Game Review: Five-A-Side Soccer (Amstrad, MAD)

Even though Mastertronic sourced many of their games from other publishers, there were times when only one version was available. In these situations, they turned to many of their trusted developers to convert games to other systems to maximise their sales potential. One such release was the Amstrad version of Five-A-Side Soccer.

Five-A-Side Soccer’s Origins…

Originally released for the Commodore 64 by Anirog and developed by Ken Grant, it started life as the ice hockey game Slap Shot. It was something of a mixed bag in terms of gameplay and despite being quite innovative featuring digitised speech, too much of the original hockey gameplay elements remained as our review explained.

Sir Alan Steps On To The Pitch

So on to this Amstrad port, converted by veteran Stephen Curtis, and it opens up with a title track by Rob Hubbard, more well known for his work on the Commodore 64. Making good use of the AY chip, it builds up anticipation for the game nicely and straight away leads you into believing you’re in for a treat.

To be honest, Five-A-Side Soccer on the Amstrad has been stripped down to basics during its conversion to the Amstrad. Apart from the single or multiplayer game options, there is nothing else to choose from. The difficulty settings are no longer present, and neither are the penalty shoot out games. The only further option you have available to you once you have selected a 1 or 2 player game is to enter your name.

Five A Side Rules

As the title suggests, Five-A-Side Soccer follows the more relaxed version of the game using teams of five players instead of the traditional eleven. There’s no offside rule, pitches are smaller and in this particular game it’s set indoors ensuring that the ball is kept in play at all times thanks to the arena enclosure so there’s no need to worry about the ball going out for corners or throw-ins.

Where Am I?

Something that I have found to be a real issue across many 8-bit football games is that of player selection, and sadly Five-A-Side Soccer seems to be no different. At kick off, you are in control of one player (either with or without the ball) and your player is recognisable because of a slight change to the colour of their top. However, if you want to swap control over to another player you have to use the keyboard even if you’re using the joystick to control the game!

Now using that method to swap players would be bad enough, but it swaps players completely at random rather than swapping control to the player nearest to the ball so you could be attempting to regain posession and swapping control to a player nearer to one with the ball but suddenly find yourself in control of someone the other end of the pitch. There’s absolutely no logic behind how the players are selected and you have to keep pressing ENTER to cycle through them to choose the one you want, breaking the flow of the game completely.

Football Without The Fun

Despite having a strong reputation for developing good quality games in the past for Mastertronic, Stephen Curtis has managed to produce arguably one of the most unplayable football titles I have ever loaded on any system. While I don’t want to come across as if I am being negative just for the sake of it, just the control system alone is a real game-breaker. If you’re playing using the joystick you’ve got to either take your hand off the joystick to swap players or put your Amstrad on the floor so you can use your foot to hit ENTER (and yes, I remember doing things like that on the Commodore 64 for Commando using the Space bar to throw grenades!).

But joking aside, having to do either just ruins the flow of what was already a rather sluggish version of football. The last thing you want it to be pulled out of the game to change your control method just so you can carry on playing and if you’re having to do this continually throughout the game then there’s no fun trying.

I honestly don’t know why an alternative system can’t have been used by either holding down the fire button to swap players or even an automated method to swap to the player closest to the ball. But as it stands it’s just a painful experience to endure and makes the game far more difficult than it needs to be.

Graphics and Sound

From the screenshots, you might be forgiven in thinking that Five-A-Side Soccer doesn’t look all that bad, especially for an early football game. Certainly, it looks more colourful and more detailed than the Commodore 64 original and before the game started playing that’s something I was quite pleasantly surprised about. But when it comes to games like this, sometimes you can have too much detail…

With the amount of detail and colour on all of the players, it can make it hard to distinguish between the one you control and the rest of your team quickly and with the issue I already mentioned when it comes to swapping players, this is the last thing you need. I also found an extremely annoying problem whenever two players occupied the same place where their characters merged, turning into a distorted mass of random pixels. And this wasn’t just a one-off either – it happened every time two players occupied the same space.

The final issue was with the scrolling. Instead of continuous horizontal scrolling to follow the movement of the ball, Stephen Curtis has opted for a hybrid scrolling/flick screen approach. Granted, without hardware scrolling to take the load of providing smooth scrolling there had to be some compromises made in order to move all the players, the ball and the screen, but it is something that takes some getting used to.

The only real highlight is the sound. While there isn’t really much in-game apart from a few sparse effects, there’s no faulting the superb Rob Hubbard title tune proving that he delivers a musical masterpiece no matter what system he is working on.

Come In Number 9, Your Time Is Up

One curious thing about this game is that it was released as part of Mastertronic’s original MAD range, numbered MAD 9. What’s strange is that all the games in this range had their own unique catalogue number, but for some unknown reason no fewer than three separate games were released with the catalogue number MAD 9! The first of these was the Commodore 64 version of Spellbound, followed by Five-A-Side Soccer – also for the Commodore 64 – and then wrapping up with this release for the Amstrad. There are gaps in the numbering in the range where no games exist so something went wrong somewhere!

Overall

I’ve played a LOT of football games over the years – right from the “football” games that were part of the early Pong clones, right up to the latest releases from EA on the PlayStation 5. There have been some pretty awful 8-bit ones released over the years (and I’m sure many of us remember the fiasco that was US Gold’s World Cup Carnival) but if I am brutally honest, I don’t think I have played any that have been as bad as Five-A-Side Soccer. Not even Rob Hubbard’s great title music can save this one. Steer well clear.

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