World Class Soccer is a soccer (football) game that ties in with the 1990 football World Cup. The game uses a top-down perspective for matches and features the full World Cup structure and all the 24 teams who were involved. Multiple formations and team selections are available before each match. The ball sticks to the feet of the players, who can be tackled either by doing a block tackle, or attempting a slide tackle, which risks giving away a foul. Matches can vary between 4 and 90 minutes, and each player has differing skills and behaviour style depending on his team's relative ability.
Do you remember the giants of football? Do you remember the legends like Diego Armando Maradona? Van Basten didn't make it through the eight finals as the selector for Neitherlands this year, but can you guide him to score the winning goals back in the year 1990? And never the less it was the last world cup with the united Yugoslavian team with players like Suker (who scored the most goals in 1998 world cup in France) and Prosinecki (who's the only player that played and scored for two different national teams).
All that and so much more can be seen in the World Class Soccer (also known as Italy 90).
The game will ask you (every time) about the input device (you can use two joysticks - one for each player), graphics (I strongly suggest VGA mode) and sound options. And now the opening title appears. Like I said, you'll have to go through this every time (the settings are not saved).
Next off you can redefine the keys (if you're using the keyboard). This is good as both you and the other player get to decide which keys to use for what. Unfortunately this setting also doesn't stay saved until the next time, so you'll have to define the keys every time you play the game.
And now you finally get to play!
You can have a one player match against a computer, a two player match against a friend, or go to the WORLD CUP!
No matter which game you choose you'll get to select the positions of your players. You'll get the roster of players that really did play in the 1990 world cup, and you'll get to choose the position they'll play (look at the letters in front of their name G = goal keeper, D = defense, ...). And now you get to play.
The match can last for a varied period of time (you get to set it up). You'll just get a top down view of the part of the field with the ball. The player marked by the arrow is the one you get to directly control. There's a sliding start option (to get the ball away from the opponent), the pass and the shot (if you have the ball). There's not all that much you can do and the computer controls the other players (the ones that are not marked by the arrow).
And now for the question. You got to select the players. Does that reflect on the gameplay?
It does to a point. All players will be the same color, so don't expect Franck Rijkaard to look any different then Marco Van Basten. Still their qualities will reflect in the speed with or without the ball, the ease with which the ball is taken away and the fouls made and most of all the quality of the goal keeper shows. You rarely even get to control the goally, except at shooting penalties.
You'll see who's at the ball though (there will be a name at the bottom of the screen.
As I mentioned before I like this game, thus I may be slightly bias. The game is simple enough, yet it offers something more then just running around behind a ball. It still lacks some things (like being able to change players, I never saw a referee in the game, the players are all alike, and so if you're not reading the bottom of the screen you can't tell them apart...). Still it's fun and easy to master. It also follows to some extend the real tournament of 1990, but if you take part in it, you may change the situation completely and prevent Brazil to take the title. Just remember, the worse the team, the worse they'll perform, the better teams are usually faster and control the ball easier.
But the game doesn't allow you to see the whole field, the passes are mostly made blindly and it's not as easy to score as some guys may imagine (oh, and it's difficult to kick the ball in the goal too). So there are bad sides to it too.
Re-release of U.S. Gold's own Italy 1990 with a few unimportant enhancements, mostly cosmetic ones. Despite the coveted World Cup license, World Class Soccer is a very uninspiring game that doesn't offer much more than the minimum you'd expect from soccer games. Simple graphics, standard ADLIB music, and pretty boring gameplay. Ball handling is very poor, as is the AI of computer-controlled teams (who don't seem to know what "defense" means). A downright waste of license... only to be recommended for people who want to have every soccer game ever made. If you want a fun game, look elsewhere.
How to run this game on modern Windows PC?
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