World Championship Soccer
(Elite, 1991)
One of the worst football games on the CPC ever. Why? Well, if the terrible graphics haven’t put you off (yes, it’s Spectrum port time again!), the gameplay certainly will. You can take part in the World Cup or a friendly match as one of 24 nations, choosing which players you want to use in each match. There are a multitude of problems with the game, though. Passing and tackling are all but impossible; you can’t seem to select another player to control on your team; the length of matches is far too long and can’t be adjusted; and the game is much, much too easy – just grab the ball during kick-offs in the first half, and run with it all the way to the other team’s goal. This is a truly shambolic excuse for a football game which is best forgotten about.
This is probably the best golf game for the CPC. You must prove your skills through four courses and three difficulty levels (ranging from kids to professional). The graphics are cute and colourful, and they appear rather quickly on the screen. There’s a little loading time between each hole but it’s worth the wait, because the gameplay is excellent. Even with a joystick, it’s really easy to control the pace and the effects of your shots – but beware of the wind and the slope, and choose your club cleverly...
See also: Leader Board.
Considering the limitations of the CPC’s hardware, this is an excellent rugby game. The front end where you select the game mode, teams, etc. is presented in the CPC’s Mode 0, so it has a colourful, if blocky, look. You can select several real world international teams such as New Zealand, England and Wales. When you get to the actual game, the graphics change to resemble a Spectrum game. However, this is to the benefit of the gameplay, as everything runs smoothly and benefits from decent controls for passing, scrums, running and conversions. This is a supremely playable sports game and in my opinion could be described as the best sports game on the Amstrad CPC.
World Cup
(Artic Computing, 1985)
If this game represented a country in the World Cup, it wouldn’t get past the first round. You, and up to seven other players, can take part in the World Cup and choose from eight (yes, only eight!) countries. Which country you choose affects how well you play. You then get to play a match, which lasts about five minutes. Primitive graphics and jerky scrolling, combined with an irritating tune that plays continuously in the background and frustrating gameplay (such as an apparent inability of your players to tackle and a tendency for control to switch to another player at all the wrong times), make this a game to stay clear of.
See also: World Cup Carnival.
Watch a YouTube video of this game by:
ChinnyVision.
World Cup
(Cult, 1992)
Can you take your team to World Cup glory? This football management simulation sees you appointed as the new manager for your chosen country’s team, and over the course of four years, you have to manage and train your players and arrange friendly matches. The qualifying rounds take place over the second and third years of your campaign, and if you manage to qualify, the World Cup is held in the fourth year. You have a total of 50 players to choose from, and there is a wide range of training and tactical decisions available to you. I found watching the matches to be fairly exciting, provided you speed them up, but when you’re choosing your team or training individual players, you have to jump in and out of menus every time you want to look at a player’s statistics, which is quite annoying and makes it a lot more difficult to make effective decisions.
World Cup Carnival
(US Gold, 1986)
This was the official World Cup computer game back in 1986, and as you may be aware, it has gone down in history as being one of the worst games ever. For a long time, there were rumours that the original game that had been written was so awful that US Gold realised they could not sell it – although that wasn’t quite what happened. Anyway, in desperation, US Gold asked Artic Computing if they could reuse World Cup (which is also an awful game). Some very minor modifications were made, and it was sold at full price, along with a few extras such as stickers and posters which weren’t worth the extra money. It was an outrage, and rightly so. The CPC version includes a few extra bits, which are very poor and very boring indeed and deserve zero marks. In fact, Amstrad Action gave this game 0%, and I certainly agree with them!
See also: World Cup (Artic Computing).
World Cup Challenge
(Players, 1990)
Take England, Scotland or the Republic of Ireland to glory in their bid to win the 1990 World Cup in Italy, through the qualifying rounds, the quarter-finals, the semi-finals, and the big one itself. The match highlights in this game thankfully aren’t too long, although the players are difficult to see as they’re all nearly the same colour as the pitch – that’s smart! Surprisingly for a football management game, there are plenty of graphics, and 128K owners can even hear some music. Lots of graphics, however, means a lack of options, which will disappoint hardened fans of football management games, but I liked the simplicity myself. You’ll probably win the World Cup on the easy skill level on your first go, but the other two skill levels are more challenging.
World Cup Soccer: Italia ’90
(Virgin Games, 1990)
After US Gold’s shameful World Cup Carnival in 1986, it was Virgin Games’ turn to release the official World Cup computer game for the 1990 tournament. The result is good, but somewhat flawed. For some reason, you can only choose to play as one of four teams – England, Belgium, Italy or Spain. What about all the other teams? You also discover that no matter what team you choose, you always play in purple, and your opponents always play in white. Each match always lasts four minutes, but the teams do not swap sides at half time. The animation of the players is very good, but the game feels strangely silent with an almost total lack of sound effects, and it had the potential to be much better and more enjoyable than it is.
Watch YouTube videos of this game by:
jgonza,
Novabug,
Xyphoe.
In 1987 the world felt like a much larger place; air travel was expensive and there was no World Wide Web, so titles like World Games were how we learned about the rest of the planet! There are quite a few events here, so let’s start with my gold medallists: Russian weightlifting and Mexican cliff diving. These are both great fun with smooth gameplay where you can feel the challenge rising as you improve. Silver medals go to German barrel jumping, French slalom skiing and American bull riding, which are not bad but lack finesse. Japanese sumo wrestling is sluggish and unresponsive, so a bronze here. Unfortunately I just couldn’t get the hang of Scottish caber tossing or Canadian log rolling, despite many attempts, so they’re disqualified! Overall, this is a nice collection of mini-games with some great graphics, amusing animations, and suitably international music and atmosphere.
World of Sports is a cartridge game that makes good use of the extra features of the Plus machines. Graphically it looks very impressive with fantastic use of colours and well drawn sprites, and there is also an excellent tune. The gameplay is quite fast and smooth. I really enjoyed seeing how fast the gameplay and movement of sprites were; it felt like I wasn’t playing an Amstrad CPC game, and this is what sets it apart from many other CPC games, especially in the multi-sporting event genre. However I do feel somewhat disappointed by the staying power. While you can choose to practice an event or play all them one after the other, there are only four events – BMX stunt riding, slalom skiing, surfing and cliff diving – and they feel like mini-games. It’s over very swiftly and you are given only three attempts on each event.
Watch YouTube videos of this game by:
ChinnyVision,
Xyphoe.