Game Frenzy

In this month's issue, Andrew Korn gives Game Frenzy the treatment with his memories of Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe, created by the Bitmap Brothers (http://www.bitmap-brothers.co.uk/our-games/past/speedball2.htm ) in 1990.

Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe is Also available on: CD32, C-64, PC, Atari ST, PocketPC, Gameboy, GBA, Sega Master System, Mega Drive, NES, RiscOS

Ice Cream! Ice Cream! Andrew Korn nominates his Best Game Ever

Wherever hardcore gamers meet, conversations will inevitably wend their way towards the great question: is retro gaming all it's cracked up to be? Retro gaming fans hold faith in the notion that the years have been kinder to graphics than to game play. Sure, running the latest games on your PS2 or ninja PC game rig with water-cooled graphics co-processor boasting more computing power than a warehouse full of A500s is going to provide you with a graphical experience older games don't come close to - but it is game play, after all, that gaming is about - and good game play does not require processing horsepower. Critics of retro gaming contend that this is all a bunch of romantic nonsense and games have improved in game play terms as well as in graphics.

I feel that the anti-retro crowd has a point. How can anyone sensibly deny that recent games such as Deus Ex, Grand Theft Auto 3 or PES have bags of game play? It is also true that nostalgia aside, replaying many of the great games of yore is simply a disappointment. Countless hours of my misspent youth were passed in local arcades filling the high score tables of every Gauntlet machine I could lay my hands on, but revisiting the experience makes it entirely clear that Gauntlet 1 just isn't a patch on descendants such as Phantasy Star Online.

Retro Gold

The retro gamers, however, also have a point. Some old games are simply awesome. Whenever I have argued with a disbeliever in the value of retro gaming, I simply direct them to Speedball 2. It works every time. As effective as this is as a debate strategy, it does have a distinct disadvantage - every time I point someone to Speedball 2, I inevitably find myself digging the game up myself, and saying goodbye to far too many hours as I once more become immersed in this consummate piece of game design. This sort of behavior was acceptable when the game was top of my stack of disks back in 1990 when it was first released, but it has become almost a yearly ritual to excavate my box of archaic 3.5" floppies and burn the midnight oil reliving the Speedball 2 experience.

Not only is Speedball 2 simply the best example of the future sports game genre ever produced, it stands up spectacularly well as an example of how a sports game should function. Games such as Speedball, Football, Basketball and even Pinball are geographically delimited - they take place in a pitch or arena of set size. Translating this into a computer game form requires a critical balance to be made between the necessity of allowing the player to see both what they are doing now and what they want to do next. You can make the pitch fill the screen, ensuring the player can see what's ahead of them all the time, but then they can't really make out what's in front of their feet. Conversely you can keep the viewpoint close so the player can time their dodges and tackles properly, but then you leave the player blind to much of the pitch, so that a long distance shot or pass has to be done unseen. You can compromise with a radar scanner, but this should be at most a quick guide the player can glance at occasionally to get an overview of the positions of teammates. A sure sign of a bad implementation is where you spend more time watching the scanner than the main view, a sadly common problem. Speedball gives you all the close-up detail you need, but doesn't need a scanner at all. The combination of view coverage, speed of motion, transfer of player control to the appropriate team member and predictable tactical positioning means that your never playing blind - you get a feel for the whole arena, you get enough warning of approaching defenders, you know where to pass. quite simply that key compromise between screen real-estate and game area is utterly invisible to the player. The mechanics of playing a video game do not get in the way of the simulation of the sports game beneath. Almost no other sports games have achieved this - only Sensible Soccer on the Amiga and Pro Evolution Soccer on the PS2 spring to mind. Interestingly the recent GBA version of Speedball 2 doesn't quite hit the mark for this very reason - the slightly smaller screen resolution means too much of the arena is hidden.

