The state of football games

[Beagle 2]

Sociable Soccer is out tomorrow on PC. It's been around for a while on mobile, I think I've even played it at some point but it blends in with all the other attempts at arcade footy games. Nevertheless, I'll probably pick this up due to blind optimism and play it for about 12 minutes.

EA Sports Football United Sports Team Club AFC Albion is fine, it's as fine as it's been for the last fifteen years or something. Bells and whistles added every year but the same core experience, the same annoyances. I can't play it on my Steam Deck. Cheers.

And... that's it! I can't think of any decent alternatives at all in terms of pure football sims, arcade or otherwise. The best I can think of are Rocket League (in truth, the best recreation of what it's like to participate in a football match, but not wholly accurate), Football Manager (not playing that ever again) and New Star Soccer (brilliant, limited, fixed).

Is there anything I'm not considering? Why should this be? I feel like it shouldn't be an expensive thing to get right and make a billion. Yes people care a lot about official licenses but people care a lot about daft arcade games and they like football. Sort it out, boffins.

Any from the archives worth going back to? I still rate International Superstar Soccer 98 as the best of the best. Dribbling past the entire team with Ba based on their flawless "wacky hair = best players" system.

[Norton Canes]

As someone whose experience of football games is limited to various incarnations of FIFA from the 90's and early 2000's, has there been a sim where you play by mechanics other than moving a selected player around? I always thought there might be some mileage in a different method where you try to move the ball itself around and the players follow it.

Mad huh.

[Beagle 2]

Super Monkey Ball, but Erling Haaland is chasing you around? I'd play it.

[bgmnts]

Is a bit gutting that there's so little out there except the suicide inducing monopoly of those evil cunts EA.

Would have to assume their dominance and PES's decline makes a developer think it's a bit pointless.


Would love just a really good football game that plays really smooth and has a well developed career or story mode. Fuck licenses or anything like that just focus on making it fun to play. There is so much scope for a football RPG or something.

[The Culture Bunker]

I think the last "proper" football game I played was the PES (or whatever it's called now) that weirdly had Scott McTominay as one of the cover stars. It was fine, and worth the £10 I paid for it on PS Store sale.

There was also a more unusual spin on the genre, I think it was called "Football: Tactics and Glory" (it had Lothar Matthäus on the cover, so I assume it was German) - worked on the idea that you had so many "moves" per turn, and every dribble, pass or shot succeeded depending on the player's stats against the defender/goalie and an element of a "dice throw". It was interesting enough for a bit.

[seepage]

Football, Tactics & Glory is currently 90% off at £1.94 on Steam, there's a demo too

EA have announced the turn-based EA Sports FC Tactical for mobile, if they port it to PC

American football, but the original turn-based Blood Bowl from 1995 for PC is fun, and is abandonware 

[Gurke and Hare]

You could try Behold the Kickmen, a football game written by someone with no interest in or knowledge of football.

[mikeyg27]

I was thinking the other day about how the early 3D era was a Wild West for football games: FIFA, ISS, Actua Soccer, Sega Worldwide Soccer, (Michael Owen's) World League Soccer, Libero Grande (the game where you play as one player on a team only). I'm probably missing some too. It's probably meaningful in some way that the two that had staying power were the two that had a 16-bit / 2D presence previously, but I don't know if that's because the developers knew what they were doing better or because they had in-built fanbases.

[oggyraiding]

I played the 2002 World Cup tie in game on Gamecube a lot. It was fine.

Played a trial of EA FC 24, found it totally charmless.

Inazuma Eleven series is good if you want your football to be full of dumb anime shit and exploration.

[twosclues]

I remember enjoying This Is Football 2002 where you could get your players to dive for a foul, and you mostly looked ridiculous and Peter Drury destroyed you on commentary, but every once in a while you timed it just right and got a free kick and the opposition got booked (to Drury's outrage). Could also do two footed tackles.

[copa]

I reckon this was when football games peaked (Actua Soccer 2):

[The Culture Bunker]

Football, Tactics & Glory is currently 90% off at £1.94 on Steam, there's a demo too

Worth a punt at that price, if the idea of a turn-based football-meets-XCOM type affair appeals. I remember my main frustration was the limited amount of "moves" you had per go, which made it hard to really put together moves. But I'm tempted to give it another try.

