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fitba games from the past...

fuzzydunlop

By fuzzydunlop
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fuzzydunlop

fuzzydunlop

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I put this ‘article’ if you can call it that together a few years ago.  Thought might be worth a read for some of you..bring back some memories maybe.  Essentially it’s a ‘review’ of some of the old Football related games for various computers/consoles.  Apologies for spelling and grammar and its quite long so if you don’t want to read it then no worries!

 

First of all it should be noted that I was a Commodore 64 man and never owned a Spectrum. In fact most of my friends had Commodore 64’s so my knowledge of the ‘Speccy’s’ range of footie games is lacking. I do remember playing Match Day and Match Day 2 round at my mates. However as we all know, if you aren’t used to a game then its very difficult to get the feel of it after a couple of shots, these things take literally days of practice..especially when your mate would relentlessly show no mercy and hammer you. So there may be some glaring omissions from my list. Similarly I moved from C64 to Amiga and then Playstation so any games not on those platforms I probably never played much if at all.

 

Anyway, my first game I remember playing was indeed Emlyn Hughes International Soccer on the C64. A revelation considering the only  computer game remotely resembling football I had played was probably the one that was like Ping Pong with little blocks!   I particularly liked the fact you could change the teams strips in Emlyn Hughes. Still not sure how Emlyn got involved in the sponsorship especially with it coming out around 1987/88 as surely these days it would have been given a ‘star’ player the gig instead of Old Crazy Horse who was most notable for his laughing fits on A Question of Sport. The game itself was pretty basic but you could score some cool goals. The one thing I do remember is your team got presented with a trophy at the end of the game by some woman(the Queen?) if you won which was a nice touch.  I also remember some of the glitches meant that some of the players would go and run and stand in the corner for no reason like some sort of Blair Witch Sports Edition.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5ZF__T7_K4

 

I think I pretty much stuck to Emlyn Hughes for the rest of my C64 days.  Quite a few others appeared, usually with a footballers name attached. Gary Linekers Hot Shot, Gazza’s Super Soccer, Roy of the Rovers…

These guys quite annoyed about Peter Beardsleys effort and I think its pretty fair when you see how sh*te it is.:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeknzsgkY6U

 

However, there was a new sort of game that appeared that sucked me well and truly in…Football Management sims. I’d always been one of those kids who not only played a lot of football but also had this messed up imagination and I’d make up my own tournaments…before taking a tennis ball into our hallway and ‘playing out the games’. Even having my own league tables, cup draws etc. All very sad although theres a recent Russell Brand dvd where he talks about doing a similar thing to pass the time whilst on a recent film set(not saying that’s a good thing but at least I didn’t feel I was alone). So, the arrival of football management games that would suck me into my own football world was an exciting event.

 

The first sim(I remember) was of Football Manager. There was also Football Director but I never played that. Not sure what the difference was. Football Manager gave you the opportunity to manage an English club and try and win the league and cup. You picked your team, then bought players. You’d then ‘watch’ the game unfold. You could make tactical adjustments to try and sway the result. Being one of those Glory hunting 1980’s Liverpool fans my first instinct was to pick Liverpool as my team. But I soon realised it looked a bit daft to see them getting beat 3-0 from the likes of Hartlepool and Grimsby every week as I struggled to work out a good formation or if my star striker(usually Tony Woodcock) was out injured. So I then started playing as some dodgy wee team like Stockport or Northampton in my attempt to guide them through the divisions…a bit like that bloke from Gretna but without the cowboy hat and subsequent financial meltdown. More management games appeared, in fact there was bloody tons of them..Brian Clough got involved, Graham Taylor,  etc etc Some offered The ‘edit player name’ feature in some management games led to more imaginative ‘storylines’ in my head. For example  I’d sign some player change his name to something ’exotic’ and pretend I’d signed some teenage sensation from South America.  Yeah, I did have friends btw and I’m currently not in Broadmoor.

