Dom Robinson reviews

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Price: £29.99 Players: 1-2 Football. Eh? Small boys running in the park. Jumpers for goalposts. Is there a better way to spend 90 Minutes ? Well, yes, there is actually. Let's deal with the good things first. With few new Dreamcast games coming out now there's no new competition for a football title, although a game would have to go some to improve on last year's Sega Worldwide Soccer 2000: Euro Edition. On the plus side, this game has the players' real names and the usual plenty options to play Exhibition matches with the home teams, a World Championship, Domestic games, Competition matches such as the World Challenge Cup and the European Trophy as well as a spot of training.

On the down side, the graphics and sound are nothing to write home about. Although there are options to choose the stadium, the inside pitch of which is identical, the kit and other sundries, it's how these are executed that is the problem. Playing the old Sensible Soccer was nothing major to look at, but at least when you moved your players they went where you wanted them to go. Here, the controls are unbelievably sluggish. If you change the direction of your player, he takes about a second to react to it, by which time the opposition has taken the ball from you! Did no-one play-test this before releasing it? Also, very often, the game suffers a slowing down of movement as the ball travels round the pitch as if it's a high-spec computer game running on a low-spec PC. How on earth is this possible? Commentary on the game is nothing more than you'd expect and the apparent roar of the crowd sounds more like Niagra Falls in full flow than a large group of people. It's hard to find originality in a football game, so there's no surprise to be learned when I say this has none, but if Virtua Tennis 2 can have mini-games then why not other sports? Longevity, anyone? If you can get "90 Minutes" of gameplay out of this title I'll be very surprised indeed.

GRAPHICS SOUND EFFECTS AND MUSIC PLAYABILITY ORIGINALITY ENJOYMENT	0
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Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2001.