[Elderly Sumo Prophecy]

The only football game I really enjoyed was Kick Off 2 on the Amiga. Technically you were playing a sort of football game of pinball, but there was a knack to it where you could get some amazing runs of play going on by just flicking the ball upfield and hoping for the best. I used to get mates over and give them the shit joystick whilst I got the godly Zipstick and hammer them with score lines like 18-10 during a 40 minute match, even better if you picked I. Ball as the ref, who'd red card everyone for a foul, so you'd end up with about six men on the pitch by the end.

I bet if I tried to play it now I'd be absolutely shit at it.

[Beagle 2]

I hated Kick off 2, purely because I was dog mess at it. It probably stands up if you can manage to master it. 

There was a point where Dino Dini and Steve Screech were minor celebrities, I guess they had managed to do the seemingly impossible in creating a halfway decent football game. I'm going to give Goal! a bash later, see if I'm any better at that. Originally titled "Dino Dini's Soccer", because Dino Dini was more of a selling point than football. Pre Taylor Report Britain, sneaking my copy of Dino Dini's Soccer upstairs but covering up the word "soccer", pretending it was porn.

I will definitely pick up Football, Tactics and Glory, thanks for the heads up.

[Blinder Data]

this one was surprisingly good

[Elderly Sumo Prophecy]

CLASS ON GRASS

[Memorex MP3]

How did those Player Manager games work? Presumably if you just got good at the playing side the management stuff was borderline irrelevant, or could you only control the one player?

[Gurke and Hare]

How did those Player Manager games work? Presumably if you just got good at the playing side the management stuff was borderline irrelevant, or could you only control the one player?

In the original Player Manager on the Amiga (which was essentially a management game with with Kick Off as the match engine) there was the option to just control one player, yes. It also had an advanced tactics editor for the time, so even if you were controlling all the players then the management side was still relevant for that.

[Utter Shit]

How did those Player Manager games work? Presumably if you just got good at the playing side the management stuff was borderline irrelevant, or could you only control the one player?

A game that I've mentioned a few times before, Player Manager, was exactly as you described:

There was a decent management game on PS1 (I have a feeling it was Player Manager as Shoulders mentioned above) which suffered from the inclusion of a laughably basic and easy player mode. So easy that you could literally just pick up the ball and walk past every opposition player before rounding the keeper and walking it in. I remember the manager side being reasonably detailed for its time, but any time you were losing you could just choose to play the game yourself and score as many goals as you wanted.

[kngen]

EA's latest not-Fifa-anymore Fifa seems to have evolved into a pay-to-win cashgrab too far, according to the Fifa subreddit. I mean, folk on there have always been moaning about how shit each new iteration of Fifa is since Ultimate Team started, but now it really does seems nigh-on impossible to craft a decent side unless you keep forking out for more packs, something I refuse to do.

I'm still playing Fifa 23 with all the top-rated players that they pretty much gift you at the end of the cycle to salt the earth for the most competitive players and force them onto the new version. It's nice - no FOMO on cards with ridiculous objectives or valuations, and a significant drop in the amount of players acting like dickheads, using meta tactics and scoring the same goal over and over again.

I did get a Beta trial of EAFC24, and it played like treacle, so I'm quite happy to stick with this one until the servers get switched off.

[The Culture Bunker]

Just remembered another slight variant on the theme I played maybe a year ago on PS4 - 'Captain Tsubasa: Rise of New Champions'.

My good lady saw it in Game when I was browsing once - the Japanese cartoon it's based on was one of the few non-domestic kids' shows they had in Iran in the 90s, and she was a big fan so I picked it up. It's sort of a mix of old school arcade action and RPG elements. There's a couple of story modes that introduce characters from show, where you have to basically win each game to progress. It has some wonderfully over-the-top animations where a player can jump 10 foot in the air to execute and overhead kick, or give it the Hot-Shot Hamish special and wallop a shot so hard the keeper winds up in the back of the net with the ball. Best story is where you create your own avatar, choose your school and work on making the Japan squad for the World Youth Cup, where you get to play alongside the titular character.

Worth a look if it's going cheap.

