[I recently discovered that I missed out a large number of #1 games from earlier in the ’90s, and with help I’m working through one a week. Please get in touch if you are interested in writing about any of them!]
First of all, the reported #1 game for the week ending 23 October 1993 in the source used by Retro Game Charts was FA Premier League Football, which turns out to have been an earlier, eventually changed, name for Ocean’s European Champions. Amiga Action’s review refers to it as “the one time FA Premier League Football” and suggests that the Football Association took away the name rights because they didn’t think the game was any good. Which is a bizarre turn of events if true.
Going under two different names is an appropriate thing to have happened to this game in particular, though, because its niche is in providing more choices at a more significant level than other football games. The rivals out there – Sensible Soccer, Goal!, Striker et al – each had their own choice of viewpoint and means of control to specialise in. The best mixed intricacy and simplicity to give lots to discover within their carefully defined method. European Champions, on the other hand, gives you two very different viewpoints and three different ways of kicking the ball that you can switch between, and leaves the specialising to you.
There is the standard pressing your controller button and the direction you want the ball to move in. There is holding down the button and moving a cursor to exactly where you want the ball to go, an unusual level of precision granted to the player. Or there is the ‘ping pass’. You look at an arrow above your player’s head to see which way the game has decided they should pass, you hear a ping, you tap the button and a perfectly flighted pass goes to a player in that direction. The receiving player might head it on automatically too, depending on your settings. It grants a lot of control to the game, and allows for some spectacularly skillful football, but it doesn’t feel like you have done so much to pull it off. You have to be willing to be a virtual spectator in exchange for seeing some above average video game football.
The different viewpoints are even more startling. I have talked about the differences between side-on and top-down football games previously, and European Champions is the first to be both. By default it plays from a completely top-down view, in the old-school Kick Off way rather than the twist offered by Sensible Soccer. When you score a goal, though, the replays show that goal from a very impressive side-on view, the better to savour the brilliant football you/the game just played. I had the PC version of European Champions and remember that being mind-blowing even before making the eventual discovery that you could press a key to change between the two views at any point in the match.
There are downsides to this idea, especially when coupled with the detailed versions of the kits the game has for all of the teams in the top divisions of England, Spain, Germany, Italy and France. A match between Arsenal (red shirts with white shoulders and some black and red trim) and Sheffield Wednesday (blue and white striped shirts) does not pose a problem for the side-on view. But seen from above, telling apart two teams whose shirts both look busy and mostly white is a headache. Previous top-down games would generally not have allowed the clash.
The level of detail extends to some better executed elements too, although sadly not to the players themselves not being clones. The game looks really good for the time, from either viewpoint. The running text commentary, a step above just seeing the name of the player on the ball (which wasn’t even something to take for granted just yet) is a lovely touch and makes the action feel more immediate. There is a lot in European Champions to get lost in obsession with, which I know first hand from a period of loving it and the more detailed version of football it was able to provide, even if it’s also easy to see why it didn’t make a lasting wider impression. It’s a game that asks a lot of the player when it comes to curating it, but I’m happy that I did so.
