Soccer is the most favourite sport in Italy since forever, and that's so true that the world clichéd that together with the pizza (common, but chinese and japanese restaurants conquered Italy too), mandolino (not much played nowadays) and mafia (successfully exported and a worldwide speciality now) triad.

I never liked soccer and I've ever found it pretty boring, played on the field and with a joystick. Surprisingly this repulsion didn't help on finding friends, leaving me a lot of spare time to spend on Rainbow Islands for ZX Spectrum and a lot of worries to my parents.

But can you really make a retro collection of games without a soccer game?

That's why I tried, as a total hater and unaware of the genre, to put together an arcade version of the game. This game was built during lunch breaks and my colleagues helped a lot on choosing the basic rules to implement and on testing. This is the only game that caught their interest and that is... bittersweet funny.

Plot!

You really need a plot for an arcade soccer game? Okay. Blue Team and Red Team are in finals! Who will win? Use UP/DOWN/LEFT/RIGHT for moving the selected player (the one with the blinking disc under his foots) and your goalkeeper. When you've the ball, press A BUTTON for kicking and B BUTTON for passing it to a nearby player. When you don't have the ball, hold the A BUTTON for running and tackling other players and hit the B BUTTON to switch to the teammate nearest to the ball.

PS: the classic 'frying pan sound' of the crowd and the PvP feature I've added to the game 3 years later had the expected killer results on my beloved italian soccerhead colleagues.

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Install / Add to home View game sources ...or play it online below!