Ultimate SOCCER
■ platform: Mega drive ■ PUBLISHER: Rage Software ■ Year: 1993 ■
Back in the 16-bit era of videogaming, Rage Software was rather well known for its Striker series of football games on the SNES and Amiga – they also certainly featured on Gamesmaster quite a lot. Ultimate Soccer is the original Mega Drive version of said game, and there’s several reasons why it sticks out in a way that the franchise’s other games perhaps don’t.
One joy that has sadly been lost in today’s football games is the art of six-a-side indoor footie – since the death of FIFA Street, you just don’t see it anymore. Ultimate Soccer captures it perfectly and understands that there’s nothing better than beating opponents by bouncing the ball off the wall and then smashing it in from 30 yards. The customisation options also help – setting the ball control to loose and the ball itself to lighter than air can make for some quite ridiculous goals, which is another great joy of old footie games.
When you play Ultimate Soccer, you can expect to score many blistering goals – as the F2 would put it, ‘It’s all about the swaz tekkers.’ There’s nothing stopping you from blasting in a free kick from the halfway line, or curling one in from the corner flag – and with a bit of practice you can do it on the regular pitch too, where you can also add hurricane winds for even more ludicrous whippage. With only a couple of buttons required for total control, the end result is a simple, Sensi-esque game of football that gets exactly what the people want – sometimes you just want to kick back and send the ball into space off an opponent’s head, take it down perfectly and score a screamer. Football games don’t need to be more complex than that.