Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe

The Good
The imaginative premise of the game whereby you can score by so many means such as the wall targets and wounding opponents.The difficulty curve is what makes this game special. You start off with a really rather bad team and only by performing well whilst collecting the money tokens can you improve. The transfer system makes you yearn to collect those coins to improve your team in preparation for the more difficult games to come.

The Bad
Super Nashwan team are just about unbeatable unless you are lucky. Being able to lob the ball over the keepers head and then clattering him to score.

The Bottom Line
Future sports game where the only rule is put the ball in the goal. Fouling is allowed and in fact essential if you want to progress.

The Good
Great gameplay. Instead of making a computer adaption of a real-life sport Bitmap Brothers decided to design a sport of their own. In my opinion they succeeded tremendously. Speedball is a very intense sport. The pace of the game can be very high, there are four different ways to score points (one of them is taking out the players of the other team ^_^ ) and can play very aggressive without being punished for it. Each match consists of two halves of 90 seconds. You can't change the length of the games. But don't worry, this game is really action-packed; a lot can happen in 3 minutes (and of course the majority of the players wouldn't survive a 10 minute match). The presence of the points-multiplier bonus means the odds can change very rapidly, which helps to keep games exciting.

The graphics are OK. The game features the Bitmap Brothers' trademark steel style of graphics. I also like the sound effects; best of all is the snack salesman that starts yelling "Ice Cream, Ice Cream!" when one of the players needs to be carried of the pitch.

The Bad
Manager options are simplistic. The only things you can do are upgrading your current players and buying a new player on the market every now and then (these players seem to become available after a predefined match). You can't make any trades with other teams etc. As a result the manager-only mode (in which you only watch the matches) is not much fun.

Controls are not that good. You can't change the default keyboard lay-out. You can only move your players in 8 directions (north, north-west, west etc.), not anything in between. The controls should have been smoother. Finally the game automatically changes the player you control. You shift to the player who is the nearest to the ball. Combined with the high pace of the game this can be confusing. There should have been a "change player / pass" button.

On the court all players look alike, even the ones you buy on the market. It would have been better if there was a little more characterization (like mentioning the names of the players who scored).

The Bottom Line
I never owned an Amiga nor played Speedball 2 on an Amiga of a friend, so I don't know whether or not Tomer is right. But I do know that the DOS version is a really cool game in it's own right.

The Good
An outrageously superb game, even now. Fast, furious and most importantly, fun! The most amazing thing about this game is that you REALLY can just pick it up again and enjoy it the same way you did when you first played it. The playability and difficulty curve are THAT good.

This game single-handedly cemented the Bitmaps Bros fame for all time (even if their other games didn't deserve it) and Eric Matthews is a sorely missed genius!

(I would LOVE to see this game updated, while NOT changing a single thing about the gameplay... just more beautiful graphics and sound.)

The Bad
Multi-player league and knockout are bizarrely missing and there's no good reason why! (Even the 256 color AGA 'Update' didn't include it!) If they'd had this then it would probably be still being played today!

The Bottom Line
Completely, truly and utterly perfect.

The Good
Everything. You have a team of losers (which you can upgrade with money you get after every match) and play against other teams... and then it just gets brutal! This game was the first REALLY good Amiga-to-PC port, and it's fast, action-packed, and fun. One of the games from that time period that I still play on a weekly basis. It was a LOT faster than M.U.D.S. despite being technically inferior, and Bitmap Brothers are awesome when it comes to gameplay. Especially when you play against some of the tougher teams (Steel Fury, etc) the pace picks up so much it's incredible. In a good way. This game is addictive beyond belief (even to me, and I usually disdain any sort of action game or Amiga ports), and it still runs well on a modern machine.

The Bad
Well, M.U.D.S. has a better "campaign" mode (buying and selling players, etc). but that's about it! Oh, and the key selection is awkward (O/P for left/right and Q/A for up/down) and can't be reselected, but you get used to it.

The Bottom Line
Well, I just saw an original boxed Speedball 2 on Disks with manuals etc. on eBay, and I stopped bidding at around $30. Needless to say, there are still many who have fond memories about this game, and rightfully so. Strongest recommendation to hunt this one down, although I doubt you can find it anywhere but illegal abandonware. They really ought to make a compilation CD of all the good Amiga ports from that time (Speedball 2, Xenon 2, Turrican 2, etc).

The Good
It's fast, brutal and fun! I really can't wait until bitmap brothers get their act together and release speedball 2100. But until then, the speedball 2 map will always have a special place on my desktop.

The Bad
The league is a bit too short...

The Bottom Line
An excellent way to make time fly. Especially when playing against a friend.

The Good
Having played the Amiga version before, I was pleasantly surprised how well the game was ported to PC (DOS), something that can't be said about so many other Amiga => PC ports.

The gameplay is the same, and the VGA graphics are practically identical to the Amiga version. Naturally they could have been even better in PC (VGA has more colors), but as a port this was quite ok.

The sound effects and especially the music depend on what kind of sound card you have. If you had an Adlib or Soundblaster like most PC gamers, the audio was quite inferior compared to the Amiga version.

But if you were lucky enough to own a Roland MT-32 or LAPC-1 sound card/module, you wouldn't believe how much better the music in the PC version sounds, it really puts the theme music in the Amiga version into shame. But then, Roland sound card cost easily what Amiga 500 cost as new...

The sound effects are also quite satisfying on Roland, even if they are generated from the limited sound effect library of Roland LAPC-1. I especially loved how the reverb effect was put into good use, giving the extra ooomph to the ooomph sounds.

The Bad
Due to DOS PC restrictions, getting two controllers (joysticks) to work passably with two-player games was not as easy as it should have been. It was possible to use certain special "double gamepads", but for most people the way to play two player game on PC was that one person was using a controller (a joystick or a gamepad), and the other used the keyboard.

I am unsure if DOSBox DOS emulator is able to fix this problem in modern PCs, allowing you to use two proper gamepads for the same game.

The Bottom Line
Still possibly one of the best futuristic sports games around. You should really try on either on an Amiga emulator (WinUAE) or on PC with DOSBox, you will not regret it.

The Good
Well, the Amiga version is one of the games I like the most, and while it's obviously superior to the PC port, the PC version has decent graphics and hours of gameplay. The intro music on the PC isn't nearly as good as the wonderful Amiga one, and so are the sound effects and visuals.

But it's a great game none-the-less.

The Bad
Again, I prefer the Amiga version. The PC version's controls are rather annoying, and the game refuses to run properly on newer machines.

The Bottom Line
A fairly solid port of a wonderful Amiga classic.