Earlier this year we looked at Accolade Sports Collection, which brought together five retro sports sims from the early ‘90s. While a couple didn’t fare too well in this modern age, the package still had worth, with the more technically impressive titles propping up the poorer ones. This brings us onto new collection Jaleco Sports: Goal, offering two retro football (soccer) sims. With so few games on offer, its chances are stacked against it before even playing – if even one of these games are bad, it means half the collection is ready for an early shower.
Included are 1988’s Goal! for the NES, which wasn’t released in Europe until 1990, and the SNES’ Super Goal! from 1992 – a time before ’90s genre titans FIFA and International Superstar Soccer debuted. This collection features the US, EU and Japanese ROMs of both, with the Japanese versions known as Moero!! Pro Soccer and Super Cup Soccer.
While the UI controls take a while to get used to (pause and rewind are mapped to the same trigger button) the presentation here isn’t too shabby, featuring 3D box and manual scans, optional CRT filters and bezels, and the rather unexpected inclusion of monthly online leaderboards that chart a player’s goal tally. At present, these don’t appear too competitive, with most players tackling Super Goal having scored fewer than ten goals each.
Going into this collection, I was convinced that Super Goal would be the better of the two, benefitting from 16-bit hardware. In the end though, it was the NES original that gained the (three) lion’s share of playtime, being more gratifying and easily accessible. I was actually able to score a respectable amount of goals here, whereas Super Goal really makes you work hard due to its telepathic keeper and fondness for balls bouncing off the woodwork. And that’s despite the goal mouth almost taking up over half the screen.
Goal! is viewed from an isometric perspective and suffers from player sprites with minimal detail, along with sprite flicker when too much is going on. It also lacks fundamentals such as offsides, and to view the current scores the action needs to be paused. While this may sound disastrous, it isn’t tricky to master, and the basics are here such as being able to snatch the ball away with relative ease before booting it into the back of the net. Amazingly, it’s also more fully featured than its successor, offering World Cup and Tournament modes, along with a Shootout mode that begins with a free kick and sees you go up against two CPU defenders.
Weirdly, the Tournament mode is exclusively formed from US teams, even in the EU version. That must have caused some confusion to European NES owners back in 1990 who simply wanted a team to represent their country.
Super Goal commences with a flashy Mode-7 title screen animation before presenting just two options: Exhibition, in which you play a single match after choosing teams, and Super Cup – aka Tournament Mode. There’s no Shootout mode present, penalty based or otherwise.
The action here is viewed from side-on and characters are more detailed. It’s also possible to turn off fowls and the offside rule, choose formations and activate an on-screen radar – which is very handy as it’s impossible to see the keeper until just a few metres away from the goal. Player movement is a bit sluggish, and the ball appears to be merely floating around the pitch, never feeling as if its in contact with either the ground or the player’s feet. As mentioned earlier, it’s very difficult to score. Holding down shoot will increase power, but even so, this is a game that mostly relies on crosses and bicycle kicks. While it’s nice to see a bit of tact to the proceedings, especially from a 1992 release (the year the SNES launched in Europe) it makes for something not particularly gratifying and a bit clunky. The lack of modes doesn’t help its case either.
Progress in both games can be saved at any time, and both have trophies (as in, PlayStation Trophies) to earn for beating their World Cup/Super Cup modes, which will require an hour or so of your time. Thankfully it’s possible to rewind; abuse this ability and it’s possible to prevent the CPU team from scoring even a single goal. Another thing of note is that, somewhat amusingly, both games feature cheerleaders during halftime, which further leads me to believe these were originally developed with the US market in mind.
The extras manage to elevate the experience beyond being two ROMs and a flashy front end, but ultimately, you’ll need to have an affinity with at least one game, as aside from nostalgia for simpler times there isn’t much here. It’s a collection where the NES original outshines its SNES successor, which definitely came as a surprise, but not one that makes it any easier to recommend to retro footie fans. The kindest thing I can say is that it’s sensibly priced, with the £6.49 asking price in-line with the 2-3 hours of playtime you can expect to get out of it before your attention wanes.
Rock It Games’s Jaleco Sports: Goal! is out now on PS5 and Switch. A PC version launched a few months ago. Developed by Sickhead Games.