SWOS is undoubtedly the king of Amiga football games, but could be a new title contender?
Greetings from Braga, where I’m taking a few days’ break in the Portuguese sun.
Just yesterday I was in Porto, a city with a fine footballing tradition, so it was a pleasant surprise to learn about Souverän Soccer, a work-in-progress title for stock AGA Amigas.
Inspired by the SNES title Super Formation Soccer, Souverän Soccer uses a low angle, third person view akin to Striker and 3D Soccer, but with smaller, SWOS-like graphics.
Oh, and it is way smoother than either of those titles.
The new video upload from the game’s developer highlights improvements such as wider goals, optional radar, and “real dribbling.”
Says the developer:
Personally I always found SWOS or KickOff dribbling way too hard to master. Therefore my dribbling mechanics got some kind of twist, so that you get an unglued ball with the ease of use as if it was glued 🙂 In a nutshell it works as follows:
Once you touch the ball, your player enters “dribbling mode”.
In that mode it will more or less auto-follow the ball, unless you make something like a 180 deg turn or stop moving. If you change joystick direction from e.g. up to up-right, then this direction change will not be applied immediately. Instead your player will continue to run up until he hits the ball for the next dribbling short-kick – and at this precise moment your current joystick direction will actually be applied and you continue dribbling up-right.
Expanding the goal’s width was a rather tedious task because I had to heavily mess around with the carefully tweaked sprite setup to somehow make one more hw-sprite available for the larger goals. The new radar made this even more complicated.
Eventually one of the corner-sticks is now made using sprite #5 – whose DMA-channel isn’t working: due to horizontal soft-scrolling and 32bit fetch-mode, only the sprites 0 to 4 remain fully functional here. And the fact that we’re in 64 pixel sprite mode doesn’t make it better. But with some hackery #5 was tamed – luckily the corner-stick is just a stick 😉
Souverän Soccer is being developed for unaccelerated stock Amiga 1200 / CD32 and compatible machines (Amiga AGA 020, 14 MHz, no Fast RAM, 50 fps).
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Christian Cawley is a writer and editor who covers consumer electronics, IT, and entertainment media. He has written for publications such as Computer Weekly, Linux Format, MakeUseOf.com, and Tech Radar.
He also produces podcasts, has a cigar box guitar, and of course, loves retro gaming.
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