Backyard Soccer

"If I had to guess, I’d predict that very few backyards are actually big enough to hold a soccer game. But that’s just me"

Then again, who realistically cares if a game fits a backyard -- that hasn’t stopped people from playing them over the years, and I doubt logic will prevail anytime soon. Yes, playing games amongst the swing sets and tool sheds of ones backyard is one of the pillars of childhood, along with spilling ice cream on your church outfit and falling off your bicycle in front of the school bus. But you don’t mess with the pillars; They always remain constant for the next generation. You don’t go building a shopping mall on the vacant lot where the kids play ball, now do they? (Thanks to Hey Arnold, we all know what hell breaks loose if some big shot developer comes in and tries that.

Once more, Backyard Soccer allows children to make their team from all of the stereotypes ever made -- from the hispanic child that can’t speak English, to the boy in the wheelchair who struggles to muddle through. We’ve got tomboys, geeks, twins, and jocks. Make your dysfunctional team and hit the field!

Once you’ve assembled your very own motley crew, you have to decide where to take them, be it taking them out for a casual exhibition, entering a big name tournament, or getting their mommies to pony up two hundred bucks for the big time: The Traveling League.

If you’ve got an exhibition game going, you get to be a little more liberal with your team choices. Designing your team for a certain field will allow you for the best possible situations, as the fields not only look drastically different, but play differently as well. For example, the sandier fields play a little bit slower, and a team of big kickers would be more effective. When playing on harder surfaces, build a team of speed demons for the most success. If you’re in a tournament or a league, you’ve just got to build a well-balanced team, and hope that the field assignments agree with you.

Clearly more important than the field assignment is the way you set up your lineup. You need to know your player’s strengths and weaknesses -- as well as what you’d like to do as a coach -- to design the perfect lineup and formation for your team. A good strategy is to pay attention to the bits of information given to you as you choose your team in the first place, for that can assist you a great deal to making you lineup.

But what good is all the planning in the world if you don’t know what to do with it once you hit the pitch! You need to master the movement of your characters on the field, all done using the mouse. This ends up requiring a lot of clicking just in front of the players as they scamper towards the goal, so that they can keep their dribbling under control. To pass, pick a destination far enough away from the player you’re currently controlling, and just a little bit in front of your target’s current position. To shoot, drag the cursor to a corner of the net and click away. If you’re lucky, their goalie will be out of position. And if you can keep control of the ball while dribbling, it’s not hard to have one player go coast to coast and beat the goalie for an easy score.

It’s always good to keep track of your past mistakes and try to avoid repeating them, and the commentators Earl Grey and Sunny Day do an adequate job of pointing them out. Their dialogue is overly simplistic for the younger set of ears, but they can occasionally have some important insights or even a witty zinger or two. That’s always a rarity.

Earl and Sunny like to go into long monologues too, which can really stress a computer’s resources without providing anything substantial. Lucky for us that Humongous Entertainment made it nice and easy to skip right over them with a handy press of the Escape Key.

It’s a shame that the cut scenes slow the computer down so much, because the video animation is topnotch. In fact, the mouths even move in time with the words. HALLELUJAH! The curse of Anime has been broken! Anyway, while the video animation looks great, the in-game animation could have certainly been improved. Player’s movements tend to lean a little bit towards the choppy side -- and watching a little kid look like he’s going constantly trip over his feet is amusing for a couple of seconds -- but it doesn’t make the game look very good. And with the Macintosh version being slightly slower than the PC make, the animation problems have just been exacerbated.

Coupling that with the simplistic, monotonous music gives you a good idea of the poor experience that is hidden in Backyard Soccer’s superficials. Humongous Entertainment essentially just slightly altered music from previous incarnations of their Backyard Sports series for the soccer edition, probably assuming that the players would be too young and naive to notice. And for their general audience, they are probably correct. It’s a cross between bubble gum pop, random keyboard licks, and Raffi. Combine ingredients and stir for maximum effect.

Another aspect of Backyard Soccer that’s perfect for the designed audience but not older players is the difficulty level. The computer simply cannot challenge any experience gamer. The Dallas Mavericks leave less holes in their defense than the artificial intelligence. You can easily waltz through their final line and shoot at will against the poor goalie, who doesn’t have a chance so long as you aim for the far corner each time. I an actually disappointed with myself if I allow a goal, or I don’t win by at least seven.

Despite winning by seven being a regular occurrence rather than a joyous abnormality, there are still plenty of reasons to keep playing Backyard Soccer. The wide variety of modes, team combinations, and field types make sure that you can almost always play in a game that is somehow different from any previous one you have done. And tinkering with your lineups in Exhibition Mode can lead to you dominating the league by an even bigger margin, so it pays to play around.

Backyard Soccer is different than the typical Backyard Sports game in that fields actually can affect play, and in that you constantly click the mouse to keep the ball moving. But some aspects of the game could be implemented into Backyard Baseball, the series’ most popular version, and improve that game even further. All in all, Backyard Soccer is a great game for children, and a decent game for older players that like to blow their opponents out.

PROS
*Plays more like a real soccer game than a children’s game.
*As usual, great commentary by Earl Grey and Sunny Day.
*Wide variety of fields, modes, and players.

CONS
*The music is quite poor.
*Moves slower than the PC version.
*Dribbling by constantly clicking the mouse gets to be a pain.

SCORE SUMMARY

GAMEPLAY--8
GRAPHICS--6
MUSIC--3
SOUND--8
CONTROL--5
FUN--7
CHALLENGE--LOW
REPLAY VALUE--MEDIUM

OVERALL--6

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 08/02/02, Updated 08/02/02