What were your first impressions of Kick Off / Kick Off 2 / Goal!? Did they change?

[Megalomaniac]

Keep it nice please.

It's fair to say that Kick Off revolutionised videogame football. Most previous Amiga football games were C64 conversions designed within that system's sprite features (MicroProse Soccer, Emlyn Hughes) or were just plain lousy (Amiga Soccer, Peter Beardsley). Even by the time Kick Off 2 came out a year later, there was nothing else that was too well-regarded.

The top-down view wasn't unique, but the loose ball control and emphasis on trapping the ball was very new. It made for a game that was tricky to control at first, but had lots of potential for amazing moves, tricks and goals. Certainly, a lot of reading and absorbing the manual, plus time in the practice mode, will be required before you can consistently get the players to do what you expected.

The majority of reviews for KO1 were favourable, though a few of them read as if they hadn't fully mastered the controls but believed that they would. It did well enough to produce a datadisk, a spinoff in Player Manager, a sequel, and hordes of datadisks for the sequel - and for Virgin to make a big deal of poaching Dino for Goal! It made a previously small company big - and once Dino left, they pretty much disappeared without trace. Kick Off 2 got wall-to-wall rave reviews on release, perhaps mostly coming from reviewers who'd spent up to a year on the first one, so didn't find the sequel as big an adjustment as someone who was only used to MicroProse Soccer or Z80 Match Day?

So, what did you all think of it at first? Was it an instant favourite, or did you have to work at it? Or are you one of the people who never mastered it at all? If so, which football games did you play instead?

[Zak]

The Football games I have played were always the same. You push the joystick into a direction and then the Football player will walk into that direction with constant speed. When you shoot, the player will shoot in a straight line into the direction he is walking along. You cannot dribble the ball like in real life, often times you can't perform a tackling, you can't shoot a volley shot, it's very limited. Kick Off 2 was a step into the right direction and solved some of the problems. I found the after touch controlled shots very interesting, although every other person I knew hated that option and would turn it off.

But then I was going to the apartment of a friend of my brother when I accompanied him visiting there. He had Goal! loaded and running on his Amiga, when we entered. I could play some with it and it felt instantly right. The way you can alter the speed of the player by tipping the joystick instead of holding it into one direction, the way the ball is not totally glued to the feet, but a little bit, that produces the perfect and intuitive dribble controls that I have never seen in any other Football game, not even in FIFA today.

Goal! has it's downsides, but the controls are the best of any Football game of the planet up to this date. It uses only one button. PES, or what it's called now, uses so many buttons, that I have to study the gamepad for pressing the correct button while the game is running with me being blind to it. You have to attend lessons before being able to play a bit. It's not that intuitive. I didn't need to practice Goal!. I was good right away. It's just right.

The downsides are that there is some game situations that are frustrating and always the same. For example, when the goalkeeper is not able to keep the ball in his hands and the ball deflects off him, you always think you can manage to reach the ball - but you can't and the computer will score a goal from the rebound.

It's not the difficulty that everyone complains about that bothers me, because I find that all these people just play with the perfect best teams and then complain that they win 10-1 to any opponent. Err, how about playing with a weaker team then? It can be fun to play against relegation rather than to win every match.

[van_dammesque]

KO2 was the bees knees at the local amiga club, I thought it was too fast and uncontrollable when trying to dribble. This coming from a SWOS fan, but previous liked matchday 1 and 2 and emyln hughes on the ZX.

[Calabazam]

Kick off 2 was hard but interesting. Goal was a big improvement in 1993 with excellent controls, though crazy fast in Ace mode. I think the best way to play it for a strong player is in Pro or Semi Pro to not run box to box in 4 seconds.
In 2023? Unplayable, i wonder how i could play it 30 years before.

[phx]

Originally Posted by Zak

the controls are the best of any Football game of the planet up to this date. It uses only one button.

I can only agree! It took some time to master it, but it offered so many possibilities. For the first time you could play tricks on your opponent, like in real football.And as I already wrote in other threads about multiple buttons: a good game design only needs a single button!

