With the World Cup in full swing we take a look at soccer on a digital level. Below you will find five of the lamest attempts to bring the beautiful game into our homes. Some of these you may know while others may have gone under your radar. Some of these games are abominations and a stain on the sport while others are technically sound, but about as fun a watching paint dry.
5.) O’Leary Manager 2000 – 2000 – Gameboy Color
It’s a soccer management sim (which would be enough to make it beyond boring) that lets you actually play in a top-down perspective. The problem with O’Leary Manager 2000, besides featuring a manager that did nothing for his club from what I’ve read, was that the game featured a really strange bug. If you allowed your team to go into a certain amount of debt over time you would strangely find 70 million smackers sitting in your bank account. I don’t know who O’Leary is, but if that’s what he did with clubs (bail them out with 70 million) when they were broke then he’s not so much a good coach, as he is a leprechaun in disguise.
4.) David Beckham Soccer – 2002 – Gameboy Advance
The portable platforms have not been the best for soccer games and David Beckham Soccer is no exception. The game offered little challenge of any kind leaving you wondering if the developers forgot to implement the artificial intelligence. For a player like Beckham, with so much style, to have a game so utterly dull is a shame. While the GBA was no powerhouse on the audio front, David Beckham Soccer sounded worse than listening to an old timey radio while underwater, and that was when the game played any sound at all.
3.) Pure Futbol – 2010 – PS3/360
This is a game that would always tempt me on the shelf at the local GameStop several years ago. I’d always go in and the same copy would be sitting there in the new section gathering dust over many, many months. I would always pick it up and look at the box wondering why this sad little game didn’t have a home; then one day I found out. Pure Futbol is is arcade game in the guise of a real soccer game. There are no refs and no linesmen to call offsides, just 10 men on the field (22 is standard) battling it out. Characters go for an exaggerated style while retaining a semi-human look. The end result is players that look like they are suffering from physical deformities. Gameplay wise the defense is terrible and the back and forth becomes repetitive quickly. With only 20 teams on the disk and lack of any sort of commentary, Pure Futbol is terrible.
2.) Freestyle Street Soccer – 2004 – Gamecube/Xbox/Ps2
Gangs rule the streets, but instead of taking territory and killing each other they have laid down all weapons in and decide to settle things via some hardcore street soccer. Besides sounding like a SyFy movie of the month written by a 10 year old version of myself, Freestyle Soccer plays as terrible as its premise sounds. The physics of this world don’t seem to adhere to the same laws that we live by and the games models look terrible. The developers should have spent less time with the ridiculous turf war nonsense and actually make a fun game of soccer.
1.) Kidz Sports: International Soccer – 2008 – Wii
My spellcheck program keeps trying to tell me that it is in fact “Kids” and not “Kidz,” but despite my protest and long winded explantation it refuses to accept “Kidz” as a real word. But the Z on the end is apropos since it can serve to stand for Zip, Zilch, Zero, Zippo, Zot or “We have all your monieZ now suckers”. There is simply no excuse for this game to exist in any form on any system. This game is below even the worst and cheapest forms of shovelware that inundated the Nintendo Wii throughout it life. It so bad that the game should have been brought up on charges for violating the Geneva Convention. Goalies can’t stop a ball to save their lives (I don’t recall on ever making a save), the graphics are so terrible and yet frames skipping happens all over the place. Couple all that with unresponsive controls and this game isn’t just the worst soccer game, but one of the worst ever made. Don’t ever play this game, not even for a laugh on a drunk Friday night with friends. Seriously, it’s like the ring, you’ll be dead before you can finish a game.
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