Chronogamer - NASL Soccer (Intellivision, 1980)

RSS Bot · August 1, 2009

NASL Soccer (Intellivision, 1980)

The last Intellivision game for 1980! How long has it taken me to get here? Short answer? Too damn long!

This is the first Soccer I've played in Chronogaming. The first soccer for a home vidoegame console was actually released in the European edition of Odyssey by Magnavox. They called it Football over there, which makes sense to me.

Okay, Soccer, like Baskeball and Hockey before it, takes the approach of having a reduced number of players on the screen at any given time, but innovates with those players in a way which we will discuss later.

Intellivision Soccer shows about a third of the field at a time, and as your players travel left or right down the field, the camera view pans. This idea of panning camera over a playfield that "exists" off the edges of the screen has been used before in Football and Auto Racing on the Intellivision. Soccer takes the idea a little further. While the camera pans over the field, the players "wrap around".

For instance, if the camera is panning to the right, a player that scrolls off screen to the left will scroll back on screen from the right. This allows you to pass accurately to a player that's "off screen" knowing that they're not there yet, but they will be. This isn't the first videogame to do let you aim "off screen", Asteroids, in the arcades, allows you to practice this virtual type of aiming. If I'm not mistaken, Soccer is the first home videogame to try it. This is a very clever way to make up for the reduced number of players on a large playing field in a game where passing is the key to playing the game well.

Something we enjoyed about this feature, was that the wrap-around effect for a controlled defensive player worked like a teleporter. Rather than chase down a player with the ball, one could run in the opposite direction, teleport (wrap-around) and show up on the other side of the screen, cutting the player with the ball off!

A feature we had to get used to is that you can only shoot or pass the ball if the player with the ball is moving, and then, you can only kick it in the same direction the player is moving. My soccer-playing son had a hard time with this. He correctly pointed out that in soccer, one often must stop the ball, and then kick it, to pass effectively. He's right, of course, but I'm sure the developers knew what they were doing with what they had to work with.

Another odd thing is the inability to switch control to other players on the field. If you pass the ball, the computer controlled recipient will run to meet the ball but only if the computer determines that computer controlled player can receive the pass. If the receiving team member cannot get to the passed ball, it goes out of bounds. After a failed pass, one can't help but feel that they'd have gotten the guy there faster, if only they'd had control of him! When defending, your computer controlled players don't always effectively pursue the offensive player in posession of the ball. This could, um--hypothetically speaking--lead to a person yelling at the slightly anthropomorpic pixels on the TV screen. Not that I did that, no, sir!

One last innovation that I've never seen before: while you are defending your goal is visible on screen, you not only control your defensive player with the controller disc, but you can move your goalie up and down with the action buttons to attempt to block the a kick on goal! This effectively allows you to control the movement of two distinct objects in different locations on the screen simultaneously and in real time. (Is that redundant? Am I making sense or did I overserve myself Red Bull again?)

Okay, that wrap-arounds it up for Soccer and the Intellivision games released in 1980.

We take a slight time warp next time by looking at Dogpatch on the Bally Pro Arcade and a very similar "mystery" game from more recent times. (Hopefully, I'll make a keen video of it on my expected iMac. )

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