The classic GOAL games are back, and they’re still somehow pretty good
Well, relatively speaking.
Jaleco’s GOAL! and Super GOAL! were fordmiddable, surprisingly deep soccer games when they first launched in the 80s & 90s. They let us live out our World Cup dreams when there was nary a full-featured soccer game to come to the US.
I learned a lot about the sport of soccer playing these games in my youth. The fields were huge, the players had some actual weight to them, standard soccer strategies were intact, and there were a lot of countries to choose from. Sure, I always selected the US team and fought an uphill battle, but it was still fun to make these little pixel athletes run nad pass and kick across the pitch.
This collection doesn’t specifically do anything to the games themselves besides make them playable, but given the fact that they still somehow run exactly like how I remember them to is a sort of testament to the games’ designs in the first place. The only additional content is the inclusion of the games’ instruction booklets, which are always a nice bonus, but this really is meant to just give us access to these absolute units of footie.
Person run with ball, person kick ball, ball go in net.
There’s a reason that soccer is the most beautiful game, and even in its simplest pixel form that old adage gets proven again and again. And again.
This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. Images and Video courtesy Publisher. It originally appeared on The SideQuest LIVE for August 07, 2025.
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