 

From then on I’d buy any Football Manager game that came along..mostly in the ‘budget range’ and spend time that I really should have been looking at the Kays catalogue lingerie section. Most games were pretty much the same but with subtle differences. I particularly enjoyed the World Cup Manager for Mexico 86...which was quite similar to this from Euro 88:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2Gur2TnMds&feature=related

 

Talking of Mexico 86, one of the strangest football computer game titles must come from the main talking point of that particular World Cup… ‘Peter Shiltons ‘Handball Maradona’. First of all no one had made a computer game from the goalies perspective before. Basically you had to save penalties and set pieces to try and guide your team to the World Cup. Dirty Diego didn’t make an appearance in the game mind you. Looking back it seems pretty strange to name a game solely on England’s injustice especially after the event. It all seems a bit bitter to me. It did get me thinking why they didn’t try this for every subsequent World Cup but I guess theres only so many times you can have a game where you have to miss penalties…I managed to find some Youtube footage of said game here:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYtZfWiWI4g

 

One other game from this era that I must mention (even though I seem to be the only person who I know who remembers it), is ‘Footballer of the Year’. Basically the aim of the game is to become Footballer of the Year(really?!). To do this basically you need to score goals. To do this you must buy Goal Cards which give you chances to score either through penalties or from a set piece. It was a different take on the Footy management games, more looking out for yourself rather than guiding your team. If you did well you’d get transfer offers from bigger clubs…and yes, if you were crap you ended up getting punted to Aldershot. Entertainingly they included a non-football aspect with ‘Wild Cards’ like “Get caught in a nightclub with Charlie Nicholas and a Page 3 Girl..lose money”. .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnLeTkGd9os

 

In the early 90’s I moved onto the Commodore Amiga. Football games were really beginning to saturize the market and there some bloody awful ones out there. Most of the crap ones were associated with players. I remember John Barnes Soccer being pretty rubbish and I might have dreamt this but I’m sure there was a game called ‘Graeme Souness Vector Soccer’ where the players looked like some sort of stickmen gone wrong….I always wanted to play it to see if there was a ‘go a bit mental’ option, opposition kicks off and you go lunging in to try and end someone’s career… I remember my mate had Microprose(?) soccer on the Atari ST which was not bad too. 

There was also the quite niche named ‘Manchester United in Europe’. The main thing I remember about that one was the quite realistic cup draw.

 

 

Still, the Amiga did come up trumps with some great games. First of all was the Kick Off series. This was my fave for a while. Not only was it a really enjoyable game to play, it also had lots of cool extras like weather elements, different type of pitch, plus overhead kicks, injuries and sendings off. I must admit I spent far too much time playing Kick Off and Kick Off 2. My fave was Player Manager which combined the playing elements of Kick Off with managing. You started as a 38 year old veteran, ending his playing years trying to guide a team to the top flight. The thing was as the years went on, you aged, not on the screen, but more the player statistics. So as the seasons passed by your pace slowed down and you lost your skill. The decent thing to do would be to use the ‘retire’ option and let the youngsters get a chance. However, once doing that you gave up the ‘playing’ aspect of the game and it became purely a management thing….which wasn’t as fun. So I discovered the only option was to refrain from retiring..so at 88 years old I’d come on as a sub, only to get tackled and go off injured…didn’t quite go to plan really!

 

Then along came Sensible Soccer which was amazing and still a favourite to this day. Not sure what made it so great. It just looked great, and I particularly enjoyed the option where you could play ‘classic teams’. Plus you could get some nice swerves on yer long range efforts.

 

There were some really good Management games on the Amiga. My fave being ‘Multi-player Manager’. Once again it did exactly what it said on the tin, it was a management game where you could have several teams on the go so you and your mates could pit your tactical skills against each other.  Obviously the problem was getting a lot of folk to sit through hours and hours of tactical decisions before they had to leave for their tea. However one day me and three friends ‘managed’ it, and my room turned into a hotbed of transfers and tactics with the five of us taking on each other for a full days worth of management craziness. Yep, we even met early and played to the early hours of the morning and before you can say “sad f*ckers” we had our very own Big Four. Tell you, I’d love to do that again, get a free day, load of beers and 8 of you battling it out to sign the same player, calling each others bluff.. That was one of my fave bits, a star player would come up for sale and you’d have to outbid each other…great stuff.

 

From then on football games on the consoles became fairly big business. FIFA has taken the baton and ran and it just seems to get better. A lot of my friends swear by Pro-Evo but I’m afraid in the same way I got cuffed by a friend on Match Day 2, back in 1986, I suffered the same thing in 1996 on Pro Evo, had one game and got hammered and never went back.

 

I never got into Management games on the consoles. The depth of the options scared me somewhat…especially when I heard some real managers were using it to scout for players! Also hearing horror stories of mates who failed Uni exams due to playing it too much scared me off.

