I heard the working title was “Grassy Pinball.”
Sega Genesis
Released in 1993 by EA Sports
Grade: C-
This debut for EA soccer is challenging and fast and can be fun and feels nothing like soccer.
Where it falls in the series
It’s the original. It’s on a whopping 10 platforms: SNES, Genesis, Sega Master System, Sega CD, PC, DOS, Amiga, 3DO, Sega Game Gear, and Game Boy.
It came out in December 1993, six months before the 1994 World Cup (which was in the United States, so the temporary soccer craze seemed slightly stronger than the other ones that happen every four years). FIFA 95, a Genesis exclusive, followed in July 1994, and the series had yearly releases ever since, usually in the summer. Genesis versions lasted through 1998.
Praises and gripes
Some fellow dork of mine equated FIFA gameplay to pinball, and that says it pretty well. This game feels like pinball. The ball bounces back and forth, up and down, never going where you think it should go, you’re never in control, but you can still get it where it needs to go sometimes.
It’s not a bad first try. It’s probably more fun than if EA tried to simulate actual soccer. Do you ever watch actual soccer and one team casually controls the ball for a while, safely passing side to side and not getting any closer to the goal?
That doesn’t happen in this game. In this game, defenders go after the ball like a moth to a light, and you’ve got to move fast. You can try a series of little passes, or you can blast the ball down the field and try to steal it back.
This sounds fun, and it kinda is, but it’s a constant, nagging challenge. Passing, the thing you’re doing most of the time, is not easy. The game doesn’t “assist” the passes to go to a teammate. You’re literally aiming the pass with the D-pad, and you end up making a lot of passes to nobody.
Not only that, but you’ve got to hold down the button to put some power behind passes. The three buttons are for lob pass, regular pass, and shot. Somehow, your players can fire shots with the quickest tap of the button, but passes take a moment.
It gets odder. You can sprint by holding any of the three buttons. So, if you want to sprint, you need to decide what you’re going to do with the ball ahead of time so you can hold the correct button. That’s just stupid, and I wonder if that’s the case on SNES or other platforms that aren’t limited to three buttons.
Defense is simpler but also a challenge. You can slide tackle, switch players, and use turbo. The controls are responsive enough, but it’s hard tracking down opponents.
Shots are ultra fast and can be made from unrealistically far away. It makes things fun on offense and nerveracking on defense. This is like the game’s saving grace, because even though you spend most of the time clumsily booting the ball around, it’s still easy to score. Hail Mary type shots have a decent chance at going in, and there are plenty of rebound opportunities, corner kicks, breakaways off steals, all that stuff. It’s common for headers to sneak past the goalie, which I’m sure seemed slick as hell back in 1993.
I’m suddenly making this game sound great, and it’s not. I don’t know how that happened.
The diagonal viewpoint limits your view of the field. It’s too zoomed in. You often can’t see the guy you want to pass to. You also can’t see the guy who’s about the take the ball away. With passes so reliant on precise aiming, it’d be nice if you could even see where the targets are. Free kicks and throw-ins suffer the same lack of accuracy as other passes.
Okay, I think that’s enough. Glory me, I think this game made my head spin. It’s a weird game. It’s not soccer. It’s something else wearing a soccer costume.
P.S. Forgot to mention, this game has international teams only, in case you were curious about that.