[A-Z Games] S: Sensible World Of Soccer

Were there football games before Sensible Soccer?

Yes, there were - before Sensible Soccer, there was Kick Off 2 [video] and all other football games. Football games of the time were simple affairs - a far cry from the games that are so popular now with (in the case of later Pro Evo games) twelve separate buttons in use along with both control sticks. Each game then was a simple case of getting the ball to your best player who would, hopefully be able to sprint away and get a shot off and then we would rinse and repeat (Interesting how things repeat themselves, isn't it? This is a regular complaint I have with some modern football games.). In many ways, this was a great approximation of football before football got good - before the Scots got involved.

Kick Off 2 (I genuinely have no recollection of Kick Off) was different as the ball was not tethered to the players but was a separate entity - you effectively ran behind the ball and nudged it forward whenever you touched it. You were never running in control of the ball - you touched and ran after it. When you were near enough the ball again, you could either shoot or hold the button down to trap the ball under your feet and stop running to change direction. While the ball was trapped, you could then pass the ball to a team mate too. This use of "physics" was absolutely amazing for the time and meant that user skill counted for more as it was not just a case of a stats battle. Kick Off 2 was untouchable.

Even Sensible Soccer did not touch Kick Off 2, it just blew it away and made it redundant in one swoop.

Sensible Software were quite well known for being a pretty idiosyncratic software house that had made Wizball and Mega-Lo-Mania and they had no track record in sports games. They took the sprites and aesthetic from Mega-Lo-Mania and applied it to a comprehensive reworking of the Kick-Off template. Comprehensive enough to be unrelated if you were not there at the time. Now the sprites in Mega-Lo-mania were tiny things, with barely any animation frames, and so the graphics were not as detailed as other games - in fact this was counter to the prevailing winds of making sprites bigger and bigger as technical showcases. Instead, we had small sprites giving a zoomed out pitch and a tactical view on it all. A tactical view meant that passing was now a feasible option and running with the ball was more considered as you could see where you were going! Passing? In football? What merry hell was this?

The Commodore Amiga was, along with the Atari ST, the 16-bit home computer of choice in the early 90s and both used, as standard, joysticks with only one button. One 8-way stick, one digital button. This compares with, for the PS3 at the moment, two analogue sticks and twelve analogue buttons. This meant that you had to tap the button for pass and hold it down for shooting: one button, two functions^[1]. This was not quite as revelatory as being the first game to do it, but it meant that you could pass without stopping. In fact, you couldn't stop with the ball. This made all games relatively quick as the ball was in constant motion^[2].

Like Kick Off 2 before it, the ball was separate from the player but there was a little bit of adhesion so you could change direction for a few milliseconds when you received the ball (better players had longer adhesion). It may have been possible to time your direction changes to run with the ball but I never saw it and I never could. The passing was relatively accurate and was not stuck on an 8-way track so you could pass at all angles and that tiny adhesion meant you could change the angle of your pass a little from the way you were facing. But, and this always held, you could not turn around so if you were facing the wrong way defensively you had to play your way out (or hoof it out of course)^[3].

So, tapping it opened the game up but you could not really beat the keeper with a pass, for that you had to hold the button down a little longer to "shoot" the ball. Shooting would kick the ball straight in front of you and then we were back to an 8 direction world so in came the variety of "aftertouch". Aftertouch, which was a way of curling the ball by changing the direction on your joystick after the shot, was not unique to Sensible Soccer and was in a few games before and after it. Microprose Soccer had banana shots with outrageous curl, such that they could curl in, and then back out of, the goal, and Striker had the ability to curl it twice in a shot. In Sensible Soccer, however, it was weighted with greatness you could centre the stick to get a bit more height, pull it back for a lob and curl it left or right. The "shots" were also used to flight crosses into the box too and the cross followed by a diving header (all headers were diving in Sensible land) was always a joyous goal.

So the gameplay was superb, the graphics were remarkably full of character so what else was there? The final piece of the puzzle, and seen as so important to football games now (and basically the only reason anybody bought FIFA Soccer for decades, surely?) was the use of likenesses. Kick Off and its ilk had a few teams that were similar to some existing teams but not really. Sensible Soccer had teams that were the teams in real life (There were about 64 club teams and 32 international teams) and had the appropriate players (and each team had three star players with better abilities). There was a team editor so you could change/update them yourself and change the kits (though I do not think you could edit the stats). As the pitch view was so zoomed out and there was no way of seeing more detail, this was a great way of having likenesses. You could only change the skin colour and the hair colour - everything else was the same but the effect on the immersion was huge. The national teams were updated and the players were in the right positions and stuff. These are little things now but a huge step forward at the time. On top of the real teams, there were also "Custom teams" where you could just make any kind of team you wanted with defaults such as Speling Mistaiks and Serious Illnesses^[4]. I mean all of the team names and colours were editable but it was fun to just have a whole section of them.

And so, at a time when football was not as dominant in the world as it is now, and was seen as a little unfashionable, at a time when English teams did not play in Europe and we were not exposed to football from beyond the UK at all, here was a game that exposed me to teams and players around the world - and this has stood me in good stead (conversationally) at a lot of times. Before globalisation, there was Sensible Soccer.

The later sequel, Sensible World Of Soccer, took the original (which was updated a few times with tweaks to the 92/93 and International versions which were probably better again) and turbocharged it by adding in a full world of football - and it was not lying. Thousands of teams and tens of thousands of players all playing full seasons with promotion, relegation and trophies throughout a twenty year career was phenomenal. There were some tweaks to the dribbling and passing models in order to improve the game and it did so with greater variation in player abilities and a new aftertouch model on the passing to enable passes around the corner. It was a football education and a great game.

The simplicity of the 2D graphics could not last onto the PlayStation era and gamers wanted greater complexity which arrived in the form of the major console franchises from Konami and EA. EA used their might to buy up licences for teams and leagues around the world in order to keep the money coming in and eventually started to try and compete on gameplay too (starting from about 2008). Sensible Soccer may not have been a particularly accurate approximation of the beautiful game, but it was the beautiful game.

3 other S titles that might be interesting:
Super Mario World - Nintendo knew how to launch the Super era.
Street Fighter 2 - 6 buttons to vary power seemed overkill – it wasn't. A legend was born.
Sonic 2 - I think the point when Sonic went hyperspeed with worldwide release on Sonic 2sday.

^{1. More recently, the Neo Geo Pocket Color versions of the SNK fighting games let you have hard and soft attacks in a similar way - it feels quite instinctive but it does not offer the control of discrete buttons.↩}

<sup>2. The Premiership and English football, generally, was quite unsophisticated at this time and the lack of European football had partially contributed to a more parochial vision of the game. It was seen as more exciting though.↩
3. I think this has had a big effect on my enjoyment of football and how I watch it, which has stayed with me throughout my lifetime. I have preferred passing build up to speed and power for as long as I can remember and the joy of a well crafted pass out of defence always raises my spirits. Goals are overrated.↩
4. I used the list of serious illnesses for a school homework once in Science/Biology.↩</sup>