Italia 1990

The Good
It loads.

The Bad
Virtually every major aspect of football has been hobbled in some way. Passing the ball is all-but-impossible, as a light tap barely moves the ball and a full press hoofs it 40 yards in a straight line (it’s not possible to curve the ball). Tackling is achieved by blocking the opponent; attempts at anything else result in a foul. Headers are almost non-existent. It’s impossible to shoot from within 12 yards and have the ball stay low enough to go into the net; conversely, the goalkeepers are so bad that shots from 30 yards out will often trickle past their dive (occasionally they will dive to the left, then immediately dive back to the right, without getting up in between). Players don't take up clever positions, and generally look disinterested and bored. The ball makes a metallic-sounding clunk as it lands, and bounces much too high.

The set pieces are ‘all there’according to the packaging,‘there’ appears to be a graveyard of inept design. A black screen with "throw-in"’ or "goal kick" written on it in yellow letters precedes each one, just as you’re preparing to take it, which is completely unnecessary. The timer continues while you prepare to take them. Players don't have to retreat 10 yards before you take them, so you can block goal kicks by standing in front of the taker, this causes the ball to rise into the air, then drop back down into exactly the same place; an interesting interpretation of physics.

Don't expect a challenge either - I won the tournament at the first attempt, with most of my goals coming from simply dribbling the ball into the net on one occasion from the halfway line, with no one ever going near me to make a tackle, and the rest being due to goalkeeping ineptitude facing ineffectual-looking efforts from outside the penalty box.

The Bottom Line
Released straight to budget to tie in with the 1990 world cup, this is a barely-altered C64 port, and unfortunately, if you take your worst possible image of a budget football game, with identical gameplay to the C64 version, and released to unofficially cash in on the 1990 World Cup, and multiply that by a factor of 10, you're still nowhere near appreciating how bad this is.

As well as chronically lacking gameplay, it suffers from poor crowd sounds, the fact that the teams always wear the same kits (red shirts and white shorts for team 1, yellow shirts and black shorts (how many international teams wear those?) for team 2), and that there's only one simple knockout tournament with just 8 teams.

The game also features a circuit-training mode, which is loaded separately from the football game and includes challenges at weight-lifting, squat thrusts, dribbling, penalties and the like. Each one requires a particular joystick movement to complete each one, and involves allowing significant rest to avoid exhausting your athlete. This is simplistic and repetitive, but arguably the better part of the package.