Superior Soccer

I've been dreading this day. I knew it would come. The day when I felt compelled to write about a complete turkey of a game for my beloved BBC Micro. I'm sorry my darling but after so many years the truth needs out. I just hope you can forgive me.

In 1988 Microprose Soccer had been released on various formats (C64, Spectrum, Amiga, Atari ST and PC) but not on the BBC which by now was nearing the very end of its life and in the process of being replaced by Acorn's 32-bit range of Archimedes machines. The game featured a large pitch and detailed sprites displayed from an overhead view. The gameplay was fast paced and had a real football feel to it for the time. Superior Soccer was clearly heavily influenced by this game featuring the same viewpoint and large sprites. To begin to see where it all went wrong for Superior Soccer take a look at the screen shots of goal mouth action in the two games below

Though it pains me lets accept the fact that the C64 had superior (pun not intended) graphics capabilities to the BBC Micro and on that basis excuse the blockier less colourful sprites of Superior Soccer and move on from that and tackle more fundamental problems. Firstly the viewing area. Compared to Microprose Soccer Superior Soccers viewing area is absolutely tiny. In fact compared to something very small its still absolutely tiny. And its not the only thing thats small: the pitch is also very small. Imagine playing a game of 11-a-side football on a indoor 5-a-side football court and that will give you a good idea of just how small the pitch is. The viewing area is an inconvenience but the small pitch becomes a really problem for the gameplay as its impossible to take more than a step or two without bumping into one of your own players or one of the oppositions.

There are other gameplay problems too. There is no control over how hard you kick the ball and when in flight the ball moves no faster than your players can run making passing both inprecise and utterly redundant. So instead of playing football what you find yourself doing when on the ball is kicking it and then running underneath it onto the ball. Eventually the opposition will get the ball off you and then you use one of your nearest players to tackle and repeat the process above. Alternatively it was possible to slide tackle the ball from one end of the pitch to the other - once a player had started the sliding tackle manouver and got the ball if you hold down the tackle key then he will keep onto the ball and keep sliding. Thanks to these flaws games rapidly descend into a war of attrition with you gaining ground through bludgeoning rather than clever play of any kind at all.

In addition to its action elements Superior Soccer also featured a management game - in fact you could play the game in arcade mode, management mode, or the complete game whiched mixed both elements together. Its features were limited to picking and buying and selling players. This did add a bit of variety to the game but it too had problems. Inexplicably the menus in the game were controlled using a mouse style cursor controlled by the keyboard. It was fairly fast and accurate but why a simpler menu system was not chosen is strange at best.

Gameplay Video I feel somewhat cruel picking on this game. Its author Peter Scott wrote a number of fine games for the BBC including the excellent conversion of Sim City that he somehow squeezed into 32k. But in the case of Superior Soccer I can't help but feel that the game required more from the machine than was possible. Perhaps if it had been released as a BBC Master only title then improvements could have been made but as it stands this game really is a stinker: it wasn't very good when it was released and it has aged terribly.

I've lauded Microprose Soccer in this review but just a year after its release the Kick Off game was launched and that really did turn football games on there head and outdated Microprose Soccer overnight but that story is for the future.