Artificial Intelligence vs. Hidden Stupidity

Then there's the Artificial Intelligence. I seem to remember the Bitmap Brothers boasting that AI routines made up something like half the game code at the time. This is of course all nonsense. There are no learning routines in Speedball 2, no neural nets, no behavioral agents, no Skinner boxes. The routines Speedball 2 uses for determining the actions of the computer controlled team players are not so much good artificial intelligence as well-hidden stupidity, but whatever the methodology it works. Oh, it's easy to engineer a difficulty curve by simply ensuring that tougher teams run faster and do more damage when they punch, but is that really satisfying? Most games control difficulty in this manner, and thus playing tougher opposition doesn't require you to play better, it just requires you to play more. Speedball 2 however is a little different. Play a poor team such as Violent Desire and they make more mistakes. They don't just punch like Bill Gates; they don't know when to punch either. Play Super Nashwan, on the other hand, and you're in for a tough time. Not only do these boys run like the wind and pack a punch that would dent an elephant, they are cunning as hell and give no quarter. Sure, scoring a thousand against Raw Messiahs is a giggle, but beating the Nashwan lads gives a sense of genuine achievement and satisfaction every single time.

Of course then there's the matter of game mechanics. When the Sensible lads gave the world SWOS they had the advantage of following game rules that have been honed over a century of professional association football. The Bitmaps developed theirs from scratch, and did a truly fine job. This isn't just a game of two goals - there's the careful tactics of the score doublers to take into consideration, the considerable tactical advantages that accrue from thoughtful timing of those power-ups, and the clever little bonuses of the electro bounce, the floor bouncer domes, the stars and the warpgate. These may seem to beginners to be just fluff, but experienced players know that they can easily win a game for you (or lose it, if you get too focused on them). Indeed, the highest scores attainable are often achieved in games that concentrate on dominating a floor bouncer rather than scoring goals. Finally, there is the brutal calculus of violence - this is a game where going for the player rather than the ball can not only be tactically advantageous, it actually scores you points.

On top of all this there is the issue of presentation. Now this is something that is usually the real weak point of retro gaming, but no so here. Sure the graphics look old-fashioned -- they're almost a decade and a half old. What do you expect? That's positively Paleolithic in computer terms. However like some digital Trois Freres, the graphics and sound of Speedball 2 do not fail to impress in the modern day. Simple and undifferentiated though they may be, they are created with real style and conviction, evoking a compelling sense of the game. Would Speedball 2 really be better with a CD-quality orchestral soundtrack than with the driving proto drum 'n' bass electro of Nation 12's memorable beat? Can you imagine any better accompaniment to the ambulance crew's arrival to cart off another injured player than the concessions guy's cry of "Ice cream! Ice cream!"? I think not.

The Future of Future Sport

Perfection then? Not quite. Fantastic as the gaming experience is, it's rather limited. It's nice that you have the choice of spending your in-game earnings on improving your squad through cybernetic implants or buying star players, but you can't improve star players and the cybernetic enhancements don't bring your starting squad up to the level of those star players so you tend to end the game with a full squad of bought-in players - and as there are so few of these star players you end up with the same bunch each time. The computer-controlled teams don't improve either, and once you've won the top division it's game over. After all, at that stage there's no further challenge. The player vs. player option is always a laugh but has no development or depth, and the cup game is short and adds little.

Luckily I'm not the only person to have noticed just how damn good Speedball 2 is. This very month the ultra-pretentious but always readable Edge magazine put it in their all time top 10 of sports games, and the Bitmap Brothers themselves have never been able to let it go. The game was ported to many other platforms at the time, but the process continues with recent releases for GameBoy Advance and Pocket PC. A few years ago an updated Speedball 2100 was released for Playstation - unfortunately not a very good game - and the Bitmaps have been quietly working away on Speedball Arena, a tasty looking 3D multi-player online version I have to admit I'm just itching to play. I can't help feeling, however, that this is a formula so good it doesn't really need to be messed about with.

So here's my suggestion. Take the game engine as is, rework the graphics to 640x400 (but don't give into temptation and go 3D) and produce different kits for all the teams and player graphics that match the portraits (currently all the players look the same in-game). Revamp the cybernetic implant system so it's more open-ended, and allow star players to have implants. Expand the league structure so there are many more teams, national leagues, international club and country competitions etc., and replace the current limited star player system to a proper transfer market with a couple of thousand or so different players. Keep track of team wealth and have computer teams work the transfer market and improve their squads too. This would all be retro-fittable to the original game engine with relatively little difficulty and at an incredibly small development cost. It would be a lovely complement to the forthcoming Speedball Arena, would be an absolutely storming title for the AmigaOne, and given we're talking about a game that originally ran on an A500 could be packaged with an Amiga emulator to release on other platforms too. It's a game I've been itching to play for many years.

Hyperion? Epic? Anyone? Are you listening?