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Formation Soccer: Human Cup '90
  PCESportsJ  
  opened by paleface at 04:45:40 04/19/04  
  last modified by paleface at 12:25:50 03/05/24  
  paleface [sys=PCE; cat=Sports; reg=JPN]
           
I made a bit of a mistake on this one. A preview showed a soccer game with cute semi-super-deformed sprites, bright colors, and lively air passing. I was sold. I got taken.
 
Now, this game might be fun multiplayer--you can have up to four players swinging away with cleats. Single-player, however, I have not enjoyed. Let's see why.
 
I suppose that I hate the player switching the most. Most soccer games will at least make an effort to switch your control to the guy closest to the ball. Formation Soccer... well, I'm not entirely sure what it's trying to do. It seems to like switching you to the guy way too far ahead of the pass, on offense, or the guy way too far behind the attacker, on defense. Couple this with the fact that your players have no real facility for passing to each other--they just boot in the eight-way direction input at the time you hit the button--and you've got some difficulty in moving the ball. And you don't really want to try passing down near the enemy goal, because your players will show an alarming tendency to suddenly disobey the direction input and pass it straight backwards. Go figure that.
 
And dribbling? Pfft. Not when you have no way to avoid a slide tackle. Even the computer has given up on dribbling and simply bobbles it downfield in a succession of on-the-fly lobs. You have to counter with the same technique, so the game becomes a contest of who has the most lobbers in a chain down the field. Somehow I tend to lose this contest against the computer, as I end up one fateful guy short of a lob chain to the goalie. In fact I've yet to score a goal in this game. With no difficulty setting, no options at all in fact, and only plain exhibition and cup modes, the game doesn't offer much in the way of play options to the daunted solo player--so I think I won't be playing this again until I find some sort of non-robot-lob-chaining human to play against.
 
Human (the game developer, now) does good sprites, and as mentioned the game looks good enough to fool the unwary, without any slowdown or flicker to be seen. Sound, on the other hand, resembles what you might pick up while submerged in a breathing bell underwater--and that's not a good thing for a soccer game.
 
  paleface 04:56:09 04/19/04
           
Your teammates never, ever try to take the ball away while on defense--a defensive stop, then, always comes down to either you or your goalie. Thanks to the goofy control switching (you can switch manually by pressing Start, but good luck getting it to switch to a useful player in time) you generally get left in the dust on defense, so time and time again it comes down to your goalie--so take a team with a good goalie, like Brazil. Do not take France; I don't know who played goal for them back in '90, but Human certainly had a low opinion of his abilities.
    
downloads:
· formation.jpg
· pause.jpg
· save.jpg
· teams.jpg

 
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