I noted with Italy 1990 that it was a rather late moment to finally cover a straightforward football game, but of course there were many, many such games before that. Italy 1990 was fairly representative in not being very good, especially within the class of games going for simulation. The business of attempting to accurately represent a football match tended to get in the way of that kind of game being particularly fun to play. There are two different approaches to solving this problem. One, wait for time and technology to make the aim a bit more possible. Two, take a different gameplay approach to representing football. More on both of those to come. Or three, turn the problem inside out, and make Speedball.
Speedball 2 (which is an upgrade on the original rather than a complete revision) is really very similar to Italy 1990 and other football games of the time – more similar than certain better football games we’ll see soon are. In both, sportspeople move around a field of play in eight directions from a top-down view, zoomed in to the point where you can’t see very far. Once a participant gets the ball, it sticks to them until they pass, shoot, or get tackled. When your opponent has the ball, your control switches to the nearest defender and you can slide tackle. At heart, it’s the same gameplay model. It’s just much better thanks to one of the best bits of outside-of-the-eighteen-yard-box thinking in sports games history, which is to solve the issue by removing football from the equation.
One by one, the things which get in the way in Italy 1990 and similar are ticked off and chucked out. The whole ball-magnetically-sticking-to-you thing makes no sense? Turn this into a sport where players carry the ball! Defending is too difficult when half of your tackling options result in fouls being given? Make it a lawless future sport fought by armoured goons where the more violent a tackle, the better! Too many hold-ups when the ball goes out of play? Stick bouncy walls at the edges! Goalkeepers invincibly hanging onto the ball slowing things down even more? Make throwing the ball to the goalkeeper and then wiping them out not only possible, but a strong tactic! Matches a bit samey? Have different arenas with different bonus features and randomly appearing power-ups!
Do all of that, and couple it with some well thought through rules and AI, and it turns out that the underlying gameplay can be great fun after all. For me it’s more than enough to overcome a lack of love for the specific acquired taste that is the game’s sports metal aesthetic, though I’ll also grant that in its context the subtitle and team name “Brutal Deluxe” is an absolutely perfect combination of two words. Plus there’s something to be said for the fact that inventing a fictional corrupt and amoral sport means not having to support, license from, or name your game after, any real-world corrupt and amoral sports governing bodies. So Speedball 2 scores a moral victory too.
