Soccer (NES)

It’s important to keep your expectations in check when playing a sports title for an old system. When I picked up Soccer for the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Soccer name being kept in all regions interestingly enough, I only really hoped for a few basic things. I expected the ball to be easy enough to move around the field, I hoped the passing would be fluid enough, and a shot on goal should have enough layers to it that neither the offense or defense is given too heavy of an advantage when one is attempted. It did not need to copy the deeper rules and strategies of the real sport, but unfortunately, this adaptation is sorely lacking even in the basics needed to even enjoy it as a quaint relic of its time.

 

Before we dive into the issues it’s important to lay out the fundamentals of the experience. Soccer for NES is played in single matches where the player can choose to have the halves nominally be 15, 30, or 45 minutes long, but the timer is actually much faster so a game with 15 minute halves will probably last closer to 10 minutes total. The game can be played against an AI-controlled team or against another human player and the soccer teams have different colors based on the team you’ve selected. The United States, Great Britain, Brazil, Spain, France, Japan, and Germany are your options and their uniforms are distinct enough that you shouldn’t ever mistake even the most similar for each other. Play will end once the timer is up and the player with the highest score will win, but if it is a tie the game does have an economical way of resolving things as both teams take five penalty kicks. The person who scores most during this will be declared the winner, but if it is a tie once again the game simply declares it a tie and kicks you back to the starting menu.

The game displays the soccer match with a horizontal view of the field, but since the entire pitch can’t fit on screen at once, it takes a rather weak approach to displaying it. If you are on one half of the field it can display from the goal all the way up to center field, which is a fine concept when the ball is currently heading towards a goal. However, at some point near the edge of the screen as you head towards the center you’ll get a half scroll where you view midfield, and then as you keep moving onward you can then finally have the screen scroll to view the entirety of the other half of the field. What makes this a difficult system to work with is that you can often be denied important information and pigeonholed into certain tactics. You’ll need to make the screen scroll to have a good view of the opposing goal and goaltender, so you must get fairly close for the screen to start moving over to show that part of the field. Trying to pass out of one half of the field into the other can be complicated if you haven’t hit the region where you trigger the scroll as well since you’ll be passing to an unseen teammate who may or may not be in a good area to receive it. The scores are displayed at the top right and left corners and move with the screen and usually they’re about the line where the ball needs to be so the screen will finally mosey over to reveal the area it’s entering. Sadly, this denial of important info isn’t even one of the worse problems with this old soccer title.

 

Soccer is a sport where the ball is moved across the field by light kicks, often a bit ahead of the player who is currently dribbling it. It is important for an athlete to be able to maintain speed while simultaneously kicking the ball forward so they can keep control of it and swiftly cross the field while doing so. However, in Soccer for NES, it can almost feel like you’re playing as kids who are only just learning the sport. When a player in Soccer approaches the ball to dribble, they nudge it forward a bit, coming to a brief but complete full stop for the act before they can start to shuffle forward to do the light kick again. Simply moving around the field is made slow by this with its brief but tangible stop and start rhythm, but a further issue arises in if you want to do anything but move the ball forward. If you want to kick the ball at a vertical or diagonal angle you need to be coming at the ball from that angle and the little extra set up to make sure you hit it right is easy for opposing players to exploit, especially with how easy it is for another athlete to practically stand on top of you and run with you while you posses the ball. Deviating slightly can lead to them wresting control away, so often just dribbling plainly towards the goal is your safest choice.

If you do want to consider passing though, there are some obstacles to this as well. Shuffling in place a little is how you change your target and this is usually safe enough if you choose your timing right, and while we have some lingering issues complicating things like players automatically defending too close to other players and the screen scrolling woes, we can also find the swapping to the pass recipient isn’t that fluid. Sometimes you gain control before you can even see your player so you might move them out of position, and while the ball does have a bit of a vertical flight to it to go over opposing players, the confusion of not being granted control when it is expected can mean you move just enough that the player guarding you gets the pass instead. Passing can be a bit of gamble and sometimes you might just need to put your faith in it instead of trying to do anything with the receiver until the ball has squarely landed in their control, but controlling players has some issues as well. By pressing a button when you don’t have the ball you can swap between players, this supposed to help you quickly reach the player closest to the ball but the game is a very poor judge of this. There are times where the ball flies over towards two players, one from each team, and both players are briefly stuck trying to actually swap to these athletes so they can try and grab the ball and continue play. This can be a problem too when you do want to defend against a pass and your player nearest to the receiver is on the game’s autopilot and will choose to stand and watch most of the time.

