World Championship Soccer

About

World Championship Soccer is a top-down soccer game built around the 1990 World Cup tournament. You guide your team through matches with basic controls focused on dribbling, passing, and shooting. The lack of fouls, substitutions, or tactical options keeps the pace fast but simple. You pick from any of the participating nations and play their official schedule, skipping qualifiers entirely. Single-player matches or head-to-head splitscreen let you chase victories with no frills. The game earned official FIFA branding for the 1990 event and shipped on multiple systems beyond the Sega Mega Drive including DOS and Amiga. Its ZX Spectrum version reached number two in UK sales behind a rival football title. Later Sega re-releases stripped Virgin Mastertronic’s name and renamed the title. In Brazil it sold as Super Futebol II. The stripped-back design gives it a dated feel by today’s standards but makes for easy pick-up-and-play matches.

Storyline

This is the second World Cup official licensed franchise game based on the 1990 FIFA World Cup featuring the official logo and the mascot, the first having been the ill-fated and little-known World Cup Carnival for the 1986 FIFA World Cup. The game gives official groups, teams and the fidelity schedule of the championship. Gameplay occurs at a birds eye view. It was ported by U.S. Gold for DOS, Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum. The Spectrum version of the game went to number 2 in the UK sales charts, behind Manchester United. After the World Cup, the game was released as World Championship Soccer and later renamed to Sega Soccer on the Mega 6 compilation cartridge on the Mega Drive removing the Virgin Mastertronic credits. In Brazil was released with the name Super Futebol II. World Cup Italia 90 sees the player given the choice of participating as any of the teams that featured in the tournament itself, and no qualifying tournaments to reach the World Cup are available on this game.