Developed by: Intelligent Systems, Published by: Nintendo
Introduction & Bias:
I just want to make a little side note before I get into the review properly. I am more than 1% finished with my whole project! It's only taken me about a month to get this far so at this rate I'll be finished in a little more than 8 more years. One game at a time...
I'm also changing up the format of the review so that the first review section is First Impressions & Presentation while the second part is Experience & Conveyance. I think this will make the sections more focused so I don't have to promise explanations between one section and the other.
With that in mind.
Soccer!
I use exclamation points to mask my feigned excitement just like I did with "Golf!". Soccer is not my sport of choice so I don't get to go on a nostalgic flashback to pad out this section like I did with Baseball. Nor do I like soccer that much. In my opinion soccer is a little too chaotic. It seems that players spend a ton of time per game transporting and losing control of a ball across a gigantic field for an interminable amount of time. Between those opinions and the low scores of most games I am feeling that I want something more out of the sport. I know that soccer is the world's most popular sport by some estimations but I never claimed to have much in common with most of the world, now have I?
So this is part four of five in my Sports Pentalogy. Out of the first three titles that I have reviewed I have only given one an average rating. Notably this is the only one of the three that has a title that is not just the name of the sport. Now we have Soccer; another sports name title straight out of the Atari era. My bias against the sport of soccer kept me away from trying out the NES game so I have not played it one bit. I have played little bits of different soccer games and I know how the sport is actually played so my expectations are to play an OK game of soccer here but my hopes are not high for a great NES game.
First Impressions & Presentation:
My first image of Soccer is an animated soccer sign with a full background music theme. Color me surprised! The music does a good job at getting me to want to push that start button and the title card which looks like it is made with sports stadium lighting is actually pretty entertaining, too. Not a bad job, Nintendo!
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| Pictured: Lights and sounds! Now how about some action? |
I waited for demonstrations again and I was rewarded with a couple of mute displays of soccer. The demonstrations show a few basics of the sport such as the objective of scoring goals and an example of the opposite team getting to throw the ball back into play if the ball goes out of bound. I did notice that when the scoring demonstration team got their goal the opponent's goalie was practically taking a nap in the far corner of the net. This left it completely open for the attacker to get an easy goal. This is not a hopeful omen.
After I selected my lonely 1 Player option I got to a second menu where I could select my team, my opponent's difficulty level, and the length of each game half. The color palette on this screen is very bright and the contrast between the pink of the menu headers and the green of the soccer background is not enough. I think that the developers should have picked some other color for the menu to make it stand out. The different teams appear to be different countries in a World Cup type setting which is kind of neat and it prevents Nintendo from needing to license any actual soccer teams.
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| Not Pictured: Me squinting to select my options. |
I selected the good ol' USA, the easiest difficulty, and the shortest game mode and went on my way. The beginning of the game has a very brief ceremony of the five-player teams setting up their positions before I got to kick off and take the first ball possession of the game. I started running to the goal and the the ball dribbling felt OK. The ball is immediately kicked out in front of the controlling player and I quickly found out that the A button kicked the ball at the goal. My first kick landed just a couple of feet in front of the gormless goalie so I ran right up to the ball and kicked it right past him for a quick, early goal. Not bad. It was also funny to see the players run back to their positions in celebration while flapping their low-resolution arms like seal flippers.
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| Pictured: "Arf! Arf! Arf!" |
I was also happy that there is music playing the whole time during the game. It's a variation on the title theme music and it's not a bad little piece. The issue with the music is that it loops a little too often over the course of an entire game and there are no music options. The player just gets the one piece instead of getting something that represents the player's choice of team. Oh, well. The graphics are plain but they do their job just fine. The teams are easy to tell apart, the ball is always visible, the field and the playing lines are clear, and, hey, we even get some of those famous soccer cheerleaders at halftime.
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| Pictured: "Shake it, baby!" Not Pictured: My confusion over the presence of cheerleaders |
My initial thrill of the game however became weighed down by several problems with its controls and the information I received while playing.
Experience & Conveyance:
Oh, boy. This game is pretty clunky. For starters, handling the ball does not feel the greatest. The players move fluidly but the ball takes this weird rhythm of being dribbled in front of the player and then stopped while the player catches up. Each time the player catches up to the ball the soccer player can turn in any one of 8 directions. My instinct is to continuously drive at the goal but I get mobbed by other players that way. I would constantly get bumped by an opposing player and lose control of the ball. On the other hand I felt like it was harder to wrest control of the ball away from the computers in similar circumstances. Part of the problem with this was that it was not apparent when I was in control of the ball.
