KICK OFF REVIEW - November 1992
| When Matt gave me this game, I was at a bit of a loss as to
how to approach the review - so much to say, so little space. Should I maintain a
veneer of objectivity and just factually list all the game's technical flaws? (Like
the ball sometimes going too fast for the scrolling to keep up with and disappearing off
the edge of the screen, or the fact that all your substitutes - of which there are an
infinite number - have the number '12', meaning there can be up to four
number 12s on the pitch at once, or the way you get a total of six sound effects,
including one for the ball hitting the post but not the crossbar, or how, as Jonathan did
when we first played, you can lose a goal completely at random by having your goalkeeper,
outwith your control, throw the ball out, hit one of your defenders in the back and watch
the ball rebound over his head and into the net, the totally incomprehensible options
icons, or...) Nope, there's just far too many of them. How about, then, a good old-fashioned red-faced rant about the outrageousness of the crime being perpetrated on anyone who spends any of their hard-earned cash on this? Nah, preaching to the converted, mate. I thought about trying to write to all those people who loved this game on other formats, explaining to them how, even for someone like me who never liked Kick Off much in the first place, this Super Nintendo version was spectacularly dreadful beyond my worst imaginings, but I figured they'd only read the first bit ('never liked it much in the first place') and use that as an excuse to ignore the rest of it. In the end, I decided to seize on the game's complete failure to capture the first, most basic element of any computer game - control, and how you never ever feel like you've got any. Unfortunately, by then, I'd run out of space.
PICTURE BOXES * Luckily, I've got a bit more room here to just say that if I had 10p for every time that, playing the two-player game, Jonathan and I looked at each other incredulously as (say) pressing 'up' on the joypad and the fire button resulted in the ball shooting off horizontally then proscribing a 30-degree arc and ending up behind where it had started from, I'd have enough money to go out and buy a halfway-decent game instead of this lumpen rubbish. * After a bad foul (which appears to happen completely at random, but at least once every 90 seconds), the fouled player lies on the ground for a bit, the physio comes on, the player limps off, a sub comes on, the ref lectures the fouler and play starts again, a breathtaking (and uninterruptable) 35 seconds later. * Penalties are great. The keeper stands four feet off his line, and when the ball goes in the SNES takes three seconds to notice before it makes the crowd cheer the goal, with a brilliant sample that hilariously cuts dead after two seconds.
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GRAPHICS 40% SOUND 11% GAMEPLAY 5% GAMELIFE 9% OVERALL SCORE 10% VERDICT: Uncontrollable, unplayable, unlovable. Miles worse than any other version (except the Game Boy one) and utterly utterly dismal in its own right. The worst Super Nintendo game I've ever seen. |
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