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Football Video Games


Forrest

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We love a bit of football nostalgia, so I want to discuss your favourite Football Video Games of all time. Although, this really is a thinly-veiled excuse to post about...

 

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It still remains the best FIFA of all time. It combined the international depth of the World Cup games with a load of leagues from around the world, and allowed you to somehow choose Sergio Porrini and Marco Negri in the Italian starting 11 or have Brian Irvine take you to last 16 of the World Cup, because it had an infinite roster of reserve players to mine from. It was a brilliantly fun game to play, it allowed you to give George Weah his moment in the sun and take Liberia to the World Cup and it featured this...

 

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INDOOR FIVE-A-SIDE. It's the best game mode ever devised for a football game, hands down. Second place in terms of my favourite football games is this...

 

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Manager games on the console have a patchy history, but LMA Manager 2007 is by far and above the best console manager sim ever. A big feature of it lies in the Fantasy Team mode. There is nothing quite like seeing your own flesh and blood team, Athletico Bellshill in my case, rise through the divisions and take scalps all the while demolishing your bank balance, often seeing your team finally achieve that goal you were gunning for all along, only to be 3 million in the red, lose all your players at the end of the season and crumble as your youth players who were banging in 30 a season in the youth leagues flounder against top-level opposition. That said, I will forever be indebted to Toifilou Maouida and Giuseppe Rossi for their tireless efforts through the years.

 

Anyway, discuss your favourite football games (I imagine the sensible option will rear it's head soon) and the absolute shitters (David Beckham Soccer, I'm looking at you).

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I remember playing as Scotland on the hardest difficulty on Fifa RTWC '98 and getting all the way to the final. A tense 0-0 against Spain and I managed to burst into the box with Colin Hendry of all people. Back then, diving was an actual thing in the game and I dived to win a penalty, which was pretty hard to do as you usually get a yellow card. Its given, there's four minutes left of normal time. I fluff it and sky it right over the bar. Terrible. I never EVER won the World Cup on that game at the hardest difficulty and to this day it sticks in my mind and will do forever. That's what I get for cheating I suppose.

 

I also have bad memories of the Indoor football, as I got Enrico Annoni sent off in half a second for Celtic against my mate Matt. Never live it down almost fifteen years later.

 

As far as my favorite ever Football game, its got to me this

 

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I played Pes from the very first ISS on the N64 and onwards but it got really shit after PES 5 and I finally became a full time Fifa convert.

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I actually liked Super Soccer on the SNES. I didn't think much of it when it came out, and came back from a week-long school trip to Bockleton in mid-94 to find my mother had bought it for me off a man who ram-raided Woolworths. By then, there were much better football games that I was used to playing at my mate Kirk's house and I think I'd already got Striker for the previous Christmas, but I took to Super Soccer in the end. It was quite dull and extremely cheap, there were one or two positions you were guaranteed to score from and it'd always result in arguments when someone did.

 

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I got FIFA a few weeks later for my birthday and that was my favourite game for ages. My brother-in-law used to always call it a hockey game to annoy me because... Well, because it was basically the same as the EA ice hockey games. I used to spend summers in a backwards part of Ireland and take the SNES over, where it was celebrated by children who only had twigs for toys. We'd be in playing FIFA all day in the back room at granny's house, and I would hammer the fuck out of the yokels. I would often reach double figures, 35-0 wasn't unheard of. The adults hated technology. My uncle Sheamus would come in ranting and raving because Jimmy or Anthony were in playing that shite instead of out baling hay or whatever laughable rural nonsense he wanted them to do.

 

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Kirk had the original ISS and we used to play it all the time, but we fell out in the September of '95 when his older cousin battered me. Not long after that, I remember going to town with my mother and buying ISS Deluxe and Fever Pitch on the same trip, and reading the instructions but not being allowed to play them until Christmas. A rule I broke every time my parents went out. Looking back, the thing I remember liking most about ISS were the recognisable player hairstyles. Baggio had his ponytail! Valderrama had a big afro! They didn't have their names though. We were right nerds, me and Kirk. We'd spend ages before a match changing squads and that, which is behaviour that annoys me greatly now when I am an extremely casual gamer and have a quick match with someone on a modern game.

 

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I was only excited about Fever Pitch for the gimmicks. That got old, though. I don't remember ever playing it much.

 

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I really wanted ISS Deluxe on the PlayStation as well, but I don't think I ever saw it in shops. I rented it once, but before I could buy a copy, I had ISS Pro. That was the end of my love affair with football games. Mid-97 was when I went off football in general really. I did get the EA World Cup games on pirate, but the magic was mostly gone. Since then I've just played Pro Evo at mate's houses and bought FIFA 10 on the PSP for a fiver with a free football from Argos.

