Street Football
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DS
| Street Football

The regular football season was a disaster in the Anthony household – Bournemouth went bust and got relegated and England shamefully failed to make Euro 2008. Hurrah for Street Football then, a kind of French arthouse version of jumpers for goalposts. Les pullovers pour posts de Gaul, as Arsene Wenger probably wouldn't say.

Street Football mixes RPG-light with a Soccer Kid type platformer, sub-games and more traditional tournament fare. It's also based on a novel by Stefano Benni. It could, and perhaps should, have been a complete mess. It's an everyday story of PC street kids overcoming a small town mayor, police, and a neurotic bloke with an unhealthy relationship with his dog in order to organise an illicit World Cup for international peace and understanding. In lay terms, it's an intriguing-to-deranged knit of gaming stuff.

For most of Street Football you control Tag, the captain of Port Marie five-a-side team The Rifflers. The early sections of the game have you chasing from location to location to complete a range of sub-games – the best of which sees you blowing into the microphone to ensure your goalie commands her area. Not all the fare is so inspired, however, and elsewhere there's a predictably large amount of frantic stylus rubbing to do.

Of course, in story terms, what you're actually doing is honing The Rifflers skills ready for the local football tournament. Win that and they get to represent the nation at the World Cup. The matches themselves are a jukebox mix of training sub games, as you clock up the Street Football hours new and often more interesting variations are introduced.

For example, your players' special moves inevitably require some kind of arcade puzzly accomplishment. The problem is that while the matches are fun and addictive they're rarely tense. They're all rather easy and it's difficult to lose even when your opponents are given a two goal head start for utterly spurious plot reasons.

It's not much of an exaggeration to say that experienced gamers will not lose a single tournament rubber. While hacking through a season of FIFA can feel a slog, Street Football is lively, fresh and imaginative, but there ain't much to it. The game keeps the novelties coming because without them all but the youngest gamers would get bored.

If the matches are about as challenging as Brazil versus Derby County, Street Football's platforming sections are more like pitting your pub team against Real Madrid. These see Tag jumping, sliding and kicking his ball through ports, construction sites and so on while collecting a given number of cans.

From a pure gaming perspective these sequences are highly impressive, and see you angling the ball off various bits of screen furniture to move objects around while sliding under beach huts and jumping over policeman. It's just weird that these sections are so much trickier than what's on offer elsewhere.

The final aspect of the Street Football package is the RPG element. As you play matches against various gangs and notch up the sub games more locations are opened up, which introduce more characters – everything from a fat kid who won't lend you his ball to a granny-come-Alex Ferguson type footballing oracle – who all set you tasks to do.

In one instance, the American women's five-a-side team is packed into crates and because of this and similar – lazy stereotype alert – wacky French plot twists the game becomes more than the sum of its relatively standard parts.

Though the characters and storylines remain unexpected and charming, by the end of the game the tasks they set have become a bit tired. Too often the chat, trekking and sub-games are little more than padding. Without them a modest gamer could probably complete Street Football within 10 hours.

Elements of Street Football are great, genius almost, but ultimately the difficulty levels are just a bit too schizophrenic, the sub-games run out of steam and the matches lose their challenge. So Street Football misses out on classic status but that doesn't mean it should be totally dismissed.

No football lover could fail to be impressed by its wit and variety. It's an amusing game that's worth taking seriously. From the music to the controls it's a quirky cart of real love and devotion in an era when too many football games are turgid, licenced, imagination-free zones.

Street Football

Half FIFA and half sub-game football, Street Football is a brave attempt to do something different
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