Top 5 Old-School Soccer Sims

With Messi’s Barcelona besting Ronaldo’s Manchester United to claim club soccer’s most prized title in the 2009 European Champion’s League final, we’re on a serious soccer binge here at COED. So to keep the party going, here are five old school soccer titles that can most definitely kick it…

5. Match Day

With players kitted out in lurid yellow and white kits against a borderline luminous green pitch, a retro blast with Ocean Software’s early hit will likely cause eye-strain today, but in 1984 it helped – ahem – kick off the soccer sim craze. Back of the net!

4. FIFA International Soccer

Hailed at the time for its swanky graphics, the Sega Genesis title shocked the soccer sim world by, er, ditching the traditional top-down or side-on view for an isometric one that was either ‘quirky’ or ‘down-right unplayable’. Nearly 20 years on they’re still updating-slash-milking the franchise, but this is where it all started back in ’93.

3. Sensible World Of Soccer

A cult title if ever there was one, here a manager mode was added to the original Sensible Soccer’s top-down, micro-sized players gameplay engine – just a shame about the litter of bugs in the first batch released. Bonus 16-bit sing-a-long factor: The original lyrics and music of theme song ‘Goal-Scoring Superstar Hero’!

2. Kick Off

Never has a soccer game split sides so furiously as the Commodore Amiga classic Kick Off, with one side claiming that it was a rip-roaring, high-speed sports sim while the other maintaining that the game’s dynamics were more like pinball with the ball zipping randomly around. Imaginatively-titled sequel Kick Off 2 did little to clarify matters, though that too was a guaranteed joystick-breaker.

1. Soccer

Simply titled and pixelatedly-looking, the blocky bods in the original Nintendo console’s kickabout had only two moves available (A to shoot; B to pass) and seemed to be sporting anti-regulation caps on their heads on the cartridge’s artwork. Bonus early schoolboy titillation factor: the inclusion of cheerleaders!