Developed/Published by: Intelligent Systems / Nintendo
Released: 2/2/1985
Completed: 12/07/2022
Completion: Beat four levels of difficulty while fighting off boredom as “GBR” which because they’re the team in blue I decided were actually Scotland. Take that, “Federal Republic of Germany”!
Version Played: Switch Online
Trophies / Achievements: n/a
Well, I’ve suffered through Tennis, and Baseball, and all these other frankly pretty rancid early NES games from Nintendo, so how bad can Soccer be? I mean, I like football, so at least I can accurately judg–[starts projectile vomiting]
It’s… it’s bad, guys. It’s bad. Something that has struck me about Nintendo’s NES sports games is how perfunctory they are. There’s no charm, no spark, and no sense that anyone involved is trying to make a fun video game as much as tick off the box that says “the Famicom has a [name of sport] game”. And apart from some slightly nicer graphics, you’re really not feeling a massive jump from pre-crash video gaming here.
Soccer, for example, is as bare-bones as you get, offering the ability to play friendlies against a variety of (identical) six-a-side teams with a five point difficulty setting. Six-a-side is disappointing (but not particularly unusual in this era) but what’s really the problem here is that the game is so slowww. Actually… not just slow, horribly disjointed? You see, Soccer has the (I guess) noble aims to simulate the experience of actually dribbling a ball, with players kicking the ball each time they move, but rather than fluid movement it’s more like the way toddlers play football–they run to the ball, stop moving, kick the ball, and so on. This makes everything not just slow, but feel unresponsive, as you really can’t do anything unless you’re at the right point in an animation, making it all feel a bit random.
Of course, as with all of the other sports games for NES, my mistake ultimately is to be playing this against the AI, which here might be more horrible than anything we’ve seen before. The opposing team and your teammates seem to have no intelligence on any level of difficulty (the small pitch doesn’t give them much to do, to be fair) and raising difficulty just means that if you put it on the highest level instead of scoring every time the opposing goalie will make a beeline for you when you get close to the goal and take the ball off you (there’s really no lateral movement when you’re dribbling in this game it’s so slow and unresponsive.)
I sort of can’t imagine this was especially enjoyed by people playing it in multiplayer though.
Will I ever play it again? No.
Final Thought: I was mildly interested if I’ve been unnecessarily unfair with judging this with modern eyes considering this is from 1985, and in my head I was like “this is bloody worse than a Spectrum game.” Well, if I’m going to be completely fair… the Spectrum did honestly had better (and deeper) footy games! with Jon Ritman’s first Match Day (released in 1984) is at least as good as this, never mind Match Day II or the likes of Microprose Soccer (Sensible Soccer’s predecessor) showing up a few years later in ‘88.
My suspicion, actually, is that Nintendo’s Soccer is essentially a clone of International Soccer, released for the Commodore 64 in 1983, but as usual I have no way to verify that because… how would I. I have no idea if Nintendo designers had even seen a Commodore 64 at the time. But there’s more than enough similarity between these… and somehow Nintendo’s version still comes off worse!