 

I never minded Ryan Giggs Soccer either, despite the shit reviews. It was no ISS, but we really enjoyed the presentational aspect of it that other SNES football games at the time never had.

 

My favourite football game ever might have been Kevin Keegan's Player Manager. I would pump hours into that, every day after school and all weekend. As a little geek with no actual football ability, this game and writing football fan fiction meant the world to me. Plus it had a cursor, so it felt a bit like playing on a PC, which appealed to me in those days of thinking a home computer would make my life complete. I just had a look on Youtube for it and seeing that big calculator next to a big floating Kevin Keegan head still makes me well up with nostalgia. Only SNES game that had Spectrum-like loading times, as well. I've tried to go back to it on an emulator once, but I didn't like it. I can't remember any of the player names now, they were all fictional, but I'm sure I loved them as much as I loved Paul Ince and Brian McClair at the time.

 

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Your left winger would always bang in 20 a season on this. And you could win the league with Sheffield Wednesday and get relegated with Arsenal. Odd, but fun game.

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This is where I (and I alone) discovered talents like Regi Blinker and Henrik Larsson who took my Man United team into the next millennium far more successful than Ferguson ever did.

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FTWC 98 is indeed the dogs bollocks, however and I say this every time this comes up and Mr Freebird will agree (I hope) that TIF 2003 is massively underrated.

 

Plays in an arcadey style and has a SWOS like transfer system It also has a cracking soundtrack via In These Shoes Kirsty MacColl and you can play on everything from School Playing Fields to the Jungle.

 

 

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TIF 2003 is a weird one

 

Mainly because I couldn't get over Kieron fucking Dyer being on the cover

 

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And my bad, ISS was on the SNES. Wow. I thought it was at least the N64.

 

Also I remember playing this a hell of a lot, and only scoring the same goal over and over again. Despite years of playing it. Even the AI scored the one type of goal. Run down the wing, cut in at the edge of the box and curl. Nothing else worked. Ever.

 

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PES 5 consumed hours of my life. I was single, living on my own and played every waking available minute on it. I even used to come home from work for lunch to get a couple of league games in.

 

I have fond memories of Fifa 2005 also. I mastered the freekick system to the extent that my mates would never try and tackle me around the box cus they knew any freekick would 99% of time result in a goal.

 

As far as current gen consoles go, it's a toss up between Fifa 10 and PES 2011.

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I even used to come home from work for lunch to get a couple of league games in.

 

In my This is Footy days, I used to play at dinnertime. We only get 30 minutes too. I was so addicted, that I used to eat my food at work, then leg it home, where my bird would have turned on the PS2 and loaded up my career and started them game but paused it at kick off. I

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PES 5 is probably the most I've played a football game, the Master League consumed hundreds of hours of my life and it just never got boring.

 

Also have very fond memories of the original Sensible Soccer, which I had on the Amiga. Going through all the teams editing them into proper clubs, mainly from Match Magazine in those dark pre-internet days was so satisfying.

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Sensi Soccer is by far the best football game ever. It was an absolute revelation. My favourite version was the demo that came with an Amiga mag. You could only play Man United vs. Norwich (1st vs. 3rd best teams in the country!) and it had a major flaw. If you gave the oppo a throw in 30 yards from goal, the keeper would always come out to recieve it but they'd throw it to your striker. Turn and score. The full version was much better. it was the most playable footy game ever made, there was a billion years of fun to be had with the custom teams, it looked amazing. It was just awesome. SWOS as posted by Ian was immense too but the game play wasn't as fun.

 

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Loved Kick Off 2 at one point

Took some getting into but it played well. Especially for the time.

 

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My first footy game was Match Of the day on the Speccy. Seemed ace at the time but look at this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=It2PGpFppN8

 

Euro '92 was the absolute worst game ever. It was horrendous. pretty sure it was the one where if you scored an O.G. you were credited with a goal.

 

World Cup USA '94 was an appalling game too.

 

I still crack out IIS '98 on the N64 or This Is Football 2003 on the PS2 from time to time. Both excellent games. Agree with the concensus on PES5 though, probably the most complete footy game ever.

 

The other day Pitcos posted some artwork for an unreleased WWE game that looked like it might be a role playing game. Made me think of an old footy platformer. Anyone remember Soccer Kid?

 

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Have wonderful memories of playing this with a mate , with the 'invisible walls' and 'fouls off' modes on!

 

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The mass brawls that would erupt as players got pushed over left and right, with that amazingly satisfying sound, in between pinging the ball all over the place and inevitably scoring from 35 yard drives.

 

On an individual level, much love for this one also! Oh the nostalgia!

 

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