Ultimate Beach Soccer Review

Admittedly, I am not a huge soccer fan. At that, I’m not big on sports either, aside from baseball, football, and tennis. The absolutely last sport of the major ones that I would like to play or watch is soccer. Despite my loathing of European football, I went ahead and gave it a try on my GBA in the form of Ultimate Beach Soccer, which puts a twist on the traditionally boring phenomena, sweeping across the United States, one soccer mom to the next.

First, lets take a look at the different modes that are available. The Exhibition mode allows you to select a team of choice, along with an opponent’s team, then one of the four locations, Bangkok, Rio, Marseille, and Venice Beach. Exhibition aside, the training mode is where you will start out, even though exhibition is at the top of the screen. Training is basically a free-for-all mode, where you can test everything out freely, without the worry of opponents, rules, or time limits. By simply pressing start, a menu pops up; this gives you the simple button layout. The other modes include Beach Soccer Tour, in which you compete against other countries to claim the trophy, Tournament mode, where you will compete in five different tournaments, including one for each of the four levels, and the last game mode is Link Mode, which allows you to play multi-player with a human by connecting your GBA to theirs; a second game pack is required.

The Beach Soccer Tour has a total of 32 teams that compete against each other. It starts out as eight pools of four teams; the winner of each pool will move on to compete in an eight team playoff, in which it is single elimination.

Your choice of moves alternates, depending on which team has the ball. If you have possession, you can pass with the B button, juggle with L, or take a shot for a goal with A. A combination of impressive moves will increase a meter at the bottom left hand corner; once it fills up, your team enters the “state of grace�. During this period, shots are fired with more power.

When on defense, you can press A to do a short range sliding tackle or B to do a standing tackle. There is enough variety in moves to keep the game fluid and the controls precise, simplistic, and easily graspable.

Each game consists of three periods of three, six, or nine minutes. There are a total of three difficulty levels; the easiest level is overly simple, I have yet to lose in well over 20 games. Surprisingly, the GBA version of UBS ended up impressing me much more than the Xbox version. Being a GBA game, UBS is highly recommendable and should be considered for a purchase.