[Joe Oakes]

I miss the days of lax licensing restrictions, when you'd get games with wonderful titles like Peter Shilton's Handball Maradona!

It was a shit game where you can only play as the goalkeeper, and had nothing to do with handballs or Maradona. They paid Shilton a few quid to promote it, but I assume Maradona got nothing. Well, except for the World Cup and buckets of cocaine.

Surprised they didn't continue to use this genius legal loophole and cash-in with a series of cheaply licensed games:

Peter Shilton's Handball Madonna!
Peter Shilton's Gloved Michael Jackson!
Peter Shilton's Police Academy's Steve Guttenberg!

I'll stop now.

[thehungerartist]

For PC players, there is fan-made fork of eFootball PES 2021 called Football Life.

It's offline only but does have Master League. Realistic faces and stadiums are optional but it's all about the gameplay.

This thread brings it home how we truly didn't know how good we had it. :(

[Wentworth Smith]

Football games peaked with Sensible World of Soccer on the Amiga, preferably with  Zipstick Super Pro joystick. All downhill ever since.

[Yussef Dent]

For PC players, there is fan-made fork of eFootball PES 2021 called Football Life.

It's offline only but does have Master League. Realistic faces and stadiums are optional but it's all about the gameplay.

This thread brings it home how we truly didn't know how good we had it. :(

I find myself going back to PES 2021 Master League, it's got nowhere near the depth of FIFA's career mode but it's a good challenge if you go with the default players, although I only keep the right back and the attacking midfielder (the players have the same stats but have different names and physical characteristics depending on what continent you play in), there's a second striker who is the best player but doesn't fit into my system so I sell him and use the money on wages for good free agents. The whole team spirit aspect of it gets criticised but I quite like the difficulty curve and actually seeing your players get used to your tactics over time, so if you go for overlapping full backs, early on they'll be a bit tentative to go forward, and not time their runs right, but eventually get better at it.

[El Unicornio, mang]

I like Fifa career mode, mostly as I have to have the latest real life players/kits etc and it's easy to mod the PC version to avoid buying the new one ever year, and operation sports sliders make the gameplay a lot better. Gave up on FUT though when I realised it was raising my blood pressure too much.

I'm not sure football is a sport that lends itself well to video games without removing a lot of the real life aspects, whereas golf or tennis games for example can be pretty accurate. Just team sports in general, it feels like mostly simulation as you're only controlling one of the players at any one time, and your skills and abilities are determined largely by your in-built stats anyway.

Loved Kick Off 2 at the time but it doesn't bear much resemblance to real football, as was mentioned above it's more like playing pinball.

[badaids]

I hated Kick Off 2 because the controls were hard. The ball didn't stick to your feet you had to properly control it. Plus my mate mastered and if you wanted a go on his Amiga it meant taking an absolute pasting on that for a couple of hours before he'd let you ply Turrican or Rainbow Islands or whatever.

The thing with player manager, which was a bit easier and I did like was the player generation which was quite advanced for such an early game, plus there was no retirement so your player could play on until his late 190s no hassles before the game gave up.

There's one football manager Amiga freeware game is love to play again where the stats had no limit and would get better and better until you could beat teams by 60 goals, but every now and then the game would have one of your players murdered or die in a car accident. It was a totally straight game about from those two quirks.

[copa]

I find myself going back to PES 2021 Master League...

I once wrote a slightly pretentious essay about this. Basically saying that this is one of the purest forms of games narrative.
By giving you a rubbish starting team, it sets you on an "assemble the team" journey that's similar to something like Severn Sumarai/Dirty Dozen etc.

That it sets you on this path but leaves you to create your own story. Gradually finding and recruiting better players to turn your no-hopers into a decent squad. And it does this without the need for cut-scenes or fixed characters. It's a clever blend of linear and non-linear narrative. Everyone has the same basic story but each experience is unique.

[stranger]

I've enjoyed revisiting Pro Evo 6 (PS2 version) on the Steam Deck recently.

I used to cane it with my then flatmates when it came out, and it still holds up today. Obviously not as polished as the latest FIFA (or whatever it's called these days), but it's so playable and a whole heap of fun.

[Elderly Sumo Prophecy]

Severn Sumarai

Set in feudal Gloucestershire