[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!]
Players of games being split between different formats leads to outcomes like inferior Mega Drive ports of Amiga games reaching a big audience. It isn’t all bad, though. Sometimes it does lead to different kinds of innovations being facilitated by different technology. The co-existence of keyboard-and-mouse Amiga games and joypad-and-graphics-power console games around this period gave rise to a range of experiences that would not otherwise have been possible. And sometimes even porting Amiga games to consoles had good results. Striker works so well as a SNES football game that it’s surprising that find that it originally wasn’t.
There isn’t much in Striker’s version of football that wasn’t already present and at least as well executed in Microprose Soccer some four years earlier. The ball sticks to your players, it moves fast from one goal to another, you can apply an impressive bend on the ball after you kick it. It’s simple and action-packed. Striker does have a couple of different buttons for different kinds of kicks, but the pass button is almost an irrelevance when the best strategy is a tried and tested zig-zagging of one player forwards followed by a diagonal shot into the far corner of the goal. It took me only three matches to perfect this and start running up huge scores against even decent opponents.
What transforms that familiar gameplay is an unfamiliar viewpoint. And that’s where the functionality of the SNES comes in. Striker is viewed from above the pitch looking both down and towards one goal, allowing it to keep all of the hallmarks of top-down gameplay while giving a greater impression of a third dimension. And it works much more smoothly than the Amiga version thanks to the same graphics capabilities of the SNES’s ‘Mode7’ as used in more widely successful games like Super Mario Kart. That supports games to use a background behind its sprites which gets scaled and moved to a less flat-looking shape to give an impression of 3D.
It’s an approach with limitations that make for a very distinct look. The mismatch between sprites and backgrounds gives the impression of Striker’s footballers being cardboard cutouts, playing in front of a background sheet being pulled and stretched by stagehands unseen; a kind of Paper Soccer. It turns every shot cannoning back off a post into another twist of fate in a script. The game I’m most familiar with using the same effect is Final Fantasy VI, and so on some level I imagine my players bearing down on goal stomping their way through the snow in Magitek armour. Even without that association, the puppet show mix of the dramatic and inconsequential is unusual and charming, and says something about the power of looking at the familiar from a new angle.
