England Championship Special

Moby ID: 18979
DOS Specs

Description official description

Featuring the English national squad in a top-down soccer game, England Championship Special represents British publisher Grand Slam's attempt to cash in on both England's respectable semi-final entry at the 1990 World Cup and the popularity of Anco's acclaimed Kick Off series.

With its 1991 release, English Championship Special is somewhat awkwardly set in between the 1990 World Cup (England made the semi finals, its best result since 1966, then lost to Germany and to Italy in the third-place match) and the European Championship of 1992, to which the "Championship Special" part of the title refers. The squad composition is based on the 1991 status quo, which means you'll go into the Euro tournament with World Cup veterans such as Waddle, Beardsley and Wright, but without 1992 players like Alan Shearer or Alan Smith, infamous substitute to Gary Lineker in the Sweden match.

While Grand Slam got the England team and manager to officially endorse the game (thus having names and photos of 20 squad members from Robson to Gascoigne), they didn't buy the Euro Championship license. You'll be playing seven out of 22 European nations for the "Champions of Europe" title in a nondescript international tournament, from group matches to finals.

Mimicking Kick Off in style and perspective, European Championship Special is geared towards high-speed play at bottom-level complexity, with only one action key for kicks and slides and heads. No cards and hardly any penalties, primitive AI and straightforward gameplay make for goals galore, and the weather system turns out to be wind velocities only, which turns out don't affect the ball at all.

Groups +

Screenshots

Promos

Credits (Amiga version)

7 People (4 developers, 3 thanks)

Designed and Programmed by
  • Tiertex Ltd.
Game Design
Manual Design
Illustration
  • Mike Wood Associates
Packaging Design
  • Stylus Design
Special Thanks to
  • the England Team Squad
  • the Football Association
  • Jon Smith

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 33% (based on 6 ratings)

Players

Average score: 2.6 out of 5 (based on 6 ratings with 1 reviews)

Wow, it’s a mediocre Kick Off rip-off endorsed by a mediocre national team!

The Good
Now England’s national football squad doesn’t exactly rank among the World’s Finest. So one thing that’s interesting about England Championship Special is how painfully accurately it recreates the experience of losing to superior teams, i.e. most of them. Never mind the humiliation (on top of having bought the game, that is), there are those moments of thrilled exhilaration when breathless turbo passes make the ball whiz across the field at goal approach velocity, and then there’s this tiny chest-swelling boost to the atmosphere when you realize that the player clone you just sprint with is actually Gary Lineker, and over there’s Paul Gascoigne and looks the same. Brilliant! Even if it's not the team that sucked so badly at Euro 92.

The Bad
It’s always a mysterious, certainly difficult decision-making process that has developers analyze games they find worthy of plagiarism, then come up with something indefinitely worse.

While England Championship Special may be stripped down to the bare action-football basics, they probably shouldn’t have stripped it of such things as, say, the ability to pass the ball to the next player. Passes are blind hope-and-pray shots in the general direction of where a team member might be standing, which is difficult to judge because the camera is so close to the field that most of it remains obscure. Instead we learn that football players have big heads.

While the AI is fundamentally primitive, it has two quirks that make it a bitch to play, especially since top teams such as Italy outskill most of England’s crew. True, the computer knows no tactics other than passing the ball towards the goal in straight lines, but it does know where its team members stand. In addition, and much more unnerving, it doesn’t dribble. It sends the ball goalwards in lightning-quick pass relays, with little to no time for even the quickest of England’s players to tackle. On the other hand, your players' shot power depends on how long you press the action key, which means that in critical pursuits and tight situations, by the time your player swings his leg for the saving pass across the field, there’ll be nothing but air to hit. Coincidentally, the AI doesn’t seem to suffer from this impediment.

There’s still the weak teams to take on in single matches, and Stuart Pearce as the top scorer in a 10:0 solo run frenzy against Austria is a sight to behold. Also there’s the two-player mode, and tournaments suddenly become a challenge if both players suffer from the same handicaps. But then again, there’s also Kick Off. And the English national squad, well... it isn’t that good anyway.

The Bottom Line
A Kick Off clone messed up badly and patched up with a fig-leaf license -- that’s as unappetizing as it is ultimately superfluous.

Atari ST · by -Chris (7755) · 2008

Trivia

Athletes

England Championship Special's national squad with their corresponding attributes as given in the game:

``` Player Speed Skill Strength Aggression David Seaman 5 2 4 4 Chris Woods 4 1 3 4 Des Walker 4 4 3 4 Mark Wright 3 3 4 3 Stuart Pearce 4 5 4 5 Gary Stevens 3 3 3 4 Paul Parker 3 4 4 3 John Barnes 4 5 3 4 Neil Webb 3 3 4 3 Trevor Steven 3 4 3 4 Steve Hodge 3 2 4 3 Stephen McMahon 3 2 4 4 Paul Gascoigne 5 2 4 5 Chris Waddle 4 5 3 3 Steve Bull 4 4 3 4 Bryan Robson 3 2 4 3 Ian Wright 4 5 2 4 David Platt 5 4 4 3 Peter Beardsley 4 3 3 3 Gary Lineker 5 4 3 4

```

The manual omits McMahon, but lists Nigel Martin, Tony Dorigo, Tony Adams and Lee Dixon, none of which appear in the game. In addition, the manual gives completely different (considerably higher) values for the four player attributes.

Version differences

Amiga and ST versions are the game's original incarnations with both the full set of gameplay elements and most detailed graphics. The Amiga version suffers from bugs that cause players to warp around the playfield.

The PC version is a stripped-down conversion of the 16-Bit originals with coarser graphics. Team morale is omitted, side-view penalty shots are replaced by a cruder top-down variation. Strangely enough, PC version matches cannot be played a full 90 minutes, but only 45 minutes max - likely a bug.

The C64 conversion has no digitized pictures except for the player photos, no referee graphics, weather and morale system aren't implemented, the penalty shots correspond to the PC version. It also features a bug meaning that, after entering the team selection and formation screens, it is not possible to get back out of this to play the actual game.

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by -Chris.

Additional contributors: Martin Smith, Patrick Bregger.

Game added August 28, 2005. Last modified August 17, 2023.