PES, or what it's called now, uses so many buttons, that I have to study the gamepad for pressing the correct button while the game is running with me being blind to it.

Same here. I never liked to play another football game again, after Kick Off and Goal. The modern games look nice, but controls (especially with a game pad) are not for me.Player Manager, which I think appeared between KO1 and KO2, was my favourite. Combining manager elements with it was brilliant! Especially the option to save your managed team and tactics to disk and then play against the teams of your friends. We had so much fun!

[Amigajay]

Kick Off and the sequel were amazing football games of their time, the sequel adding aftertouch and different pitches and mud etc was amazing at the time and felt like a big step up. Funnily enough i thought Goal! didn’t feel like as a big leap as KO1-KO2.

I remember just before Sensible Soccer came out my mate got an early version and we all laughed and said it was Kick Off for beginners as the ball stuck to your foot! Obviously the more we played it we loved it just as much.

But you can never take the 2-3 amazing years Kick Off ruled the roost!

[demether]

I liked kickoff, since it went with my brand new amiga 500 back in the days. But when sensible soccer have been released, I never looked back to kickoff. Even if Goal is the best version in my opinion.

[acidbottle]

Bare in mind that Kick Off was well before Sensi Soccer, so upon first play I was blown away. Had great fun on original Kick Off, especially after the controls were mastered and recall it being brutally difficult on the hardest setting.

When Kick Off 2 emerged for the 1990 World Cup though it took the game to whole new level, especially multiplayer. Would be my go to footy game right up until Sensi World of Soccer blew all the others away with its gameplay.

Goal on the other hand, terrible. Looked so much better but felt so wrong and was impossibly tricky to play, even with hours of practice.

[Memory Station]

Kick Off 2 was lots of fun. One of the best Amiga games of 1990.

It got a remake in 2016 called Kick Off Revival It's basically the same game as Kick Off 2, but it was poorly reviewed, called the second worst game of 2016, and worst football game ever. It seems like the game hasn't changed, but player expectations have.

[Megalomaniac]

Interesting set of views so far, thanks everyone.

My experience was of playing KO2 fairly briefly against a friend who'd had it for a while, and was rather good at it. Inevitably I wasn't patient enough at such a young age to read the manual, and I got trounced every time. Don't think I could keep the ball under control for any length of time. Never ended up playing him at it again, and I pretty quickly formed a complex against it. Quite a negative start, really.

It was MicroProse Soccer that I had first when I got an Amiga, and I enjoyed that to an extent, despite the limitations of it being a C64 original. Once I got Sensible Soccer I didn't find the control system instantaneous - think it took hours or days before I really felt in control, but I stuck at it and quickly got hooked. To be honest, I barely gave Kick Off 2 another thought, definitely told myself that Scottish reviewer was right. In my head it was another of those games that was before my time, and not as good as the games being released now, so I had no reason to care about it.

When I got the World Cup Year 94 compilation much later, it was for Championship Manager and Striker, not Goal! So I was quite surprised to actually enjoy Goal! (and hate Striker actually) - with practice I did feel in control of the players, and could score the odd decent goal, even remember saving some to disk.

Limited attempts at Kick Off 2 more recently have still felt more difficult though, in Goal! the players did what I expected them to do, much more than KO2. I'm pretty sure I'd never played Kick Off 1 at all until the emulation era.

it's nagged at me though, as one of those games I'm determined to master. After a few attempts at KO2 I've found myself trying KO1 (with the Extra Time disk's features), and I can now see the appeal, especially against contemporaries. I still find it uninstinctive to control, but I'm making progress, and finding tricks that work (coaxing CPU players into fouling you is definitely doable). Being able to play a tournament at the third skill level at least makes me feel that I have a chance - though I'm still to beat a full 11-man opposition team with no red cards. My thinking is to master this before trying KO2 again, when I have time.

