Did the Speccy ever get a half-decent overhead-view football game?

[Pegaz]

Spectrum doesn't have particularly good games in this department, unfortunately that's a fact.
I played Emilio Butragueno football a long time ago, but the frame rate wasn't good enough.
Generally, C64 has very good candidates here, I remember a few overhead football games that I loved to play: Super Cup Football (great fun), Graeme Souness International Soccer and Championship of Europe, as examples of decent sensible soccer or kick off 2 attempts...but, I agree that Microprose Soccer is probably the best.

[Pobulous]

European Soccer Challenge by Players isn't awful, although you need to choose a +2A and load the TZX to get sound.
It doesn't work on a 128K, and it's silent on 48K.

It's smooth and fluid, but no ball sounds is disappointing. It wouldn't have needed much tweaking to make it great.

[Andre Leao]

Not a single on. Match Day II still the best...

[Pegaz]

Frankly, not a single one, overhead or not.
The only thing I like in this whole genre is great homebrew shooting game ZX Striker and the good old Football Manager.

[Morkin]

Yeah I can't think of one, and I didn't particularly like the early 16-bit attempts either.

Sensible Soccer (Amiga) was the closest to a top-down playable footy game that I really liked (it's not a completely overhead view but fairly near). Always wondered if it would be possible on a Speccy - small graphics with a character based scroll perhaps?

[catmeows]

Nah, playfield graphics is so simple that you could scroll at arbitrary speed. Maybe it would be limited to vertical scroll but if Commando can do the job a footie game could do as well. But I have no idea how AI should work.

[ianace]

Not overhead, but try Emlyn Hughes international soccer, or match day.

[Daveysloan]

I thought Microprose Soccer on the Speccy was alright, maybe it's my memory playing tricks again.

There was also a game called Advanced Soccer Simulator ("ASS" - tee hee) which I think was half decent for a budget game, but the only thing I remember about it was it had speech, where the commentator shouted "GOAL, GOAL, G-G-G GOAL!'

Ok looking those up, I was mixing it up with European 5 a side, which I remember having some fun with. In retrospect however, both games look dreadful!

[Turtle_Quality]

Played a lot of Kick Off 2 on the Amiga with friends, great fun as 2 player. I remember thinking there's not a lot of graphics moving on screen, the Spectrum should be able to handle something equally playable. Must admit we didn't really try the Speccy version back in the day as the Amiga version was great
Top down games will usually have simpler graphics but more focus on playability.

[toot_toot]

There was Manchester United which got a decent review in YS when originally released, but the budget re-release was slated by a reviewer called Stuart Campbell…;-)

By the time Kick Off came out on the 16-bit machines, the big deal was there were 22 players on the pitch (although not all of them visible). If you look at the succesful 8-bit footy games like Match Day and Emlyn Hughes, Im sure they only had about 6-7 players per team, I wonder if making a decent AI for 21 other players was just out of reach for the 8-bits?

In saying that, I remember US Golds official 1990 World Cup game being decent at the time, but it’s probably crap now when compared to Sensi.

[Swainy]

I remember enjoying Gazza 2 but that might of been because it was too easy. I’m usually crap at football games.

[druellan]

Gazza 2 https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/1 ... m/Gazza_II is a technically competent one (as all John Pickford games), kind of dull if I remember correctly but worth to check out.

[Mpk]

Take off the border info, I'd never have guessed that was a football game. Looks like starships orbiting a tiny moon.

[druellan]

Ha! Yeah, but at least the screen has some dots/grass, and is not an empty void of despair like Kick Off

[voxeltower]

Yeah I can't think of one, and I didn't particularly like the early 16-bit attempts either.

Sensible Soccer (Amiga) was the closest to a top-down playable footy game that I really liked (it's not a completely overhead view but fairly near). Always wondered if it would be possible on a Speccy - small graphics with a character based scroll perhaps?

Hi Morkin, I am the author of CPC Soccer 22. I have seen you ask if a game like sensible soccer is possible on Spectrum.
Technically I think that it is possible, although having to scroll through software and take into account 22 players, a maximum of 25 fps could be left, although if I did I would play it safe at 16.6 fps (1/3 frames).

A big problem would be how to manage the sprites, since if you make them very small the animations will not be distinguished, and if you make them large you can have a problem if they accumulate many on the screen.

For horizontal scrolling you have to avoid doing byte rotations, so either you do it from 8 to 8 pixels, or you do some trick like the game "Nothing" having pre-rotated tiles in memory.

The vertical scrolling shouldn't give you much trouble.

The field has many repeating tiles, from which some advantage could be taken.

Another problem I had was moving 22 players 50 times per second. You need to optimize the movement and the AI ​​a lot to make it work well.

From my little experience I tell you that it is very difficult to make a soccer game, you have to take into account many elements that are not appreciated at first glance.

[Morkin]

Oh cool, just checked it out on YouTube and it looks great..! Pretty fast, and I love the elements like the whistle sound FX and the slide tackles. It's great to see footy games being made for the older machines, I can't really remember one for the Speccy.

I don't know much about programming the Amstrad but I completely understand that it wouldn't be a simple task, and certainly not for the Speccy... I'm not sure where I'd start for the AI and the player movement. Otherwise I might have actually given something like this a go in assembly, but I think it's beyond my capability.

[voxeltower]

thanks friend. amstrad and spectrum can share code perfectly but drawing on screen is completely different. In cpc I have been able to do it very fast thanks to the hardware scroll of the crtc but unfortunately in spectrum it cannot be done and everything has to be redrawn in each frame. Hopefully someone will cheer up and try to program it, I would love to see something similar on spectrum.