BRIEF: SoccerStar (1989)

 

Most databases put a space in the game name, but I default to the title screen.

      

SoccerStar

United Kingdom

Cult Games (developer and publisher)
Released in 1989 for ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, and Commodore 64

Date Started: 23 October 2022

Rejected for: No "characters," so no character development

      

SoccerStar is a sports simulation/strategy game, a lot like a single-player fantasy sports league. It's one of almost two dozen football-related games commissioned by Hertfordshire-based Cult Games between 1986 and 1991. The title is a bit of a misnomer. You don't play a soccer star, but rather a manager of soccer stars. A victory for the player isn't scoring a goal; it's making a favorable trade for a decent midfielder.

   

Listen to Chet using the sports terms! I'm well known among my friends for having little interest in organized sports. There are a couple of exceptions. It's hard not to have at least a vague interest in the Olympics, for instance. Between about 2007 and 2013, I did a lot of work in Trinidad, and if you're going to be taken seriously in Trinidad, you have to at least pretend to enjoy cricket. That pretense turned into a somewhat-honest interest, and I still check in now and again to see how the Red Team is doing. I like some of the statistics involved in sports; I thought Moneyball was a great book and decent movie. Beyond that . . . I admire athleticism, and am happy to occasionally watch sports highlights, but it seems to me that you spend most games just waiting, for hours, for something to happen, and then half the time you miss it when it does. I'm not interested in the personalities and rivalries and debates, and I've never understood why I should root for my local team when most of the players come from somewhere else. 

    

So the good news is that in the process of playing SoccerStar, I learned a lot about soccer. I spent more time on Wikipedia than I did in the emulator. Going into the game, I was aware of course that what Americans call "soccer" everyone else calls "football" (which raises the question of why a game made by a U.K. developer uses the former term), but I wasn't aware that the English invented the word "soccer" from the soc in "association football" (as distinguished from rugby football). I learned a little bit about the various divisions in the English football league system, although apparently they all changed in 1992, and this game is using terminology from several years prior. I learned that teams are "promoted" or "relegated" (demoted) through the divisions based on performance, and I learned that the four major categories of players are goalkeepers, defenders, midfielders, and attackers. I essentially quadrupled my knowledge of soccer in the last two days.

         

Setting up the game.

        

In the setup screen, you can give yourself a name (the default is "Bobby Robson," a real player and manager who at the time was England's national coach), a league name (the default is "Barclays"), and the name of the cup you're vying for (the default is "F.A. Cup"). You then choose from among seven Division 4 teams to join as the manager. The defaults are York City, Cardiff City, Rochdale, Crew Alex (short for "Alexandra"), Scarboro, Carlisle, Aldershot, and "Wolves." These were all legitimate Fourth Division teams when the game was being programmed; some have since been dissolved. My research showed me that "Wolves" is short for Wolverhampton Wanderers, which since the publication of SoccerStar has worked its way up to the Premier League (the highest level), so I figured I'd join a team on the rise.

      

Choosing which team to manage.

     

As the game begins, you have £45,400 on hand and a roster of 8 players. You need at least 11 to field a full team (another thing I learned!); your overall roster can have up to 15. You can take a bank loan of £250,000, but for a usurious rate of 24%. Fortunately, you can get some players as "free transfers." Their attributes are lower than players you pay for. The players' default names are drawn from real-life players, both contemporary and past, though you can rename them.

   

Each player has attributes for skill, fitness, and stamina. I wasn't able to find a manual for the game, so I wasn't sure exactly what the attributes do. "Skill" seems to be fixed; it never goes up or down. The cost associated with buying and selling players seems to be based mostly on skill--roughly £40,000 per point. Stamina and fitness fluctuate from game to game and can be trained in between matches.

     

In between matches.

     

Once you have your roster, you begin the season. You indicate which players are going to be fielded in each game. You see your total scores for each position. You can pay £8,000 for training, which has a reasonable chance of increasing some players' scores. You can also pay £100 for a "spy," who will tell you the sum of the scores for each of your opponent's positions. The idea is to assemble a collection of players whose combined scores (skill + fitness + stamina) exceed the opponent's for each position or, if that's not possible, for strategic positions. For instance, if the opponent has an "defense" value that's so high you can't hope to beat it, you might want to essentially give up on attacking and put everything into defense yourself. A draw is better than a loss.

