Game:

Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe (1990)

Duration: 4:22

126 views

0

Speedball 2 HD: the only game in the market today that lets you beat up Lord Tennyson.

Anyone who didn't play Speedball 2 back its Atari ST/Amiga heyday will struggle to understand why gamers from that era rate it so highly. I think one of the lesser appreciated elements is its speed. One of the great things the Motorola 68000-powered 16-bit home computers did was provide a sense of speed their predecessors -- the BBC Micro B, Spectrum ZX and Commodore 64 -- could not . Before the Atari ST and Amiga came along, action-oriented games had such low frame-rates you could almost measure them in seconds per frame. (Dino Dini's Kick Off moved at breakneck speed compared to earlier football games.)

But what's fast in 1990 is slow and plodding in 2013. Similarly the brutality that might have made Mary Whitehouse blanch in 1990 is tame by today's standards. But mostly it's in terms of gameplay that Speedball 2 badly suffers. The kids playing super slick EA sports games today are going to look at this quaint old artifact and wonder what the hell the appeal is. Enjoy your lawn, old timers, we're going to the Superbowl, they must be thinking. Speedball 2, the sports game set in the 24th century, is outdated by 21st century standards.

I'm not sure what the long term plan is for Jon Hare, Mike Montgomery and Vivid Games. Are they releasing these Speedball 2 remakes on various platforms in order to fund development of a modern Speedball game? I sure hope so. It's a great theme and core design but it desperately needs updating.

Some thoughts on the iOS version released two years ago:
http://www.fuyoh.net/2011/05/27/speedball-2-evolution/

Other Statistics