Super Soccer

"Splendid, Pele would be proud."

If I am not wrong this was the very first soccer game for the Snes, and it is damn good one, it was made by Nintendo, so if you expect a simple but enormously fun and addictive sports game, you are right.

As I said at the beginning, Super Soccer is a simple game, so we are not going to find too many options or game modes. We have a Tournament mode, a versus mode, one or two players against the CPU, and the possibility to practice penalty kicks. We have a very limited number of teams and basically no customisation options. Enough for a good soccer game anyway.

The gameplay is very good, the game is extremely easy to play and the controls work perfectly...until you realise that you can pass automatically, too bad but well, this game is very old, and well, everything else is great, the game’s speed is very good, switching between players is easy and quick, goalkeepers are easy to handle if you decided to control them manually, etc.

The penalty kicks however, are simply the best you will ever find in a soccer game for the Snes, and I would even say the best ever, because, even if obviously I haven’t played all the soccer games, I have played a lot, I have yet to see a game with better ones, and I am talking about PS2 games too. For me the best thing about them is you can miss the shot, you can shot in the eight directions but never miss, this is good because in International Super Star Soccer, where penalty kicks were very similar, if you pressed the control too hard the ball will end up god knows where. That can’t happen in Super Soccer, if you miss that is because the goalkeeper managed to stop the ball.

The game looks pretty cool because it uses the Snes Mode 7 (like Super Mario Kart or F-Zero), the characters are sprites, and they look ok, nothing fancy but ok. When you score you will see a little image of your character running, they look a bit like, fat, but ok anyway. During the penalty kicks the game looks much better, the characters are bigger and they look really good. The graphics are as good as they needed to be.

The music is very good, normally sports games lack music, I think that there is no need of music in these games, or at least in soccer games, but Super Soccer is not the case, here we have music and it’s great.

It has been ages since I played this game, it is not International Super Star Soccer certainly, but I still think is a great soccer game, I used to play it in the exact time it was released, that time it was the best soccer game available, and nowadays is still above most 2D sport games, in fact I would say that aside from the above mentioned Konami game, Super Soccer is the best soccer game available for the Snes, because as the gameplay is the important thing in a soccer simulator, and as Super Soccer does an excellent job there, and as I have played a lot of soccer simulators in this system, and as I am a fan of this sport, I guess I know what I am talking about.

”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: 9/10, Originally Posted: 01/15/04