Developed/Published by: Human Entertainment / Nintendo
Released: 13/12/1991
Completed: n/a
Completion: Won a few matches in exhibition and then tournament, but didn’t keep going for reasons I’ll explain.
There’s an international football tournament on, which means that, as usual, I want to play a football game so I can imagine that Scottish people could ever be good at football. As I didn’t have anything particular to play in mind I took a look for what was immediately accessible and fell upon Super Soccer, the SNES’s first footy game, and one which has some nostalgia for me.
An unusual sort of nostalgia, really, because I won’t ever have played it at the time. I mostly remember this as being one of the early hyped titles of the system in the UK. It wasn’t a launch title–I believe that the system launched with Super Mario World as the pack in and just F-Zero and Super Tennis on offer—but had to have come out pretty sharpish (Wikipedia actually lists it as releasing on the same day in the UK as the system, which feels wrong to me). Using mode 7 to create a 3D effect at a time when the most “3D” a football game would have felt was the three-quarters side-on view seen first in Atari’s Basketball (and when most people would consider top-down titles like Kick Off superior anyway) it really looked like a huge step up to me at the time, and I remember pouring over the screenshots in TOTAL! (my Nintendo magazine of choice) with this image sticking out in my mind, featuring the TOTAL! writers cartoony personas:
Even at the time though, I remember thinking… wasn’t the game going to be much harder if you’re running towards the screen?
Yes, Super Soccer has the exact problem that a small child in the early 90s could foresee, and a few others too. But let’s not get too negative too quickly, because in its way, Super Soccer plays a decent game of football. Er… sort of. You’ve got the ability to target a pass (and change who you target), do a low pass/shot, and a high shot when you’ve got the ball. When you don’t, you can do the traditional sliding tackle, but also the more unusual “shoulder barge” to knock your opponent away from the ball. This is generally considered by players a bit of a liberty that Super Soccer is taking with the rules of association football, but I have to say it functionally doesn’t work any different from non-sliding tackles you generally get in other games, except that the punishment is a bit reversed. In most games, sliding tackles are the dangerous ones, likely to end up in a yellow or a red card, here your shoulder barge does seem to be implied to be more of a rugby tackle and you can easily end up with a red immediately off them, which generally seems to come if you do it from behind (but it might also be totally random–I ended up with a game with 4 players being sent off, so I can’t really be sure.) There’s a bit of risk/reward, let’s say.
Once you get used to the controls–and if you’re playing in the direction where you can see the goal–this is… fine! The most major issue really is that there’s no indication of which player you’re actually controlling, so in particular the targeted pass seems basically useless because it’s got that thing where you pass, but you’re moving in a direction, so the guy you’re passing to you switch to control and they… run away from the ball. In general though the ball sticks to your player so you can rely on careful low passes and dodging around to try and keep possession, and when defending just hope for the best. Goals aren’t effortless, but really only because it’s hard to get into position for them; if you can basically line yourself up just inside the goal posts on either side you’ll almost certainly score, which makes them a bit underwhelming. Or impossible, if you’re running towards the screen, because the goal doesn’t even come on screen until you’re practically running the ball into the keeper’s hands.
This would be a perfectly fine knock-around footy game–and I bet it was for anyone who had two controllers and at least one mate–but for the fact that it’s so bare-bones. The first huge problem, of course, is that you can’t play Scotland in it, which immediately docks it half the score it would get if I gave out scores. You could, like… play Italy or something and just pretend they’re Scotland, I guess. The second problem is that the tournament mode is just a slog through every team in the game from the worst to the best–not really a tournament at all.
I was sad to not be offered a group stage and knockout rounds, but it’s something I could live with bar one other aspect of the tournament mode: You’re locked to 5 minute halves, and the game stops the clock regularly (you know, unlike actual football) meaning that the average tournament game you’ll play will take upwards of 15 minutes. I looked up a longplay on YouTube and the poor guy had to play over three and a half hours!
It’s a bit strange considering exhibition mode lets you choose halves of 1 to 99(!) minutes long, and I suppose the question that might be raised in people’s minds might be “well, if the game is good, does it matter how long the halves are?”
It’s weird, right? It feels like it shouldn’t, but pacing is everything. Football is all about that hunger for a goal or that desperate defence, and without a sensible time limit in either direction tedium starts to set in. The time limit in a football game is like the health bar of a boss. It doesn’t matter if it’s fun to dodge their attacks or wail on them; the longer it takes, the worse it feels, even if you’re just going to do the same thing to the next enemy.
(It’s worth noting that the official greatest game of all time, Sensible Soccer, limits halves to 90 seconds.)
It’s made worse here really by the fact that half the time you’re playing facing the screen, meaning you generally get 5 minutes to try and score enough that the next five you’re just clinging on trying to defend. It’s like the game was designed to feature the kind of boring fucking football that ruins international tournaments. “Score one lads, then settle in.”
All that said with 90 second halves I’d probably have played this through. There’s a very funny wee twist at the end where the ref steals the trophy and forces you to play the ultimate Nintendo team to truly become world champions, but it’s hardly worth getting there for it as it is.
Will I ever play it again? I did save my mid-tournament playthough but this is one best left in memory.
Final Thought: There are some interesting… well, mildly interesting changes between the original “Super Formation Soccer” release from Human in Japan and the global release from Nintendo, including slightly changing the player sprites which barely feels worth the effort, but there must have been some reason???
