Goal! Goal! Goal!

• Release Date: 1995
• Genre: Sports
• Style: Soccer
• Similar Games: Goal! (Nintendo Entertainment System), Soccer Brawl (Arcade), Goal! (Super Nintendo Entertainment System), Goal! Two (Nintendo Entertainment System), Soccer Brawl (Neo Geo Advanced Entertainment System), Super Sidekicks (Neo Geo Advanced Entertainment System), Super Sidekicks 2 (Neo Geo Advanced Entertainment System), The Next Glory: Super Sidekicks 3 (Neo Geo Advanced Entertainment System), Goal! (Game Boy)

Game Description

Goal! Goal! Goal!, released in 1995, is an arcade style soccer/football game. Players can choose from twenty-eight teams from various nations, each rated in kicking, defense, and speed. Players can also choose one of six formations for their team before a game. The formations range from defensive configurations with only two forwards, to aggressive formations with four forwards.

The game sports 2D graphics, and players view the field from a tilted overhead perspective. Only a small section of field is visible at any time, with the section being determined by the ball's location. To aid in orientation, the game displays a small model of the field at the bottom of the screen with a yellow box indicating the current viewing area.

The game follows the basic rules of soccer/football. Each team has eleven players, with one being the goalie. The object of the game is to kick the ball into the other team's goal while keeping them from doing the same to your goal. While on offense players can short kick the ball, pass, or shoot. The strength of a shot is determined by how long the shoot button is held before being released. When on defense players can either tackle or slide. Players do not get to manually switch between team members while on defense; instead the computer automatically places players in control of the team member closest to the ball.

When two players play together they each pick a team and compete against each other in one game. The single player game is a tournament mode in which the player's team must play and defeat the game's other teams.

Roots & Influences

This game is based on the sport of soccer as it's played throughout the world. It's similar to the popular series of Super Sidekicks games which was also available on the NeoGeo system.

Review: Overall

Goal! Goal! Goal! gives you a selection of twenty-eight national teams, each rated in three skill categories. In theory, that would be a lot of gameplay. You can theoretically try out different playing styles to suit various teams' strengths and weaknesses. Practically, choosing national teams has no effect other than altering what your players look like.

This is really disappointing. The England team is rated as one of the fastest in the game, while the Japanese team is one of the slowest. I had them matched together and was hoping to see a contest of where team Japan compensated for their slower speed with more ball passing, and where the English took full advantage of their superior speed by driving straight to the goal. Instead what I found out was that every Japanese player ran just as fast as every English player. After some more experimentation I discovered that all the teams played exactly the same, with uniform look being the only difference between them. If you're not going to use any team stats during the game, why bother putting them up on the team select screen?

By far the game's biggest problem is the fact that you can't switch players while on defense. The computer is supposed to handle that, giving you the best player to make a defensive play. But it does a pretty awful job of that. Sometimes you'll be approaching the guy with the ball, when suddenly and without warning the computer changes your controlled guy to someone clear across the field. Other times you'll be converging on the ball with four or more players, but you can't make the play because anytime you get close with one player the game switches and you find yourself in control of another player on the other side of the ball, now running away from the play. Playing defense in this game is maddeningly frustrating, and coming up with the ball is more a matter of luck than skill.

Playing offense is much easier. In fact it's too easy. The computer has very little idea what effective defending is; most times it'll react by having one of its players run behind your ball carrier while everyone else on the field, including players between your guy and the goal, watches idly. Sometimes you can actually drive right between two defenders without them reacting to you at all. The AI in this game is just poor.

Rounding out the game's design problems is its viewable area. You don't get to see the entire field all at once, instead you see a zoomed in portion corresponding to where the ball is. That portion is really small though, and you can't even fit the entire circle at half field into your view. Playing the game with such a tiny section of the field viewable leads to a lot of problems. You could be five feet away from the goal and not see the goalie. You could also be madly looking for your players on defense when the closest player to the ball is just out of the viewable area. Not a good design decision.

The game's graphics are substandard. All the players are animated poorly, and everyone on the same team looks exactly the same. With only two players to draw sprites for per team in the form of the goalie and the standard player, you'd think that Visco could have packed more frames of animation in. Sadly that is not the case. The field itself looks like fake grass, nothing special. Game sound is pretty tinny and fake sounding. There is an announcer, but he doesn't have a lot to say during the game.

Goal! Goal! Goal! is a sloppy arcade style soccer/football game that ultimately suffers from a host of poor design decisions. Even if it was the only game of its type on the Neo Geo the game isn't worth much playtime. But the system has a lot of soccer/football games, some much better than this.

Review: Enjoyment

Playing on defense is simply frustrating, and offense is a little too easy to be exciting.

Review: Graphics

Every player on a team looks exactly the same. The player animations aren't up to par, but the players are fairly large.

Review: Sound

Standard fare. Nothing earth shattering.

Review: Replay Value

You'd think that 28 teams makes a lot of replay right? Not in this game, you're actually getting one team that can look 28 different ways.

Review: Documentation

Standard documentation

goal	basketball goal
Mundial Goal	soccer goal