The player controls one of the soccer players at any given time. That soccer player gets a little "1" icon above their head. That works well in some instances like when the player has possession and is only trying to score. Problems start to come up when the player is fighting to control the ball. The black and white "1" icon does not change colors at any point. It would be useful if it changed color when the player controls the ball or does not. The camera does not change priority to one side of the field depending on which team is in control, either. This means that I found myself dribbling the ball toward the opponent's goal on occasion because I thought the other team had control of the ball. The only notification that the player gets to let them know they are in possession is that a second player on the friendly team also gets the same "1" icon. This means the ball can be passed to that second player and more problems come up in that situation.
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| Not pictured: Me speculating that the reason the soccer players have flippers for arms is because they aren't allowed to use them for soccer |
Passing the pall is another clumsy process. The player pushes the B button to pass the ball to another friendly player. When the ball is passed the player's control immediately switches to the receiving fielder. If the player doesn't let go of the D pad while the pass is in the air the receiving fielder will continue running in the direction of the button that is held and that direction is away from the ball. There were several times where I would pass the ball and wonder why it ended up in a barren spot on the field. Since passes and shots move so slowly the receiving fielder could be a good quarter-field length away by the time the ball catches up to them.
The last big issue with the controls is defending. When the opponent's team approaches the player's goal the player begins to control their fielding player and the goalie at the same time. This leads to awkward situations where the player is trying to get a fielder to take control of the ball while running up, only to leave the goal wide open because the goalie is all the way at the top of their legal playing zone.
All of these niggling issues put a larger learning curve on the video game than I would have liked and caused me more trouble playing the game than should have been necessary. You might think that because I am putting so much emphasis on the clumsiness of the controls that I did not have much success playing the game. That is not true. I ended up playing several rounds of soccer over the course of my hour and I won most of the games. I won at difficulty 3 by the end of my play time and I never felt like I had to resort to cheap tactics to get those victories.
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| Pictured: My success in spite of obstacles |
Verdict & Score:
Soccer does not really turn me on in real life or on the NES so far. I have the feeling that the slow, plodding gameplay and screen scrolling is a limitation of the console. I know there must be a couple more soccer games in the NES library and I wonder if they will offer a better experience. Soccer the video game also suffers from compromises it needs to make with its controller. It is trying to boil a real life experience down to a video game level instead of trying to make a video game that takes advantage of what the platform offers and that really makes the game suffer. The presentation does take the edge off of the roughness of the game and there is enough gameplay to try and master to make the hour mostly worthwhile.
With these mixed factors all put together I rate Soccer a 4/10. It doesn't have the randomness problems of Baseball but it also is not a very quick or polished game which leaves the whole experience a little flat.
Factoids & Trivia:
There is not a lot of trivia to be had about Soccer. Out of all the games I have reviewed so far this is the first that was released for both the Famicom and the NES in the same year so the trademark on the title card reads 1985 only. In spite of the game not being developed by Nintendo, Koji Kondo was still tapped to compose the music for Soccer. Considering there is only the one piece and a couple of variations on it for the halftime show and victory themes I suspect he was not needed for very long. Maybe he was too busy being such a boss. Who knows?
The game was developed by Intelligent Systems and this is not the first time they have come up so let's dig a little deeper into them this time around.
Intelligent Systems was started as an in-house production unit of Nintendo. Tohru Narihiro was brought on to help port games from the Famicom to other systems like the NES. Before spinning off into their own company Intelligent Systems was responsible for developing Tennis and Wild Gunman for the Famicom. Even though they formed their own company they developed games exclusively for Nintendo. Their major contributions include the Fire Emblem, the Wars series including Advanced Wars, and Paper Mario. I'm going to chalk up their earlier efforts to the simpler days of the NES. Clearly, their best work is ahead of them.
With all that out of the way I am going to wrap up this sports block with the last traditional sports game of the original 17: Tennis! The exclamation point still masks my lack of real excitement.
With all that out of the way I am going to wrap up this sports block with the last traditional sports game of the original 17: Tennis! The exclamation point still masks my lack of real excitement.
Sources:
NES box art:
Intelligent Systems wiki:
Soccer wiki sources:
Sample Soccer gameplay:
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