Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe

The Good
The imaginative premise of the game whereby you can score by so many means such as the wall targets and wounding opponents.The difficulty curve is what makes this game special. You start off with a really rather bad team and only by performing well whilst collecting the money tokens can you improve. The transfer system makes you yearn to collect those coins to improve your team in preparation for the more difficult games to come.

The Bad
Super Nashwan team are just about unbeatable unless you are lucky. Being able to lob the ball over the keepers head and then clattering him to score.

The Bottom Line
Future sports game where the only rule is put the ball in the goal. Fouling is allowed and in fact essential if you want to progress.

The Good
It's fast, brutal and fun! I really can't wait until bitmap brothers get their act together and release speedball 2100. But until then, the speedball 2 map will always have a special place on my desktop.

The Bad
The league is a bit too short...

The Bottom Line
An excellent way to make time fly. Especially when playing against a friend.

The Good
Having played the Amiga version before, I was pleasantly surprised how well the game was ported to PC (DOS), something that can't be said about so many other Amiga => PC ports.

The gameplay is the same, and the VGA graphics are practically identical to the Amiga version. Naturally they could have been even better in PC (VGA has more colors), but as a port this was quite ok.

The sound effects and especially the music depend on what kind of sound card you have. If you had an Adlib or Soundblaster like most PC gamers, the audio was quite inferior compared to the Amiga version.

But if you were lucky enough to own a Roland MT-32 or LAPC-1 sound card/module, you wouldn't believe how much better the music in the PC version sounds, it really puts the theme music in the Amiga version into shame. But then, Roland sound card cost easily what Amiga 500 cost as new...

The sound effects are also quite satisfying on Roland, even if they are generated from the limited sound effect library of Roland LAPC-1. I especially loved how the reverb effect was put into good use, giving the extra ooomph to the ooomph sounds.

The Bad
Due to DOS PC restrictions, getting two controllers (joysticks) to work passably with two-player games was not as easy as it should have been. It was possible to use certain special "double gamepads", but for most people the way to play two player game on PC was that one person was using a controller (a joystick or a gamepad), and the other used the keyboard.

I am unsure if DOSBox DOS emulator is able to fix this problem in modern PCs, allowing you to use two proper gamepads for the same game.

The Bottom Line
Still possibly one of the best futuristic sports games around. You should really try on either on an Amiga emulator (WinUAE) or on PC with DOSBox, you will not regret it.