| | Pretty much this same game came out in the States, I just got the import because it was super cheap and I'd been optimistically hoping for a decent football game on DC. Well... I don't think this is it.
However, anything I am going to say about this game is no doubt prejudiced by my supreme inability to score a goal. I scored two in about a dozen matches and both were flukes. You can't ever seem to score with a shot on goal, no matter how great a breakaway you get. All the computer's goals come from centering it to a man waiting right in front of the goal, and my men didn't seem inclined to be able to center it there or to stand there and wait for a pass.
Two things don't help the sense of being in control: first, your guys' responses seem to be delayed by a second or so. I can't count the sickening number of times that I tried to come back to make a defensive play, only to find that my guy stole the ball on his own, THEN moved back, and now I had to get him headed the right way downfield. Same thing happens with kick inputs.
Second, when they're off the ball they act like complete morons. The thing they're fondest of doing when you're on defense is to come blitzing across the screen at the ball carrier at about fifty miles per hour, whooshing right past him and not stopping until he's already ten feet upfield from them. Yeah, that's good defense there guys. The screen view is fixed from the side and very narrow, so very frequently you're watching the opposition dribble downfield and wondering "where's my defender" and then you see this brightly-colored blur shoot past going the wrong way and you say "oh, there he went." And don't go for a steal because 50% of the time, perhaps due to the delayed input reactions, they result in a penalty kick against you.
On the positive side, the graphics are very nice, and fast, and the announcer doesn't get in the way too much.
Oh yeah, the other thing I find mindboggling is that when you shoot, it just shoots in the eight-way direction you're holding the stick at the time--not necessarily toward the goal. So any kind of approach shot that is not immediately in front of the goal is pretty much impossible to aim. That's just super brilliant.
I prefer sports games where your players appear to know what they're doing, like Virtua Tennis--or at least where they respond to whatever you do, no matter how dumb, as in NeoGeo Cup '98. This game, on the other hand, seems designed to take whatever sort of manual coordination you might have, and turn it against you. |
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