If real footballers trained on this, they’d all be shit.

When Michael Tonge suffered a long standing injury years ago, he was tipped has being one of England’s next greatest starlets in International Football. Instead, he came back and dropped down to be a sub-par Championship footballer. I have a feeling I know why, he must have done his physiotherapy on Striker Pro Soccer Simulator.

Chunky ass cabinet

SPSS (for short) is an arcade cabinet that has featured in many amusement centres around the UK. It contains a real football that is attached to the back of the cabinet with a sensor board at the back to sense where the ball was hit and the power of the punt. It’s not at all original, a cabinet called Kick It was out quite some time ago doing the same thing, except it did it better and somehow recognised the spin of the ball better, unlike SPSS which has a spin button that doesn’t work properly. The game has three different modes with varying difficulties and the premise of the game is to score goals and get through matches against teams from dead ball situations. Graphics are that of Sega Saturn quality and the unit stands tall with a 39” screen. The cabinet is beefy and definitely dominates the room, the cabinet design is aesthetically pleasing, but the pleasure stops there.

Easy mode is extremely easy, until you start using the bend function. The bend function is too over complicated, instead of adding the amount of whip that you want on the ball, you instead have to time your kick to ensure you get the amount of curl you require. That’s bullshit and it should have kept it simple, it really was the maker and breaker of the game being worth a play or not. Secondly, depending on the vendor you’ll be charged £1.00 per go and that £1.00 is over extremely quickly. If you want to buy this cabinet you can get it for £5100 but to do that you would need to be clinically insane, or own an arcade. Would you get your money back on the investment? Probably but you could be waiting a few years for the return.

I'm a fucking blur baby!

When players play SPSS they can choose their own country to represent and also view replays of their goals, but that’s as far as it goes. There are no world leader boards like many cabinets offer today and the kicking square feels too small to get a good whack. According to the manufacturer it’s the closest game you can get to the world cup. What world cup are they going on about, the clinically insane Olympics? Games like SPSS are proof that arcade games are a dying breed, people have moved on and so have I, what a dreadful machine.