World Championship Soccer Download (1991 Sports Game)

This soccer game lets you choose a team representing one of twenty-four countries around the world to participate in the World Championship tournament, which is identical to the real 1990 World Cup.

Once you pick your team you can also select which players you want on the field, so that you can round out the team's strengths and weaknesses. Also provided are modes for single exhibition matches, either against the computer or against a friend.

The action is viewed from above with large player sprites. Violent play is encouraged as there are no free kicks. The gameplay is rather simple: you can only control the player closest to the ball, and many soccer rules (such as penalty flags and offsides) are missing.

Probably the rarest PC game from SEGA, World Championship Soccer is an okay PC port of one of the first soccer games on the SEGA Genesis. This overhead soccer game lets you choose from 24 national teams to compete in the 1990 World Cup tournament. Other than featuring real-life team and player names, there is not much to recommend this simplistic title. You can only control the player closest to the ball, and the game lacks many important rules such as fouls and offsides. Worse, throw-ins, corners, and goal kicks are all cumbersome to set up, slow to execute, and mostly inaccurate. The game is also quite difficult - I suspect this is because it places unfair bias toward computer-controlled teams, because their players never seem to miss any goal opportunities no matter how much better my players' stats are compared to theirs (unless I play against the USA team, that is). Decent graphics and good two-player exhibition mode (hotseat on the same computer) cannot rescue the flaws of this game that deserves its obscure status. Not recommended.

How to run this game on modern Windows PC?

People who downloaded World Championship Soccer have also downloaded:
FIFA 99, FIFA 2000, FIFA World Cup 98, World Cup USA '94, England Football Championship, Winter Sports 2: The Next Challenge, Lothar Matthäus (a.k.a. European Champions), FIFA 2001