The game doesn't deserve the right to carry the Sensible Soccer name
I can almost remember the day when I was first introduced to Sensi, a demo of Sensible Soccer 93/94 was the cover disc with amiga power, the demo featured only Germany vs. England in a 2 minute half of a match. The hours I spent playing the demo to wear out the disc must have been ridiculous, but from that day on I was hooked. I was hooked to such an extent that I can remember going around all my neighbours in the street asking if I could was their car for a fee so I could save up the pennies and pounds to buy Sensible Soccer.
The majority of my early game playing memories are memories of playing Sensible soccer, the pleasure and joy achieved crafting a 20 pass goal routine or bending a 25 yard shot into the top corner is still unsurpassed in my gaming life.
But as the days and years passed along sensible soccer evolved into the greatest football game of all time Sensible World of Soccer or SWOS as it was tagged by the huge number of fans. SWOS introduced one of the best (yet extremely simplistic) football management career options ever created, almost every single football team in existence at the time was in the game, from the mighty Italian teams of Serie a to the lowly part timers in the League of Wales, you could manage them all and attempt to take the to footballing glory. The difficulty curve was outstanding; the game could be as difficult or as hard as you wanted it to be.
Now jump forward 12 years to 2006 and Sensible Soccer 2006. Sensible Soccer 2006 has been sold on the history and legacy of the previous games, like so many other nostalgia products companies are trying to sell out childhood memories back to us in shinny new products. Like other reworking of classic products Sensible Soccer 2006 will sell in the thousands, but like the modern version of the Volkswagen Beetle SS 2006 is a soulless interpretation of the original.
The game shows glimpses of the classic SWOS but these moments are few and far between, the game is full of frustrating bugs that remove even the most hardcore fans enjoyment out of playing the game. There are bugs in this game that I haven't seen in a computer football game since playing kick off 2 on my master system, the goal keeper teleports across the goal to save the ball, collision detection is a joke and at times leads to masses of players laying on the floor holding their heads.
But worse of all is the motion sickness educing screen movements, I have struggled to play this game for longer than one and a half hours with having a pounding head ache, which leads me to ask, who tested this game?
It's fairly easy to pick up and play without extensive knowledge of contemporary football video-games, and while its design involves cartoony big-headed players, its play finds a middle ground between the obsessively "authentic" approach and the goofily casual.
The game does not deserve the right to carry the Sensible Soccer name.