Goal! ReviewOh great....another sports simulation game. I'm not sure why these exist, to be honest. A golf game is understandable, as you need a course and a set of clubs, in which a golf game would suffice, but a football game? What's wrong with playing the real thing? Well, this is just me talking, and I have been wrong with these types of games before, but still.....Football on the NES? How will that work? Only one way to find out, to play it. So pick your chants and support your team, as we look into Goal!
The story is that you want to win the football championships. Simple enough. There are three modes to play from: World Cup, Tournament, and Shoot. World Cup is where you verse the world in football for the championships, I think....while Tournament is where you play different teams for a world cup trophy. They seem different, but I hey look like the same games garnished differently. Shoot is something entirely different, as it is where you practice your penalty shoots. You can pick between three different players for this, weather it makes a difference I don't know.
The main game (lets just pick world cup for reviewings sake), is somewhat decent. The football pitch has that "light green dark green" alternatives that gives you that nice feeling that you are progressing forward as opposed to just one colour which would make you feel terrible in the sense you don't know if your moving or not. The controls are a little fiddly, having never played a football game before. I have to press B to choose different players in my team, and if my player isn't selected, but has the ball, it's on auto-pilot. So i have to select my character to move it, and get the ball. Then I can either press the B and a direction to kick it over, or press the A and a direction to gently pass it. I normally just lob it over, as I press the B button to change characters, and I just normally do that as I want to change characters, so it's a little awkward for those that have never played a football game.
I scored a goal, and it seemed to easy, only to find that I scored a goal in my own teams goal. When a goal is scored, the game cuts in with a scene, known today as a "cut-scene". It just shows the player running with some footy music in the background, showing the score. The animation for this is pretty good for the NES. I'm almost impressed. The music is pretty nice, far better than I expected it to be, although the music that catches me is the music at the title screen and the menu, not the music in the game. The game simulates football rather well. You can have a really intense game once you master the controls.
The shoot option is something else entirely. You have to pass the ball to the next person on your team, which is the only other team-mate, then you have to shoot at the goal, and of course, get it passed the goal-keeper. Sounds easy, right? Well, to make things harder, the opposing team will try and block your shoots or try and take the ball off you. If they touch the ball, then you fail, it's over, you miss that shoot. This makes a pretty unfair and hard thing to do. When I first did it, I got one star out of five. Now, at first, I thought this was how well I did, so I tried again, and I got two out of five, despite having the ball taken off me. When I got three out of five stars after another fail, I started to
suspect that it might be the number of tries I had. On the fifth one, however, I got it in, and the fifth star was gold, as opposed to grey.
What else can I say? The more I play it, the better it seems. This simulation of football is very well executed, I must admit. Yet, as I play even more of it, it starts to get boring to me. It's really hard, you have to be perfect in your shoots, and that's if you can get even close enough to the goal-keeper. On top of that, in the panic of trying to keep the ball away from the opposing team, 70% of the time I kick the ball out of the field. And the times I do kick it in the right direction, most of the time, the opposing team is one step ahead of me and is able to get the ball. It's almost as if they can control every character at once and get them to move where they want. My team players just run in the same direction as the ball....
I've not been able to score a single goal in this game. I can keep them tied for most of the part, but their strategy seems perfect. They can score at least one goal a game (in which I have a couple of seconds to switch tot he goal-keeper and hope I run in front of the ball), yet I am unable to get to their goal-keeper. A difficulty setting would have been nice. With this, I was unable to get further that then first match. I can practice my goal shoots, but how can I execute them without getting to the goal? It would have been nice to have some practice stage where I can just make my team run around, practicing passing and stuff like that. It would be fair to say I am better at football in real life.
Overall, I give this game an 8.8/10 Despite the difficulty, this is a really fun game to play, as it simulates football as it were in real life very well. It's almost intoxicating having to control an entire team to do your bidding in a football game, and even more so when you preform the action right. If you like football games, this this is well worth a shot.
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