 

The game’s AI can be changed to different difficulty settings to make the game easier or harder and it can definitely be felt. Your game-controlled allies don’t seem to really scale and hence you get those issues where the AI defender can steal a pass but your players like to watch it land in front of them passively, but when you do start to go up difficulty levels goals become harder to achieve and the game handles steals and goal defense better. Steals can’t be faulted in this rickety game design at least, it often as simple as being the one to touch the ball with your foot first with perhaps a slight allowance for the dribbler to ensure that the optimal tactic of walking on top of another player won’t always lead to steals. Goalkeeping is a bit of a different story, not an abject failure but having some aspects that make it come up short as well. As you move around the field you also guide your goalie around their goal line.  They can go out a fair bit from the goal so you can intercept a player trying to come in close, but because your movements and your goalkeeper’s movements are tied to the same directional inputs, you might need to make the choice on whether you want to keep pestering the dribbler with the player on top of them or start focusing on your goalie’s movements. Usually, controlling the goalie is the smarter pick, since even though players can angle their kick towards the goal so it’s not a straight and predictable shot, the ball moves pretty slowly and you can usually position yourself or react reliably enough to block better with the goalie than attempting to steal while on your half of the field. The AI starts to scale up in goalie intelligence on higher difficulties to make for tighter games, but with so many issues in the basic design, having a functional approach to goal defense hardly salvages the experience, especially since it is also another area where the game’s limited controls lead to picking the simpler options rather than risking anything more complex. Jaunty background music and the same cheerleader halftime show every game certainly aren’t going to pull the experience out of the muck either.

THE VERDICT: Soccer on the NES didn’t have to go the extra mile, it only needed to be a simple adaptation for the sport within the boundaries of what the hardware could manage. Unfortunately, it can’t muster up that much, a small but meaningful fault found in almost all of the basic elements. Ball control is slowed down by the odd staggered ball kicking, switching your player can be a confusing affair as the game sometimes refuses to let you pick the player closest to the ball, and since player and goalie movement is controlled in tandem you often have to ditch the fielder once you get near the net. The screen scrolling is imperfect and leads to missing information that could have lead to deeper play if it was provided, and while a human opponent or tougher AI can lead to games where scores are hard-earned and the competition tight, this is a sports title that trips all the way through its simulation and you must tolerate quite a lot of quirks to be able to draw anything from the experience.

 

And so, I give Soccer for the Nintendo Entertainment System…

A TERRIBLE rating. A lot of ideas in Soccer aren’t outright broken so much as held together in a poor way. The stop-and-start forward dribbling is a nuisance that slows down play and allows for the boringly effective tactic of just running on top of the player in control of the ball until they either slip up and give up possession or attempt to make a move. Goaltending has an interesting risk baked into it that can lead to points being a bit easier to earn if someone doesn’t keep their goalie’s movements in mind, but the screen scrolling means by the time the goalie is in jeopardy you also get that screen drift to tell you it would be wise to shift focus to only blocking any incoming shots. Not being able to always switch to the player closest to the ball is an annoying programming quirk and one that can make attempting passes harder to justify than it already is, but even passes often work just often enough you can’t call the whole system completely broken. The semblance of soccer does mean it can have some rare interesting moments when the difficulty is appropriate but you’re getting blood from a stone there, the action surrounding it more often dull, stilted, or confounding.

 

So many of the fundamentals are ever so slightly skewed here and the pile-up of problems it causes lead to a game that, while not presenting some grand flaw to point at, still fails to bring the excitement you’d hope to find in a sports game. Soccer for NES isn’t just a dated sports game, it’s one that had issues even in its time, the attempts to hold things together too weak and thus the whole package is brought down by the myriad of drawbacks. If everything was just a little tidier it would shoot up to mediocre but acceptable design, but the rickety mechanics end up making Soccer a bit of a mess.