Developed/Published by: Tose / Jaleco
Released: 23/12/1988
Completed: 22/06/2026
SCompletion: Won the “Championship” (it’s obviously the World Cup, there’s a picture of the World Cup at the end) with Italy Scotland (look, they play in blue, ok?)

After the terrible experience of Match Day’s bare-bones port and antique play, I was definitely looking for something better to play to get my arcadey footy fix–but of course, the siren call of more retro beckoned. Steam, surprisingly, has a sort of burgeoning collection of retro games, I think because there are a lot of companies throwing games up in the hope they’ll make a buck or two. I learned my lesson well enough with Match Day to not bother with Microprose Soccer, even though I’d genuinely like to play that predecessor to Sensible Soccer–the version on Steam apparently doesn’t include the proper C64 game and doesn’t work on Steam Deck anyway.

However, I spotted Jaleco Sports: Goal! and it looked like it had a little more oomph to it, including two versions of Goal!, CRT filters, saving and rewind, and manuals. What I’d consider the bare minimum–but after Match Day, a welcome sight.

It’s not even exactly the bare minimum. I appreciate that Sickhead Games/Rock It Games made sure to include all the different regional versions of Goal!–so you can, if you wish, play the original Moero! Pro Soccer version, or the PAL version (for some reason)¹. And that even includes all the different manuals. Pretty good!

I suppose it’s hard to ask for more from a re-release of an late-80s footy game, because what are you really going to dredge up that’s that illuminating? So at best, you’ve got to hope that by 1988 we’ve reached “football as a video game” rather than “we tried to represent football as best we could ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”

After Match Day, or I suppose more contextually, Soccer, Goal! for NES feels like a huge step up in that it’s much more accurately representing the sport–full differentiated teams, tournaments, and all the rules including offside (although I never saw this play out… actually come to think of it I never even saw a foul given, but the manual does say they’re there!)

You can also feel it trying to be a video game. It’s trying to do what you want a video game version of a sport to do: create something that gives you the same feeling of the experience without being a slavish recreation. In Goal! You can feel the flow of a football game and those big moments: When you scored the goal needed to win the game with a header off a keeper deflection. When you had to desperately defend against an opponent that just keeps knocking on your door in the dying minutes of the game. All of those sorts of things.

It’s a shame that Goal!.. is not very good. Credited to Tose, I genuinely think they set out to make a good football game–and I think they did nearly succeed. But there are a lot of baffling decisions.

First up: that viewing angle. It’s not… what is that angle? It’s not isometric projection. I think it’s an attempt at military projection? But there’s something so off about it. It feels like you’re a giant with a crick in his neck, and it doesn’t even look like the players are drawn correctly for the angle anyway. Why did they do this? It’s not a viewpoint football is ever seen by (perhaps in the modern era by a failing drone, I don’t know.) Old footy matches were often shown at a bit more of an angle, but this is just ridiculous.

It’s what probably causes one of the most major issues with Goal!. It’s bloody impossible to line up your shots correctly. Blessedly the game has a pass and a shoot button (though the I feel layout is backwards) but by putting everything at an angle, and the cross of a d-pad famously not at an angle, it’s a nightmare. It doesn’t even feel like you can really line up your shot with the angle of the pitch! 

But there are plenty of other glaring errors. The AI is atrocious. As much as you can still weave a story in your matches, the story sometimes features beats like “when the midfielder that wasn’t under your control suddenly stopped chasing the ball to run in the opposite direction.” I said jumpers for goalposts when talking about Match Day, but a lot of the time Goal! looks like children playing: literally everyone on the pitch just chasing the one person with the ball. And despite already having a low framerate with jerky players, when things like that happen the game’s speed craters. It’s Double Dragon level, though arguably worse because Goal! (thanks to the stupid angle) requires such precision. 

The bad framerate is especially damaging because it makes Goal! so unresponsive. The game features a sliding tackle, but it literally took me several games to successfully pull off, even though the command is just “push a direction and press the tackle button.” It just doesn’t let you do it nine times out of ten. And if you’re trying to switch players to get closer to the opponent with the ball? Good luck. The game seems to have absolutely no system in place for selecting the closest player–you’ll often find it selecting someone miles away. Just for fun, I guess.

It’s not all bad, though. Goal! Does have one of the best things in a football game: aftertouch. After shooting, you can hold B and push a direction to bend your shot, and it’s one of the things you’ll need to do to beat the keepers, who are weirdly close to perfect if you get them on screen head on but useless if you try and bend it in around them before you even see them (another side effect of the weird angle is how close you have to get to even see the goals.) 

Maybe it’s just that the game chugs along, is unresponsive, and awkward–you really do have to have a death grip on your controller to try and hit those angles–but scoring goals does feel really satisfying, so that’s nice. There’s a real dopamine hit that keeps you playing longer than you probably should.

And, honestly, I bet at the time it did keep a lot of footy-loving NES owners playing. Goal! Got some terrible reviews–39% in TOTAL!–and while it’s not exactly that I’d say they’re wrong (it’s not good) with so few footy games on the NES I understand why you’d make do when playing this–somehow I did just keep playing it until I won the World Cup. It was probably better in multiplayer, too, with both players struggling with the controls and tackling–I don’t know if the championship mode gets more difficult as you go, but it can be pretty frustrating playing against the better teams who are able to tackle at will.

In an attempt to offer value for money, there’s a weird extra mode in Goal! too. The “shoot competition.” This is a mode where you’re trying to quickly score a goal from a set piece against a couple of defenders, but… it’s got completely different graphics and plays differently.

Why would Tose do this? It’s not even very good. It’s easy, over quickly (score five times, you’re done) and doesn’t reward you with anything. I wonder if this was what the game was originally supposed to be, and when it turned out the graphics wouldn’t fit into memory with two full teams, they just jammed it in as a wee extra.

The weirdest thing about it is that you can play as one of three “stars”: Hansen, Roko or Juarez.

Hansen?

As in… Alan Hansen???

He was a defender!

And Scotland isn’t even properly in this game. Which, by the way, immediately halves the scores I don’t give out. Meaning I’d be rating this more harshly than TOTAL did. So they’re lucky I don’t.

Will I ever play it again? No, but as I said above: I would understand why people would. This is so nearly there, just let down by weird decisions and technical limitations/ineptitude.

Final Thought: Another odd decision: in adapting Moero! Pro Soccer as Goal!, I guess Jaleco felt they had to try and attract the US market, and so Goal! even in its European release has a Championship mode (World Cup, international teams) and a “Tournament” mode, but the tournament mode features American teams², like literally anyone would care. It’s a shame as well because only the tournament mode features the “proper” knockouts of the World Cup, with the Championship mode instead featuring a strange double group stage. Really not sure what they were thinking with that. Anyway. Alan Hansen!!!

1. Sorry, I’ve let the side down here and didn’t actually boot this version up to see if it’s any different. The main way it should be different is it should be slower, at 50hz, and I imagine they didn’t go that far. Also, why would you want to play that! ↩︎
2. Something I like about this: Tose obviously didn’t have the memory to fit in stats for more teams (or couldn’t be arsed to make them up) and so they just made the American teams rebadged versions of international teams, and the manual happily admits this. ↩︎