Goal! (NES) Playthrough

A playthrough of Jaleco's 1989 soccer game for the NES, Goal! In this video, I play through the World Cup mode as team USA. Then, at 1:43:13, I did a quick round of "shoot competition." Goal!, the second NES soccer game to be released in North America (following Nintendo's    • Soccer (NES) Playthrough  ), is a localization of 燃えろ!!プロサッカー (Moeru!! Puro Sakkaa, Burn!! Pro Soccer ), an entry in Jaleco's sports series that included such titles as    • Bases Loaded (NES) Playthrough [1 of 4]  ,    • Racket Attack (NES) Playthrough  , and    • Hoops (NES) Playthrough  . With Goal!, developer Tose attempted to once again to innovate on how to represent a team sport on an 8-bit console with a two-button gamepad. In theory, it offers a lot more than Nintendo's 1985 take on the game. You can play through the World Cup as one of sixteen teams, you can play a national tournament, every player has unique stats, and you get a cutscene whenever someone scores a goal or commits a foul. In practice, it delivers a nigh unplayable mess of a game. The controls and animation are hyper jittery, and your players awkwardly snap into place when changing direction. The isometric perspective makes aiming difficult with a d-pad, and the AI controlling your teammates is useless, so whenever you attempt to pass, they tend to sit and watch the ball go flying by. You can't tell who is who until you take control of a specific player, so you can't strategically switch to the player best suited to the situation at hand, and you can't reliably tell which player the game is going to switch your controls to when multiple players are on-screen. Heavy slowdown that causes the game to drop inputs is a common occurrence. Some teams wear similar colors that make them difficult to tell apart on the pitch. The arrow telling you who you're controlling is too far from the player and gets lost on a crowded screen. And though it doesn't have any direct bearing on the gameplay, the music is the type of bad that'll irritate you the moment it starts playing. I'll give it credit for the cutscenes, though. They look great. I have no doubt that Goal! had its fans in the late 80s, but I didn't like it then, and I find it excruciating to play now. I try to find the appeal in the games I play - I want to believe that they all have merit (aside from the NES version of Lion King) - but I really don't see much in this one. Of all the NES games I've played, I'd rank Goal! pretty close to the bottom. _____________ No cheats were used during the recording of this video. NintendoComplete (http://www.nintendocomplete.com/) punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!