with a Walt Disney mallet you take Bugs through a seemingly endless sea of cookie cutter stages, most of which could be finished blindfolded. The bosses are much the same deal. While it’s great to see all the classic characters such as Daffy, Tweety, Porkie Pig etc the ease at which you disperse them is laughable, clearly this was aimed at a younger audience!

The initial challenge of any classic Megaman, is knowing the optimal order to play the stages in, with each boss defeated, you gain a new weapon, these new additions can help to defeat future bosses more easily, hence the desire to know the best order. Since playground gossip was no longer an available source of intel for me, I resorted to the web. Knowing the optimal order to play certainly helps, but it doesn’t render the game easy by an means.