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gameofthrones

gameofthrones

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Did you have the 'International Soccer' cartridge for the Commodore 64 ?  

You only had 2 outfield players (big block graphics) but you could get the ball trapped between the players, the ball would then basically run up the back of the player in front and then sit on top of his head so you could run the ball into the net,

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Homer Thompson

Homer Thompson

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19 minutes ago, gameofthrones said:

Did you have the 'International Soccer' cartridge for the Commodore 64 ?  

You only had 2 outfield players (big block graphics) but you could get the ball trapped between the players, the ball would then basically run up the back of the player in front and then sit on top of his head so you could run the ball into the net,

I had International Soccer. Dont remember there only being 2 players though :unsure2:

I also had many of the games on that list

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fuzzydunlop

fuzzydunlop

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26 minutes ago, gameofthrones said:

Did you have the 'International Soccer' cartridge for the Commodore 64 ?  

You only had 2 outfield players (big block graphics) but you could get the ball trapped between the players, the ball would then basically run up the back of the player in front and then sit on top of his head so you could run the ball into the net,

i thought it was a full team as well?   Found some 'footage' here:

I do remember being able to play keepy-uppy all the way up the park though!

 

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54_and_counting

54_and_counting

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Kevin keegans player manager on the snes was awesome, until you learned what letter of the alphabet started you off with the best team

One glitch that was funny in that game is that if your money went over 2.14bill (something like the memory in a computer system) it reverted back to 0 and your club was in the shit lol

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19QOS19

19QOS19

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:wub::wub::wub::wub:
512HEJMY7QL.jpg.c38406c68ebdc19e54465229c64e8d1c.jpg
Bought that recently for the nostalgia. It still plays well tbh. I used to love the through ball then lob and was great at it. Thinking back I assumed it was just an easy way to score. Playing it now I can't score with it for the life of me! So I must have been decent at it back in the day.

The ball sounds flat which is something I never noticed at the time.
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54_and_counting

54_and_counting

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13 minutes ago, 19QOS19 said:

Bought that recently for the nostalgia. It still plays well tbh. I used to love the through ball then lob and was great at it. Thinking back I assumed it was just an easy way to score. Playing it now I can't score with it for the life of me! So I must have been decent at it back in the day.

The ball sounds flat which is something I never noticed at the time.

Through balls have always been unbalanced in footie games, either too easy to do or too shit, to this day no footie game has a properly balanced through ball, purely down to shit AI defenders

Not sure if it was that one or the snes version, but i used to have a front 3 of overmars, batistuta and hasselbaink, through ball cross batigoal nods it home for his 50th of the season lol

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19QOS19

19QOS19

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Through balls have always been unbalanced in footie games, either too easy to do or too shit, to this day no footie game has a properly balanced through ball, purely down to shit AI defenders
Not sure if it was that one or the snes version, but i used to have a front 3 of overmars, batistuta and hasselbaink, through ball cross batigoal nods it home for his 50th of the season lol
The through ball is the easy part, it's the lob I can't do [emoji38]
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itzdrk

itzdrk

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3 hours ago, 19QOS19 said:

Bought that recently for the nostalgia. It still plays well tbh. I used to love the through ball then lob and was great at it. Thinking back I assumed it was just an easy way to score. Playing it now I can't score with it for the life of me! So I must have been decent at it back in the day.

The ball sounds flat which is something I never noticed at the time.

I seem to remember just hitting square inside my own half and that just did the trick.  

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Gaz

Gaz

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On 18/02/2019 at 11:23, fuzzydunlop said:

One other game from this era that I must mention (even though I seem to be the only person who I know who remembers it), is ‘Footballer of the Year’. Basically the aim of the game is to become Footballer of the Year(really?!). To do this basically you need to score goals. To do this you must buy Goal Cards which give you chances to score either through penalties or from a set piece. It was a different take on the Footy management games, more looking out for yourself rather than guiding your team. If you did well you’d get transfer offers from bigger clubs…and yes, if you were crap you ended up getting punted to Aldershot. Entertainingly they included a non-football aspect with ‘Wild Cards’ like “Get caught in a nightclub with Charlie Nicholas and a Page 3 Girl..lose money”. .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnLeTkGd9os

I had this for the Speccy! It was a great game.

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