The thing is, there's a lot wrong with Kick Off 1. Frequent slowdown (if a slowdown period strikes at the start of injury time, the whole of injury time plays like that). What feels to me like limited sound - even MicroProse Soccer has music, and the total silence that follows an own goal (as if the crowd aren't sure if it still counts as a goal) feels amateurish. Set-pieces (mainly throw-ins) often go to clearly the wrong team, and there are other bugs too. There's only one tournament, and you can only play it at (effectively) the second-highest skill level, so it's too hard for new players and potentially too easy for veterans. No different pitches, no weather, no action replays, no player names, no kit editing (or change strips). The Extra Time datadisk, KO2, the KO2 datadisks and Goal! gradually improved on most of those things, but the point is that the game achieved popularity despite these issues.

And yet, I can see why people got hooked - and, more exactly, why they stuck with it even if success wasn't instant. MicroProse Soccer may win on most of the features and options, but Kick Off feels like eleven men against eleven, a real game with full control (and fouls, unlike MicroProse). Oddly I've never been drawn to having multiple buttons for control either, maybe it's what I grew up with but I find it hard to learn multiple button features.

Winning a game of Kick Off 2 at the top skill levels should definitely be on every Amiga fan's bucket list, but it's a big job. A few comments that it doesn't stand up well now though - is this compared to Sensible, or the early Megadrive FIFAs, or SNES Super Soccer?

[Zak]

@Megalomaniac: the trick about Dino Dini's Football games (KO, KO2, Goal!) is in my opinion that you have to get into the situation that you can lay across the ball with a pass parallel to the goal line in front of the goal and then score with the pass receiving player. This is the way to go in KO 1, where you don't have after touch controls to score goals from distant shots with and it still works in the other games. Pass the ball sideways and then shoot onto the goal.

Therefore I find it way more simple than SWOS where I can play for hours without scoring a goal and I just don't understand how to score a goal or say, they explained it to me, but I can't reproduce it. It just doesn't work. That's why I hardly ever play SWOS.

[eXeler0]

I came from playing a ton of Emelyn hughes on the c64 to Kick off 1 on A500. I thought it was unreal! The pace, speed was incredible. However it did feelnit lacked some control in the shooting and that was of course fixed in KO2 with the After Touch. I played a ridiculous amount of KO2 and I still do it from time to time.
The CPU ”AI” is really impressive in KO2, if you havent played for a while the CPU opponent will offer a challenge.
When Goal came out I was really looking forward to it. It looked good and on paper it had great features… but I simply could NOT get used to it and no matter how much I tried to like it, i couldnt..
I even made several new attempts years later but with the same outcome. That game simply is not for me.

A word about Player Manager, it was amazing, but obviously everyone wanted the KO2 engine in it. But I had great fun with it.

[Megalomaniac]

Maybe being used to Kick Off 2 makes Goal! more difficult somehow? Perhaps the controls are subtly different, but different enough to completely throw you off if you're subconsciously doing what you did when playing KO2? Perhaps that explains my experience in reverse, of having played Goal! first and finding it more intuitive and responsive than the Kick Offs?

[fxgogo]

I had a dodgy copy of KO2 and made joystick splitters so four of my mates could play together. It was easily the best multiplayer game I had for my Amiga.

[CCCP alert]

Played really nice, underwhelming visuals. Ditto for Sensi Soccer games. My opinion hasn't changed.

[Megalomaniac]

I'm not sure what's more impressive there, making a joystick splitter for yourself, or (seemingly) mastering Kick Off 2 without the manual? Presumably someone had mastered the game initially and was able to demonstrate the controls to everyone else?

I don't find the visuals to be a problem in any of those games, I'd rather this than have huge sprites that limit the view area by too much, as you get in some football games. The pitches are fairly well drawn and (in KO2 and Sensi, not KO1) look different enough from each other. Sensi's players are at least well defined, KO2's would ideally look better (and it's a shame they're all white, even in Goal!) but they're animated well enough. One area where Sensible does beat all the Dino games, though, is sound (but I guess most 1992 games beat most 1989/1990 games on sound). Those crowd samples really add to the feel.

[Zak]

The Goal! SFX with the crowd turned on isn't enough for you though? I think you need the slow memory expansion for it, maybe some people forget to turn it on in emulation? I personally turn off the crowd in the options menu because I like to listen to podcasts or audio books while playing a league or cup and you can't understand a word with the crowd yelling all the time.