Ballsy! World Cup 2020 is a wonderful throwback to Sensible Soccer

Well judging from what i see, SWOS feels so much better...
I just played today via FS-UAE and my brand new quickshot 2 turbo hooked via an adaptor to the usb port ^_^
Also there is this: https://www.sensiblesoccer.de/swos-2020
but it seems Windows and Amiga only.


Last edited by kokoko3k on 22 January 2021 at 2:23 pm UTC

Portugal goal was in offside position, the tackle to croatian player looks like from SpeedBall 2...

I remember a game called Striker that you had to keep pressing one of the directional keys to give an effect to the ball, my older brother had to replace the keyboard after some days playing ...

Quoting: kokoko3kWell judging from what i see, SWOS feels so much better...
I just played today via FS-UAE and my brand new quickshot 2 turbo hooked via an adaptor to the usb port ^_^
Also there is this: https://www.sensiblesoccer.de/swos-2020
but it seems Windows and Amiga only.

Yeah it's a bit strange that a game from 2021 with all the advanced in cpu+gpu power still is more sluggish than a game from 1992 running on a 14Mhz machine with 2MB RAM...

Quoting: qgnoxPortugal goal was in offside position, the tackle to croatian player looks like from SpeedBall 2...

I remember a game called Striker that you had to keep pressing one of the directional keys to give an effect to the ball, my older brother had to replace the keyboard after some days playing ...

It was called the aftertouch, pretty much all of the soccer games of the 80/90 era, starting from dino dini's kick off (i think), had it.
Thanks for bringing striker to my memories, nice game, indeed.

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: kokoko3kWell judging from what i see, SWOS feels so much better...
I just played today via FS-UAE and my brand new quickshot 2 turbo hooked via an adaptor to the usb port ^_^
Also there is this: https://www.sensiblesoccer.de/swos-2020
but it seems Windows and Amiga only.

Yeah it's a bit strange that a game from 2021 with all the advanced in cpu+gpu power still is more sluggish than a game from 1992 running on a 14Mhz machine with 2MB RAM...

I think Sensible soccer required just 7mhz and 512kb of ram when running from the floppy drive :)
Playing with word meanings, 'strange' is not right unfortunately, quite the opposite, indeed.
It is fairly typical in the whole computer and operating systems development history started when pc-ibm took over the amiga and the "let's optimize software that can run on actual hardware" paradigm switched to "You've to buy new hardware to run my software"...
So that today, to read a bunch of kilobytes of text out of the web before growing old, you need a bunch of gigaherts and a bunch of gigabytes of ram ^.^.
Sadly, not strange at all :/

Quoting: qgnoxPortugal goal was in offside position, the tackle to croatian player looks like from SpeedBall 2...

Heh, I thought the same thing, but then immediately afterwards the caption said "defend like there's no referee, cos there's no referee", so I guess it makes sense.

I've hardly played any football games since Nintendo World Cup on the NES, but this one looks like a lot of fun.

Instabuy! This will be pure fun playing in split screen!

Quoting: kokoko3kI think Sensible soccer required just 7mhz and 512kb of ram when running from the floppy drive :)

Yep, it ran fine on an ordinary Amiga 500, and at least from memory it did feel snappier than what's shown of Ballsy. But I guess if you played SWOS back then, Ballsy might be the right speed for you now ;-).

Quoting: kokoko3kSo that today, to read a bunch of kilobytes of text out of the web before growing old, you need a bunch of gigaherts and a bunch of gigabytes of ram ^.^.
Sadly, not strange at all :/

I don't want to image what we could do with the computing power at hand if only we'd have lean code optimized for the hardware it runs on. Instead we developers (and I'm guilty of that as well) keep heaping layers upon layers of high level languages, libraries, abstractions and indirections on top of each other until we end up with an onion the size of a melon for a task that could be performed by a pea.

I mean, just look at something like this!

Quoting: GuestOlder games for older hardware that didn't vary, aimed at 640x480 at best, many with a 25fps target (hooked up to a tv rather than a dedicated monitor), 16bit graphics, limited or absolutely no networking, far more simplified audio, no multitasking worries, and with a much higher barrier to development entry compared to today (both economically and for required technical knowledge).

Still, they were a lot of fun.

Quoting: GuestJust bear that in mind when comparing against modern games.

Let's take Ballsy! vs Sensible soccer.

GPU:
* Ballsy: Any modern GPU
* SS: Amiga OCS blitter was capable of almost 1000k pixel per second, no 3D, the copper and that was it.
* Ratio: Almost a number bigger as you want

HD space:
* Ballsy: 200MB of Storage
* SS: 880KB of Storage
* Ratio: 225X

RAM:
* Ballsy: 512 MB of RAM
* SS: 512KB of RAM
* Ratio: 1000X

CPU:
* SS: 68000@7mhz: something around 2.5 MIPS
* Ballsy: 64bit processor... Intel Core2 Duo is over 20k MIPS
* Ratio: around 8000x

And today if you read the system requirements for Ballsy, you can even easilly say "Wow, this game is very light!"

...it is a bit too much for me to even consider to justify.


Last edited by kokoko3k on 23 January 2021 at 5:22 pm UTC

It is that the numbers are so big that i think the big part of the resources (maybe not vram) are sacrified in the name of the developers lazyness (abstraction layers).