Soccer stars

Soccer stars is not soccer but a bizarre mutation of air hockey. This is good because I already used up everything I know about soccer in my Fifa 14 review, also because air hockey is majestic and wonderful. I’ve always loved air hockey tables. Where will the disc go? How have I scored more points against myself than against my opponent? What am I doing with my life?

I had a bit more fun with this game than I did with Fifa 14 and since the only mode I could access was local multiplayer only, I only ever played against myself, alone, in the dark, while weeping. I managed to win, but lose in a much deeper way.

This is a difficult image to write a humorous caption for.

I feel like more sports could benefit from including aspects from videogames and tabletop games. Imagine football but players sat on hovercraft and had to ricochet themselves off each other to hit the ball, just like in this game! Maybe you could have multipliers or multiple different types of balls and nets within the same game. Maybe you could roll a giant 20 sided die every 20 minutes with different consequences.

“Oh my god, we’ve rolled a 12! The field is being flooded with butter as we speak Tom and if you look closely, you’ll see that the hornets have been released. Who will find the bagpipes first? It’s anyone’s guess at this stage. Ohhhh and Jacobs has come up for air and is being stung repeatedly and mercilessly. It’s a big mistake for the blind boy wonder and a point deduction for his team. His manager isn’t going to be pleased with that Tom. We’ll recap after the break.”

I found Soccer Stars to be akin to a pot noodle. A bland but passable cup of dried worms and armpit juice.

Fifa 14

Bloody hell. It’s the world cup again. What a shame that bluffball.com is currently down.

I haven’t played a sports game since Fifa 98 but luckily it seems the formula has barely changed at all. Kick, pass, shoot, run in a direction. Yes yes, perfectly flavourless football.

Sadly my favourite aspects from ’98 are missing in Fifa 14. You can’t make a team called The fart entrepreneurs with names like Barry Nipple and Erogenous Jones. And you can’t choose to have them wear rainbow coloured kit to blind your rivals. I mean, is it even football without those things?

The cardboard cutout crowd are still there, only in they are eerily motionless and they flash or sparkle periodically to simulate people taking pictures. I probably wouldn’t have bothered with this Fifa, it’s quite disconcerting to see a frozen man suddenly have a small star shining brightly from his crouch. And I can’t imagine the fans of football complaining about such a minor detail when often the commentary doesn’t even change between games.

Another feature which I miss quite a lot now that I think about it, is the ability to foul players mercilessly. I always enjoyed seeing my brother’s goalie successfully prevent a goal only to have one of my drones sliding tackle the bastard so hard that he’d never walk again. It was even better seeing the player receive his red card, with his face conveying a pure sentiment of “What the FUCK? I didn’t even touch him!”. This often devolved into a game of trying to score red cards instead of goals which is infinitely more fun than football itself.

“NIPPLE TWIST!”

There is a new feature where, when the ball goes out of play, all of the players on the pitch are immediately teleported away so that the person who throws it back in can do so without interruption. It’s odd for sure and it must play havoc with the minds of the players, I mean, after they are teleported, are they really the same or are they merely copies? Are any football players really any different anyway? I think teleportation is something that should definitely be incorporated into the corporeal form of the sport when we have the technology, it might spice things up or at least create some weirdly athletic philosophers.

If only real football was more like Fifa ’98. I recently snagged Honduras in a sweepstake as the potential winner of the Global cup. Honduras, are terrible at football. Their odds to win were 2500:1. If Honduras were allowed to win by maiming the players on the opposite team or making them “disappear” I’m confident that they’d easily come first. To quote wikipedia:

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Honduras has the highest rate of intentional homicide in the world, with 6,239 intentional homicides, or 82.1 per 100,000 of population in 2010.

I don’t have much else to say about this game. If you like football, you don’t need a person who turns off half of the rules, to convince you that this is a game you might like. If you hate football, probably don’t play this game about football because it’s almost entirely about football, which is a thing that you hate. Football.

Verdict: Football.