Sensible soccer is back :)

Wonder if it will be as good as I remember the Amiga original.

Here's the lowdown:

http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=61490

Quick Screenie.

There's one developer with his finger firmly on the pulse ... of a corpse. It's no wonder he's rehashing an old game rather than coming up with anything new, although I suspect sales will prove him right anyway.

Consumers can be such mugs. Why buy sensible soccer when you can download an emulator?

well it does look better than the original, and looks kind of cool in a Beano kind of way. As a budget game I can see a lot of people buying it. Something like that would do really well on Xbox live arcade.

Your right though, I downloaded a Amiga V's Ataris ST DVD with emulators and about 3000 games. Funnily enough, the one game I downloaded it for was Oids, which wasn't on there, so I never really played anything but speedball 2 a few times.

It's worth mentioning the Blitz Plus game New Star Soccer too. Looks very close to Sensi Soccer judging by the DixvX movies.

As for the original, my brother and I must have played SWOS non-stop making the Amiga beg for mercy.

We loved the fast pace and relentless gameplay. As for scoring, there was nothing like diving for the ball at a 45 degree angle then quickly switching to a vertical position to shoot the ball straight into the net. Result!

Simple and fast game play like nothing else.

Sensi Soccer always looked crap, graphics was never the point of the game.

I've got the plug and play version of Sensi from Firebox. No footy game has ever beaten the Amiga version of SWOS though.

yeah, but good gameplay and graphics is still better than good gameplay and bad graphics :)

I think it looks pretty good considering how small everything is. Glad they kept the scale down too. Maked it that much easier to play.

Woohoo, after coming back from a 12 hour shift from hell this has put a smile back on my face. My favourite game of all time returns, can't wait :)

No, but really. It was a fantastic two player game. You really had to have some skill to keep the ball. It wasn't stuck to your feet like FIFA games.

I bet it is now :(

By the way. Stop giving me game ideas that will distract me.


Oh, its football. ¬.¬

In that screenie, why do all the players in red have afros? Is it part of their team kit? :P

With regards to Sensi Soccer graphics ..

I prefer them to look simple and clean looking. It made the game easier to follow and you could quite easily pick out your players.

Too right. My brother and I developed 'Sensi Wrist' due the amount of wrenching of the Competition Pro joysticks as we battled to maintain the ball.

big10p - because they're liverpool, of course!

On the Amiga this was definately the daddy of all footy games. I agree with jb about the graphics ... keep them simple and cartoony.

I hope that they don't try and do anything too fancy. If they include the whole management part and the gameplay is much the same then they are onto a definate winner.

The PS1 version of this was a complete joke so heres hoping.

The problem with this idea is that sometimes an upgrade in graphics, particularly from 2d to 3d, requires an upgrade in gameplay. If you just slap fancy graphics on the game, you essentially ruin the origional gameplay, because all the details of pixel to pixel speed and collision detection go out the window. Dev will then rarely spend any time getting those things optimal for the new engine and as a result, you wind up with Frogger on the psx, or worse, you wind up with a game that feels nothing at all like it should. And then It might as well be a whole new game.

Graphical detail isn't part of gameplay, but the fine tuning of the gameplay can be set off balance by changing large aspects of the graphics. Not only that, but games today require a lot more depth in the mechanics to pull off a convincing sense of suspension of disbelief. 2d low rez sprites worked well because your mind fills in the blanks, thusly creating details that aren't there, or even emotion in a 4 frame animation that shouldn't be possible. The more high rez the graphics, the more you have to animate and the more variance in animations you need to portray the same level of realism.

Look at the change from Final Fantasy 6 to 7, and how the emotional context of the characters in 6 were just as deep as in 7, while 6 had essentially 5 'poses' jumping, standing, kneeling, looking down, and dead. Where as final fantasy 7 had a wide range of character animations, from subtle details with hand movements and facial contortions, to bends and rude gestures.

And then from 7 to 8, where again the detail grew and again the number of animations grew, but the emotional context of the characters had begun to decline even more.

As you take things away from the imagination, you have to validate them more to be convincing. Which is why, when you upgrade a game like this, you need to overhaul some its parts. Esspecially the animations and variety of players.

If you only have 1 model per team, 1 set of animations that are basic movements, run, walk, kick, and so on, you are going to end up with a game that feels shallow and bland. It will lack the charm and the presense of the lower rez game, because you will be asked to believe that the players are doing things you -could- see but are not, where as in a low rez game, you imagine they are doing things that you -couldn't- see because your brain is in fill-in-the-blanks mode.

I think the graphic style and detail in the screenshot looks fine for the kind of game. I'm afraid I simply don't care for 2d games much anymore. Been that way since the first voodoo card and apocalypse 3D cards came out. Bought both in the same month and never looked back :)

Think this is mainly because I typicaly prefer making games to playing them. And for me at least, the interactive 3D side is what makes it fun. Thats why the minute I left university and didn't have to do short CG animated films etc, I went straight into games, which was frowned upon at the time.

Uhoh, it should've stayed dead after the first game. It was a cute little game, a little bit TOO sensible, but all the millions of remakes was a bit much. Of course, they HAD to go 3D because 3D is the cure-all for everything.

Sensible Soccer & Goal were excellent 2 player games on the Amiga. The problem is the PC is not geared for more than one player present at a time so I doubt any new version of SS will grab me like it did before.

To make it work you need to have 2 people sat infront of the same screen / room battling it out with each other.

3D Sensible Soccer? Hmmmmm, not so sure. What is wrong with the original birds eye view?, nothing!! Often good 2D games do not translate to 3D very well, for example Sydicate.

Leave the classics to retro remakes only!

For me, all 300 versions of FIFA (each with minor changes) have never grabbed my attention. They don't have the raw playability of Sensi Soccer. Neither does any other PC football game. If the developers can keep right feel of the original I'll certainly be reserving a place of my HD.