ISS 64 is one of two International Superstar Soccer games released at the same time, and topped the charts just ahead of International Superstar Soccer Pro on the PlayStation. Which was a modified version of the same game under a different name. This is an interesting moment in the kind of console exclusive competition I talked about back on the similarly-named-but-unrelated Super International Cricket. There were a lot more people in the UK with PlayStations — it sold three-quarters of a million before the Nintendo 64’s release — but that version of the game didn’t do as well as the N64 one. PlayStation players had a lot more choice, and the series’s history on the SNES may have meant it was more familiar to long-time Nintendo players. Above all that, though, the N64 version looks clearly much better.
It is a fine showcase for the N64’s powers. Now, Super Mario 64 looked great and better than any PlayStation game I’ve covered to date. So far few PlayStation games tried to do anything similar, though, and it’s difficult to separate the parts of that superiority that are down to art decisions and the parts down to technical differences. Put ISS 64 next to ISS Pro or even the PlayStation FIFA 97 for a comparison of the rather more constrained task of showing a football match, and it’s a different matter. There are many decisions which go into that too, but it’s ultimately plain that the smoothness and detail of ISS 64 is miles ahead. It does not look like an actual live or televised match, at all, but it looks a lot less glaringly jagged and hacked out of polygon blocks. It’s easier not to think about what you are looking at. The N64’s capabilities were superior.
The entire story of the PlayStation’s success against the N64’s is one of the insignificance of that difference, though. So many of the differences between the two weren’t about direct comparison, game-to-game. And while something more pleasant to look at may make the process of forgetting about imperfections quicker, it can happen soon enough anyway. The really important difference between ISS 64 and FIFA 97, any version, is that once the looks drew people in, they had an all-round strong game to play as well.
The original ISS was well ahead of FIFA and looked ready for powering up in 3D, and that’s exactly what Konami did. It keeps some old school tendencies, playing on a much flatter, side-on basis with less emphasis on showing the freedom of proper 3D, but it plays in a new and wonderful way. A tangible sense of presence remains but its football players glide and their passes zip with a new zest. And while it wants you to play a beautiful game, there is no simplistic balancing act with that and how realistic it is. New options enhance both.
The biggest example of great new options is the defining idea to offer two pass buttons, a pass-to-feet and a through ball. The latter puts the ball ahead of a team mate for them to run onto it. All of a sudden new options for defence-splitting passes come quite readily to hand which were previously impossible, or at least required an inordinate amount of precision. This at last is a proper solution to the tendency for football games to make dribbling past the opposition an unrealistically central tactic, though attempting that still has plenty of rewards in ISS 64 too.
Against all of that gorgeous free-flowing football, there are not too many weaknesses to stack against ISS 64. It doesn’t have the licences for real player names and still has each international team filled with a curious set of people with surnames of famous players over the ages but non-matching initials and looks. There aren’t any real tournaments, and there aren’t any club teams at all. Which all sucks. But it still offered an experience which people wanted anyway. At this stage it looked like EA and FIFA who would need to up their game.
