217: Striker

Number 217
(6.8 points)
Striker
1993: 84

Football games regularly appear in the Amiga Power lists, and Striker provides yet another iteration of the beautiful game.

As was typical of the time, there aren't many playing options: you can play a friendly match, or take part in a tournament, which consists of a knockout cup between the 64 national teams in the game. The teams themselves are very basic (all are white men with dark hair) but thankfully there is a difference in team strength, indicated by the 'seedings' rankings on the menu screen. The game is viewed with players running vertically, with a heavy slant on the camera. Sadly, this does mean you can't see a great deal of the pitch, making long passes more of a hopeful thing. The action is accompanied by a stadium-style scoreboard, providing helpful messages, some of which would certainly not be allowed during a real match (such as "the ref's blind").

After the simple early attempts at football games in the 8-bit era, this was a time for experimentation in the genre, as we saw games playing horizontally, vertically, isometrically and so on. Striker isn't a terrible game, but it still suffers from the same problems of other games of the era: the low resolution means it's difficult to see enough of the pitch to play tactically. One company realised the solution was to use extremely small players - but we won't see them in this list for a very long time.

Recommended TOSEC disk(s):
Striker (1992)(Rage)[cr CSL]