Internation Soccer is a graphical soccer game for the Windows platform. It puts you in control of your own soccer team, allowing you to control player by player, kick by kick.

The game graphics are done very nicely, and the sounds are great. You have several different choices for view cams, stadium, team nationalities, and difficulty level. You can choose side view, top down view, close-up or pulled back. The game controls are either by keyboard or Sidewinder (Microsoft's game input device).

For my testing, I used a 400 Mhz PIII with 4 MB video RAM, running Windows Millennium. The game play was fine with this setup. The first thing I tried, after setting all my preferences, was to go into the training level. Here the game walks you through various aspects of the game, such as passing, shooting, throwing in, penalty shots, corner shots, and a 6 on 6 scrimmage. I found the walk-thru very helpful.

Despite the nice graphics and sounds, and the helpful training level, once I got into a serious match, trying to control the entire team turned out to be more difficult than I anticipated. First of all, the player movement did not feel very intuitive. Perhaps my definition of intuitive is based too heavily on 1st person action games. I expect to be the player that I'm controlling, so when I move forward, I am thinking in terms of moving in the direction that the player is facing. In Soccer, however, the control of a player does not work that way; rather, moving forward actually means moving down the field regardless of which way the player was originally facing (once he begins to move down the field, he does face the way that he moves). The same goes for left, right and back. From a top down view, it's basically like controlling a piece on a 2D game board. For me, this type of control lacks the luster of a 3D environment.

The other difficulty I had with controlling the players is the way the game engine passed control from one player to the next. At one moment, I'm one player (highlighted with a yellow circle around the player), and just when I'm moving in to do something, the game may decide to switch control to another player, and when I thought I was moving one player to some place, I end up moving another player to some other place. This can be extremely aggravating, not to mention confusing. I can see why they did this, as the alternative would be to manually switch control from one player to the next myself, and in a fast-moving game of soccer, there just isn't the luxury of time to be worrying about that kind of player management. I'm not sure there's a good way to handle it, but if some aspiring programmer ever comes up with something that works better and feels more intuitive, then they'll have a hit on their hands. As it is, the game of soccer may be just a tad to busy to successfully implement a game with this kind of player-by-player control.

One other slight problem with the game is that the menu items appear to have sporadic problems with becoming invisible. In the beginning when I was setting up my preferences, I came back to the main menu and there were no menu items. The background was there, and so were the sounds, and if I moved my cursor, I could select an item where the text used to be (of course it was like choosing in the dark). I found that clicking the "put away" button in the top right, and then pulling the game back up would resolve this problem.

Pros

• Nice graphics and sounds
• Good training level
• Played well with minimal graphics hardware

Cons

• Player movement felt non-intuitive
• Player to player control was confusing and aggravating
• Slight bug in menu text displays disappearing

Overall, International Soccer showed promise in the beginning, but the more I played it, the more frustrated I got, until I eventually lost all interest. If you really want to get a good feel for soccer, I recommend take a soccer ball outside and kicking it around with your friends.

Rating: 2 1/2 out of 5 Mice