       

My squad. Note the "defense," "midfield" and "attack" subtotals at the bottom.

   

When everything is ready, you start a match. Unfortunately, you don't actually get to play during the matches (or, if you do, I couldn't figure out how). The only choice you can make is to hit the "S" key to sub one designated player for another, but I'm not even sure when or why you would want to do that. You otherwise just watch as the 90 minutes (something else I learned!) roll by. The ball bounces back and forth between the two goals, propelled and resisted by random rolls against the two teams' respective scores for the positions. When the ball reaches one of the goals--which, as in actual soccer, it almost never does--the screen switches to one showing generic players on a field and one of them kicks the ball towards the goal. At that point, I guess the goalkeeper's skill alone determines whether the ball goes in or not. It usually doesn't.

        

You spend about 90 seconds watching this ball quiver back and forth.

      

The result of each game influences a "morale" percentage that must have some multiplier effect against the statistics. You make a certain amount of money for each match depending on the outcome and the number of fans who attended; teams performing better get greater attendance. In between games, you can adjust the roster (in particular if a player becomes injured), spend a decent chunk of cash on training, hire a spy for the next game, or pay a certain amount of money to rent a player from another team.  

     

Don't make the mistake of thinking you actually "play" on this screen. It's just a cut scene.

          

Tie games are common; wins are usually 1-0 or maybe 2-0. You play a dozen games and then get a final score for the overall competition. I think draws count as 1 and wins count as 2. For some reason, the game sometimes accepted a draw and sometimes forced me to "replay" the team until one of us definitively won. I assume there's a real-life rule behind this, but I couldn't figure out the pattern.

      

After several tries, I manage to eke out a win in Division 4.

        

It's an interesting numbers game, but I can't figure out the trick to it. After several tries, I managed to win the Division 4 championship and get promoted to Division 3, but once there, I was against teams with scores outrageously higher than my own. I tried using all the tricks the game offers to no avail. Training only adds a few points to your roster, and you can't afford to do it all that frequently. A £250,000 loan doesn't go very far--it buys maybe two decent players--and you end up spending each game's profit on the interest. The best I can figure is that you don't really want to advance quickly. You want to stay in your division for several cups, letting the money and training build, and move forward only when you can demolish the other side, not just eke out a win. Is there a real-life analog to this strategy?

       

I figure you have to win Division 1 to truly "win."

     

We've already had several debates as to whether a game without any combat could be considered an RPG. Those that say yes suggest that if an RPG's definition centers on character development, there's no reason that such character development couldn't take place in contexts other than martial ones. Even in RPGs with combat, they point out, character development is often directed into non-combat skills such as lockpicking, smithing, haggling, and charisma. In tabletop role-playing (less so in most CRPGs), non-combat skills are a valid alternative to combat, and improvements in attributes can help with scenarios like forcing open a door or dodging a trap.

   

It's a persuasive argument, and I think it works particularly well for sports games. Sports are contests, much like combat, in which the attributes and skills of the participants play a vital role. Someone wins and someone loses. Rewards go to the winners. Sports like fencing and boxing are essentially indistinguishable from combat, and even in games that feature combat, there are often sporting events that draw from the same skill set. Even in the early era, we saw CRPGs with horse races, dart- and dagger-throwing, balance beams, skeet shooting, arena battles, and other "sporting" events, all drawing from the same attributes as the battles.

  
So I'm open to accepting non-combat games, even sports games, as RPGs. But no, SoccerStar still isn't one. Come on. First of all, my definitions don't just require development; they require character development. A "character" has to be more than a name on a spreadsheet. You have to be able to play the character. He or she should be an individual with characteristics and goals, and if he or she doesn't have a personality in-game, the player should at least be able to project one. 

   

There are subtler issues, too. Nothing like "exploration" is technically part of my definition, but I think it's somewhat understood. And yes, we've had plenty of RPGs that have lacked a main quest, a story, a fantastical setting, a personal mission for the character, and personal inventories. None of those are inherent in my definition of an RPG individually, and yet there is an extent to which I don't think a game can be an RPG if it lacks all of them.

  

Thus, I think the first sports/RPG hybrid is further down the line. But I'm not sorry that I learned that Emirates Airlines sponsors the F.A. Cup or that it's the oldest national football competition in the world. Two weeks from now, I'll be rooting for the Wolves.