System: Neo-Geo/Arcade
Year: 1995
Developer: Visco
Screenshots From: Neo Geo For Life

The Skinny:
    •Simple arcade-style soccer borrowing from Tecmo World Cup. Features international teams in a World Cup-style tournament.
The Good:
     •Inexplicably addictive
     •Decent variety of goals possible including from outside the 18 yard box
     •Neat powerbar
The Bad:
     •Poor graphics compared to its 1995 peers
     •Rugby-style tackling
     •Frustrating 2-player

If it were a footballer it’d be:
- Mick Harford; ugly, lazy and out of shape but still, inexplicably, a cult hero.

Overview:

Developed by obscure developer Visco for the Neo-Geo/Arcade GoalGoalGoal! borrows heavily from Tecmo World Cup and a number of other games developed around the same time. Released in 1995 this derivative arcade title somehow adds up to slightly more than the sum of its shoddy parts.

Graphics:

For a game released in 1995 and on the powerful (and ridiculously expensive) Neo-Geo, G3 is decidedly underwhelming in the graphics department. Its overall visuals lag significantly behind other Neo-Geo titles released around the same time, particularly Super Side Kicks 2 which looks a hell of a lot better. The game’s graphics are also easily bested by SNES titles including the holy grail ISS Deluxe (which also came out in ’95).

Starting off with the good news, I like the game’s default camera angle which is a high, zoomed out side view. This gives you a much better view of the pitch than in Super Side Kicks & Neo Geo Cup ’98, and I prefer this type of view compared to the diagonal view of games like Fifa International Soccer and ISS Deluxe. G3 also scores some points for having a radar (a rarity in most coin-op soccer titles) though the radar only shows three points; the location of the ball carrier, the location of the nearest defender, and the location of a teammate in the direction you’re facing. Not perfect, but not bad either.

I also like the details surrounding the pitch are well done. Beyond the obligatory ad hoardings lining the sides of the pitch, behind each goal you can see a variety of photographers, journalists and subs. You don’t see much of the fans with the game’s camera angle so seeing these guys when you shoot over or wide reminds you that someone’s watching the match.

Now the bad and there isn’t a better place to start than the shithouse 2D player models that look like rejects from Matchday II. There’s absolutely no variation in size, hairstyle or build. There’s also no variation in skin color in teams so if you play as France or Holland everyone is white. The player models are made worse by the choppy and sometimes poorly synched animations. On occasion, replays of bicycle kick or volleyed goals you’ll see the kicking animation finish it’s cycle before the ball even reaches the player supposed to be kicking it! This doesn’t happen all the time, but when it does you can’t help but scratch your head in confusion as to how a guy can jump in the air, do a bicycle kick hitting nothing but air, but as he’s falling to the ground the ball hits him and flies into the net. Weird.

The graphical crap-ness is rounded off by the total lack of weather effects, lack of variation in pitch types and lack of variation in goal celebrations (they might as well have mo-capped Alan Shearer’s customary hand-in-the-air ‘please sir can I have some more?’ goal celebration).

Audio

Audio? What audio? Oh, you mean the looped crowd nose, a cheer for a goal, a jeer for a foul and a bongo drum for when you hit the ball? Yeah, it’s lame. The rugby style tackles have sounds ripped right out of a fighting game but fortunately Visco spared us the pained grunt/scream that you hear in Super Soccer (SNES). On a positive side though, there’s no music during gameplay (unlike many of its coin-op arcade brethren)…..not much but it’s something.

Features/Options

It’s a coin-op! 28 teams and one world cup-style tourney where you start in the group stages. That’s it. What did you expect for a quarter, the Master League?

Gameplay

GoalGoalGoal! is a simple old-school arcade soccer title, not much depth but its still quite a bit of fun while it lasts. It doesn’t come close to the reigning Neo-Geo champ; Neo-Geo Cup ’98, however it does have some fun gameplay aspects that help it hold its own.

Controls are simple and straight-forward with three buttons and a joystick for movement. On offense, you have one button for pass (of the automatic variety, straight to a teammate in the direction you’re facing), a second button for shoot, and a third button for a manual kick into space (can be used as a shot or a pass). No special dribbling moves and no speed burst! Players on the ball do randomly jump over slide tackles but as far as I can tell there’s no rhyme or reason to this. Bicycle kicks, volleys and headers are all position dependent. When you’re on defense, you have a slide tackle button and a button for a ‘shoulder barge’ (which is similar to a rugby tackle). Player switching is, unfortunately, completely automatic which can take a while to get used to (especially in this age of manual or semi-auto switching in soccer games).

GoalGoalGoal!’s ball physics are a mix of 1/3 unscripted and 2/3 scripted/ball on rails stuff…..okay, so I pulled that ratio out of my ass but it sounded neat. Anyway, the ball moves on wires for regular passes and for all shots inside the area that are on the deck. However, when you use the 'kick into space' button the ball movement is fairly unscripted and you can set up some half-decent through passes. Also, shooting from outside the box, as well as headers, volleys and bicycle kicks are unscripted, which leads to a modest variety of goals that can be scored.

