Nintendo World Cup

"Take Kunio, add soccer, and you got soccer with a bad attitude, yeah!"

World Cup Soccer was designed by Technos, now, if you think that can only mean that Kunio will be somewhere near beating the hell out of everything that comes to close... SCORE!, because that is exactly what you will find here, but, a mix between WWF and soccer doesn’t sound wonderful?

The gameplay is stupidly easy, if you character has the ball the you can pass with B and shoot with A, if one of your players has the ball it is the same, they will pass the ball to you if you press B or shoot with A. If the other team has the ball then with B you will hit them with a body slam and with A you slide. If one of your mates is near an opponent, if you press B or A they will hit the opponent to, so there is no need to keep running behind the ball all the time, make you pal hit them and them order them to pass to you. If you keep hitting them they will finally get exhausted and fall, and they will not be able to continue playing anymore, so you know what to do.

During the matchs you have your own player and you can’t switch between team mates, this is not a problem actually, because it is very easy to give orders to your players.

There are special movements too, each team has their own super kicks (well, not all of them exactly, some teams have the same super kick). This special shoot is extremely hard to stop for the goalkeeper, so if you manage to perform one the goal is almost guaranteed. The problem is that you can’t keep doing super shoots all the time, you only have a limited number of them.

You can also use techniques at the beginning or during the middle time of each match, I have never used them, but they are probably pretty useless, no strategy is needed to win in this game, it is a Kunio game for god’s sake!, with your brute force you will be enough.

Scoring a goal without using super kicks is not an easy task, it is a pity because in the VS mode this could have made the game easier and at the same time more challenging, because you would have to learn to control the goalkeeper properly.

A very nice feature is the wide variety of fields available (these fields are not available in the Tournament mode though), we can play in the typical green field, or in a frozen field where there is no traction and you will be constantly sliding from one place to another, or a bumpy field full of boulders that will make us fall to the ground every time, etc. These different fields add a lot fun and variety to the matchs.

All the teams are relatively the same out of the Tournament mode and aside from the above mentioned special kicks, this is probably the game’s biggest flaw, too bad. The multi player option anyway, is fantastic, two players can go against the cpu or play in the classical VS mode.
We also have the possibility to play with four people at the same time, I don’t know how really, I have never seen a multi tap for the Nes, but I have heard something about playing via satellite or something like that, but I don’t know noting about that, and if were true it would sure be for Japan only.

The graphics are the same we always see in a game starring Kunio, there is nothing special about them but they are good enough and very funny. The music is really good, there is not enough variety true, but that doesn’t make it bad, the soundtrack is very badass, like everything in this game, and for that reason it rules.

World Cup Soccer is a great soccer game, of course nowadays there is not point on playing this one, but I used to play it back in the time it was released, and that time it was probably the best available.

”My lack of vocabulary and grammatical errors (if there’s any) are because I’m not from an English speaking country, sorry about that.”

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 01/03/04