Very, very overrated.
Review 23
Game Genre: Sports
Graphics
The graphics are very bad. You can’t tell where your players are and it’s hard to control them because it’s so pixilated, but that’s what you get from an early GBC game.
Gameplay
There are 3 modes to play:
Exhibition—Typical mode for any sports game, just for somebody who doesn’t feel like doing anything but playing one single quick game.
P.K.—You select a team for yourself and the computer and you trade off 5 penalty kicks, starting with you kicking at the opponent’s goalie, and then vice-versa. Whoever has the most points after 5 kicks wins.
Int’l Cup—It’s basically the World Cup, but apparently saying that would be copyright infringement or something. In this mode you select a team and go through the World Cup tournament mode. First you play three matches in your group, then advance to the actual elimination rounds.
Now the in-game gameplay is a whole different topic. To begin, you select heads or tails and the winner of the coin flip selects their starting side. Two 3-minute halves are then played.
It’s very hard to control your players, partly because it’s pixilated, partly because it’s a very old game, partly because there’s only around 3 buttons to choose from. That’ll be explained in the next section.
A bad aspect is that the U.S. team is the worst selection. The players just stand there staring at the ball unless you control them, basically. My American Pride won’t let me pick another team, however. This results in me losing a large majority of the time.
The goalies both do excellent jobs, it’s insanely hard to score, and insanely hard to be scored upon. This also results in many overtimes and kickoffs.
Controls
It’s so hard to diss the controls, it really is. D-Pad: Move player
A: Pass
B: Kick (Offense), Slide (Defense)
Select: Pause
I just wish there was a button to manually switch characters. The game does it automatically, and it’s hard to get it to switch. That’s a big problem. Then again, the GBC handheld itself consists of 4 buttons and a direction pad. That and two of the buttons are tiny little “start” and “select”.
Durability
Durability is somewhere in between put it down and never play again and just plain put it down and play every now and then. The World Cup format makes it fun to play, but the in-game play is just unbearable.
Difficulty: Normal (Hard if you use the U.S. team)
Overall Score (4.75/10)