Shooting occurs via an interesting powerbar which takes a good 3-4 seconds to fill (making it much slower than in most other games with similar shooting systems). The length of time it takes to charge up the bar, combined with the frantic pace of the game makes charging up a shot to even 1/3 power a challenge. To balance this out, however, you can actually hold down the shoot button and charge up your shot while moving. Another aspect of the shooting that I like is the fact that the shoot button doesn’t automatically target the goal – it just shoots it in the direction your facing. Because of this you can use the shoot button to make some bullet cross-field passes.

As I mentioned before, the pace of this game is wickedly fast – imagine an EPL derby match with everyone on steroids. You have about a second and half on the ball before an opposing player rushes in to tackle you (hmmm…..so a few less seconds than in Winning Eleven 8……) which means you’re always on the move; either deftly evading tackles by the skin of your teeth, or spraying lush 40 yard cross-field passes. You rarely have time to breathe and for a coin-op this works perfectly. Matches are two minutes long (plus stoppages) and the average score of a match is usually 2-1 or 3-1. The fact that you can shoot from anywhere on the pitch, as opposed to when the computer ‘lets’ you in Super Side Kicks/Neo Geo Cup ’98 means you have a little more attacking freedom.

What also helps to make the play more varied is the unique, but ridiculously odd, system of control with automatic passes. As mentioned before the main pass button automatically passes to the nearest teammate in the direction you’re facing, be it a short 2 yard pass on the floor, or a 30 yard lob downfield. What makes this system so interesting (and some would say, retarded!) is the fact that if you move around the player on the receiving end of the pass the ball will actually automatically curve in mid-air to meet the receiver! As a result you can have banana curved passes or even long passes that start off veering left and then suddenly swing to the right. 

So how (or why) is this odd anomaly of physics good for the gameplay? Mainly, because it helps to create situations where you can have players jostling for position to receive a pass. Since you have about a second on the ball before you have the shit kicked out of you by an opposing player you have to make sure you’re in enough space when you receive a pass that you can actually control it and do something with the ball before you’re assaulted. This also works for crosses into the box where you have a second or two window of time to move your striker away from his marker and into space so he can have a shot!

Unfortunately, it’s not all roses for GoalGoalGoal! and there are several gameplay issues that cause frustration and decrease the entertainment value. Starting in net, regardless of what team you pick, your CPU controlled goalie is a graduate of the Jerzy Dudek school of goalkeeping; i.e. fantastic saves mixed with a nice heaping of braindead errors, a dash of an unwillingness to leave the area, and topped off with two scoops of severe rebounditis. The rebounds are the biggest problem as they often (of course) go straight to the feet of awaiting strikers (this is known as the ‘Andy Cole Phenomenon’^TM).

The WWF-style tackling can get tiresome very quickly, especially when you have a packed midfield that suddenly starts to resemble the Royal Rumble. The tackling is also compounded by the fact that the refs are blind and call fouls completely randomly. You feel a bit jipped when the same ‘tackle’ you’ve done 20 times already in a match suddenly becomes a ‘foul’ when it happens in the penalty area.

Another problem is that it can be very difficult to judge the trajectory of goal kicks as the camera doesn’t pan to follow the ball (nor zoom out) and for some odd reason the shadow of the ball as it falls doesn’t accurately represent where its going to land. Naturally, the CPU players have no problems intercepting these passes. As a result you can sometimes find yourself annoyingly pinned in your own end following a goal kick and in a stroke of game design genius you cannot take a short goal kick.

Finally, there isn’t any real variation between teams except for speed and shooting power. There also isn’t any variation in playing style – its always balls to the wall, 100mph attacking football which, while it works for a coin-op, limits the title’s depth.  

Longevity/Replay Value 

Not much as by its very nature as a coin-op title it was never going to have the replay value of a PC or console-based title. Also, the lack of different playing styles and the only moderate variation in goal scoring hurts the replay value.

Overall

While it’s by no means a great title, I had a lot more fun with GoalGoalGoal! than I expected. You might be wondering why a game that on paper sounds like a variation on the worst of the Fifa series gets a half decent review despite faults like rebounds and rugby tackling. The main reason is that GoalGoalGoal! doesn’t pretend to be a simulation like Fifa and the lack of 360 degree spins and a decent powerbar help make the game more varied. You actually feel a sense of accomplishment when you score a goal which is always a sign of a decent game. Furthermore, the lack of a speed-burst button means that at its core, GoalGoalGoal! is a game of pass and move – just how soccer should be (even if the passes have some serious voodoo). GoalGoalGoal! also holds up fairly well against other Neo-Geo titles and while it doesn’t have the intricate build-up play of the Super Side Kicks series, the larger field and the shooting from anywhere make the goalmouth action more frantic.

At the end of the day GoalGoalGoal! gives plain, simple, quarter-crunching fun. Don’t expect much depth, but do expect some thrills.