Top 5 forgotten football franchises

Hard as it may be to believe, there was a time when there were more than simply two football franchises vying for your attention and hard-earned moolah. Well, three if you count Pure Football, but we don’t want to as it’s not very good. This golden age (of plenty) ended years ago now, but it is still recent enough that we remember it fondly. As such, here’s a list for your eyes to digest (eyegest):

Actua Soccer
Crafted lovingly by the fine hands of Gremlin Interactive, Actua brought the first fully-3D football game to our PlayStations. It also brought motion capture provided by Andy Sinton, which is bloody hilarious. The fate of the series was decided with the fate of the company, who unfortunately died a death after being acquired by Infogrames (now Atari). We’re not too likely to see the series returning, ever. And to think, it had Barry Davies on commentary.

This Is Football
This Is Football did one thing special compared to many other footy games out there – it used the word “football”. Believe it or not, this was actually used in the marketing spiel at the time, as if it brought something major to the game. It wasn’t the best of series, but at least it was a different option to PES or FIFA, up to 2004 when it just kind of… stopped.

Adidas Power Soccer
APS brought the power of licensing to the fore – something that had existed before, no doubt, but something many of us hadn’t seen in such blatant fasion before. The first word in the bloody title of the game is ‘Adidas’, for eff’s sake. It took a less realistic route and let players use special moves (triangle and X for Predator Shot, if memory serves). It wasn’t very good.

Individual player-games
That’s a rubbish title, so let’s explain: there was a time when football games with an individual player’s name attached came out quite often. They were usually quite poor games, mind you, but still – Michael Owen’s WLS 99, David Beckham Soccer, Alexi Lalas International Soccer, Ronaldo V-Football and – of course – Chris Kamara’s Street Soccer. Innocent times… better times…

Sensible Soccer
The daddy. The pinnacle. The best. Okay, so the version that came out on PlayStation was tripe (the ’98 edition) and the updated one on PS2 in 2006 was pretty much dire, but Sensible World Of Soccer exists, and therefore you cannot discount this series. It was re-released on Xbox Live Arcade, but no word of a PSN version. Shocking. Heresy. We want more goalscoring superstar heroes.

Of course, it seems the main reason most of these series died off was the fact they weren’t very good. So it’s a judgement call really – would you prefer more choice with less guaranteed quality, or the lack of choice but good games we have now? We would say more competition is healthy as it encourages risk-taking and creativity, but at the same time Adidas Power Soccer was pretty pump. Hmm.