"In the resounding roar, you hear the loud clear chant of VICTORY."
RealSports Soccer is a 1983 Atari 2600 programmed by Michael Sierchio. It's three-on-three soccer with no goalies. You can either play with another player or against the CPU, and you can customize the game's length and difficulty level.
Objectives
- Uses hardest difficulty
- Emulator: BizHawk 2.11.0 (Stella core)
Notes
When two players of opposite teams are both on the ball, the ball usually alternates between their possession. This gives one of the players the chance to kick the ball away. I use this technique to kick the ball down the field without having to pass to a teammate or evade the computer player.
The strength of ball kicks is seemingly random. I sometimes have to wait a frame because my kick isn't strong enough.
When you don't have the ball in possession, pressing the button will make you switch to a different teammate. Sometimes, I'm unable to get the ball to alternate possession between two players, or the CPU kicks the ball to the teammate before I can get to it. To avoid this, I briefly switch teammates so that the CPU ignores my teammate on their lane, then switch back to get the ball again. Players that aren't being controlled move slower though, so I do this sparingly and quickly.
When a goal is scored, the team that got scored on starts with the ball. When the CPU has the ball and you're not moving, they will always (as far as I know, at least on this difficulty), successfully score a goal. After they score, the ball goes to my team. Most of the time, the CPU manages to steal the ball or kick it to a teammate and score again. However, it is possible for the CPU to get stuck in a loop of stealing the ball, backing up, turning around, and immediately losing possession of the ball again. This happens very rarely and seems to be determined by RNG. I wasted 17 frames at the start in order to manipulate this.
I'd like to end off this submission with a comment I found from the developer of the game, Michael Sierchio. I always love hearing game devs talk about their work, so I wanted to share it.
"glad you like it. when I saw mockups of the Mattel game, I decided to do a horizontally-scrolling playfield, and "realistic" players. So I reduced it to an abstraction of soccer with the elements I thought made for game play. This was my first original game (as a designer/programmer on the 2600). Jerome Domurat did the player animation, and Andy Fuchs did the sound." - Michael Sierchio
InputEvelution: Claiming for judging.
InputEvelution: Optimisation looks good! It's always very entertaining to me seeing sports games that can end input ridiculously early and still pull off a win. Accepting.
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