[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!]
Super Kick Off is a fast-paced top-down football game, with the way the ball runs away from its players as one of its key differentiating points. It also came out after Sensible Soccer, so it was obsolete as soon as it landed. I say that not out of ignorance but as someone who played Kick Off games quite a bit and then never went back to them once the superior alternative emerged. Except it’s not as simple as that. Kick Off 2 for the Amiga and Atari ST came out in 1990, before Sensible Soccer. Likewise Super Kick Off is a version of Kick Off 2 for consoles, and the Mega Drive version of Sensible Soccer was still months off (as was FIFA International Soccer). So this did have a claim to be state-of-the-art, at least for a proportion of players, for a bit of 1993.
The Mega Drive conversion means a much lusher looking game than I remembered from the Amiga, with lovely bright colours and details to the players (including differences between them, hooray). It looks more like a super-advanced Microprose Soccer than I remember. The console version also means an opportunity to move away from the original game’s complex one-button control scheme, but it’s not an opportunity it does much with. Almost everything significant still goes through a single button, which is a bit of a wasted opportunity but keeps it truer to the original. The key function of that button is the unique one of trapping the ball. This is how you keep the ball from just running away from you completely, and getting the hang of doing it at the right moment, while not pressing on the directional pad, is fairly critical.
There’s also a contradiction in the detail being provided by a zoomed-in view when the pace and slipperiness means you need a good view of what is going on around you. It attempts to make up for this with a radar view of the pitch that by default takes up virtually half the screen, but doesn’t even show the ball as a different colour from the players of one team. I’m sure it was possible to learn to read this in a glance, but mostly it just acts as a reminder that there was a whole lot of compromising going on. There is at least an option to reduce its size and rely on luck and hope instead.
I remembered Kick Off 2 as fast and chaotic (and read that the Mega Drive version is slowed down!) but not quite the extreme difficulty of getting any kind of grip on it. After a couple of matches of getting completely overrun I chose to play against a dormant Player 2 just to try to get the hang of the controls and work out how to score a goal. It was still hard-going to the point where the first goal I scored was actually with one button press as Player 2, after I somehow managed to give away a penalty. More memories of the game came flooding back to me on facing the penalty mechanism of an arrow moving backwards and forward across the goal, one element whose tension and random element did feel better than Sensible Soccer’s alternative. After that I did eventually get to scoring goals, at least when not faced with real opposition.
Super Kick Off is a very different experience from games like Italy 1990 and Manchester United Europe, in which it was possible to get stuck in and start dribbling through the whole opposition almost immediately. There is a positive side to its difficulty which it kept regardless of advances outpacing it. When I managed to kick the ball where I wanted it, it felt like an achievement of skill, and when I pulled off a vicious curling shot it felt like a total triumph, even if it missed the goal. In those respects it is much truer to my actual experience of playing football out on school fields at around this time.
