‘Sensi-Soccer’ game style comes to Amstrad

Bitmap Soft is pleased to announce the availability of CPC Soccer: International Edition for the Amstrad CPC, developed by Israel Roman from Voxel Tower.

CPC Soccer is a football/soccer simulation game that sees you take control of one of 20 international teams as you put them through their paces in either a friendly exhibition match or a knockout tournament consisting of 4, 8 or 16 teams in which you can vie for the CPC Cup.

The game contains a number of features that look to provide an authentic video football gaming experience, including:

  • Team and player statistics and selection
  • Variable team formations
  • Fouls, yellow card, red cards and injuries
  • Game stats
  • Goal Keeper errors

CPC Soccer makes a very good attempt to replicate the Sensible Soccer experience on the standard Amstrad CPC with its zoomed out birds eye view of the action and miniature players. The game features Mode 1 graphics and moves around at quite a fast pace with the ball and field scrolling movement set at 50 frames per second.

New sports games for vintage home computer systems are quite rare these days, when we asked Israel as to what set off the urge to do a soccer title he surprised us by revealing:

I really didn’t want to do a soccer game. I was just testing if you could do a hardware scroll in cpc to make a shoot em up or something similar. But to test the scroll I used a soccer tileset and when I managed to move it I posted it on twitter, and many people loved it and they pushed me to do it, so I finally opted for the soccer game.

Having succumbed to social peer pressure to do a soccer game, Israel set of on the long arduous journey to produce a game that the Amstrad community could get excited about while at the same time allow them to boast to their 8-bit home computer counterparts. In asking him about what were the main challenges he faced while developing CPC Soccer for more than a year, Israel discloses:

The game has several features that took me months to control. The scrolling and rupture technique for the scoreboard were a nightmare, requiring perfect timing(thanks to cpcwiki). It was also quite complex to create the function that moves the 22 players in each frame, I needed it to be like a shot, I had to give many turns to the organization of the data so that everything could go at maximum speed. I underestimated soccer games, they have more rules and situations than I thought and programming them all was difficult. In any case I am a newbie in assembler and someone with more experience can push the CPC further to the limit.

CPC Soccer: International Edition is currently available in physical cassette format from Bitmap Soft. A digital copy of the game is also made available to you soon after you place your order.

Israel intends to offer a free digital version of CPC Soccer at a later date that will feature a six pack of teams from the German, Spanish, Italian, French and Dutch leagues (in addition to the International team). But there might be a chance that CPC Soccer could be ported across to other systems as Israel left us with this tidbit:

Having completed the Amstrad version, there is part of me that wants to make a version for Spectrum and Spectrum next since technically the code is z80 and I could reuse 70% of the code. Right now I am with other projects but if there is anyone out in the community who interested in doing the port themselves then I can give them the source code.

Retro gaming journalist promoting NEW C64 and Amiga releases. Contributes to RetroGamerNation YouTube channel, Vintage is the New Old blog site, Reset 64 Magazine, K&A Plus Magazine and various other publications. Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/retrogamernation Website: http://retrogamernation.com Email: retrogamernation@gmail.com

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