Soccer NES Online: Send In The Cheerleaders
Depending on which side of the pond you are swimming on, this is football, not Soccer on my side of the water. If you’re on the other side, then it’s soccer. If you’re under the water then you probably call it blerbelwel. Yet another NES title I never played on the original machine but wanted to try it out on NES Online.
Being a Brit I like football, tea and pronounce it ‘scone’. While that doesn’t make me an expert, I know a little bit about the beautiful game and could happily say that this is one of my favourite sports type games I like to play on both consoles and, back-in-the-day, computers.
The status quo is FIFA but I gave up on that years ago and opted for Winning Eleven a.k.a. Pro Evolution Soccer. I skipped a few iterations of the latter and picked up Pro Evolution Soccer 2018 and have subsequently switched back to FIFA. Though FIFA 18 on the Switch is far from going to convince people to jump ship.
“The actual way to pronounce scone is ‘scone’. You’ll hear difference of opinion, but this is the true way.”
— The Knight Vulgar
Those are the current-gen games but in the olden days when people had eight legs and tv screens were hung from ceilings, the best football games, in my opinion, were the likes of Sensible Soccer and before that Kick Off. One of my all-time favourites though was Virtua Striker in the arcades – later on the Dreamcast.
It wasn’t the graphics or the handling of the ball (quite poor if you ask me. Are you asking? Yeah, I’m dancing) but the fact that you could score a goal from the halfway line and the commentator would explode in a supernova of GOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLL!!!!!! We still don’t have that type of commentary on Pudding Island, this side of the pond, so always made me chuckle.
Nintendo’s Soccer is… rubbish. I don’t know if I would have found it any good at the time as there wasn’t much else to play, but playing it now? Nope. It’s slow, the controls are dull and relatively easy to score a goal. Once that’s done and you win the game, nothing. No trophy, no next stage, no cookie.
There are cheerleaders after scoring a goal but not once in my life have I ever seen that happen. Very surreal. Nice pink uniforms though. So, should you buy this? Nope. But it’s free with your NES Online membership so save those pennies. Should you play it then? Also, nope. I’m not a fan as you can tell.
