Though I eventually picked up a copy, "Super Soccer" was one of the SNES launch titles that I didn't have at the time. Via the Switch's SNES online system, I've been playing the game a bit for the last couple of days and thought I'd leave my thoughts.
The game is a simulation of football matches between approximations of International teams (by that I mean Country names and colours of shirts is accurate, but the player names are not). You can play a one off friendly game between two teams, or participate in a knockout tournament. The game allows for player against CPU, Player against Player or for two players to team up against the CPU.
The thing is, unfortunately this isn't a good game of football - and I'm not just talking about comparing it with Fifa 20, or something like that. We're only a couple of years or so before the first Fifa game would come out and in comparison with that, or other SNES football games like "Sensible Soccer" or "International Superstar Soccer", "Super Soccer" feels like a poor relation. Its trouble really stems from the camera location, positioned behind one of the goals and scrolling with you as you move up and down the pitch. This gives the human player a massive disadvantage over the computer, in that when the computer is attacking towards the bottom goal, you can't see where your defenders are and move to intercept an attacker. This becomes a real problem when you combine this with the other big flaw, that the goal sizes are adjusted to give the impression of distance, so the bottom goal is three times the size of the top one. This would be fine except the goalkeeper figure is the same size, so even playing with the best team against the worst, I'd find myself several goals down at half time.
It's a nice slice of history, but it's too frantic and unfair to go back to very often.
The game is a simulation of football matches between approximations of International teams (by that I mean Country names and colours of shirts is accurate, but the player names are not). You can play a one off friendly game between two teams, or participate in a knockout tournament. The game allows for player against CPU, Player against Player or for two players to team up against the CPU.
The thing is, unfortunately this isn't a good game of football - and I'm not just talking about comparing it with Fifa 20, or something like that. We're only a couple of years or so before the first Fifa game would come out and in comparison with that, or other SNES football games like "Sensible Soccer" or "International Superstar Soccer", "Super Soccer" feels like a poor relation. Its trouble really stems from the camera location, positioned behind one of the goals and scrolling with you as you move up and down the pitch. This gives the human player a massive disadvantage over the computer, in that when the computer is attacking towards the bottom goal, you can't see where your defenders are and move to intercept an attacker. This becomes a real problem when you combine this with the other big flaw, that the goal sizes are adjusted to give the impression of distance, so the bottom goal is three times the size of the top one. This would be fine except the goalkeeper figure is the same size, so even playing with the best team against the worst, I'd find myself several goals down at half time.
It's a nice slice of history, but it's too frantic and unfair to go back to very often.
