Cyberball 2072 Review (XBLA)

[Steve_OS]

We have just posted our Cyberball 2072 review. Find out what Scott Burress had to say about it.

"Oh, the memories of Cyberball 2072. I remember loving to run down to the local arcade and dump quarters into this futuristic football game. No real pro teams exist, instead you have teams like the Dallas Machine, Pittsburgh Invasion and Kansas City Crush. Obviously, no real players exist either, they are all robots. The quarterback at least has legs, the other players all are on wheels. It's the memories that made it great I believe though, as playing it now, the game doesn't hold up to what was in my mind. There's only 4 plays you can choose from on the play calling screen ala Tecmo Bowl, these do change on the situation though, as you'll see different runs and passes."

[Fluff E Bunny]

One thing to bear in mind here is that this is NOT the same version of the arcade game that had two monitors. That game was Tournament Cyberball: 2072 and it allowed you to play head-to head (1v1, 1v2, or 2v2) whereas the original single monitor game (which they ported for XBLA) only ever allowed 1 player or two player co-op vs the CPU. I have NO idea why they chose to port the older version of the game instead of the Tournament version.

Regarding game play, the controls are simple, but pretty responsive. To throw...and to pitch/hand off to RB...you just point at the player and press the button. They could get away with this control scheme because it is a 7-on-7 game, rather than 11-on-11, and you only ever have, at most, 3 players to throw/hand off to.

The game itself had six teams (which had different names depending on a dip-switch setting in the cabinet....one for US names, one for international names). These teams were broken down into 2 'option' teams, 2 'passing' teams, and 2 'running' teams. There are a generic set of option, pass and run plays that every team has access to, but each team has exclusive access to a set of 20 special plays for their particular style of team (ie, Crush gets a bunch of special option plays). There are about 250 total offensive plays in the game. I even have screenshots of all of the plays from when I played the game on MAME.

There were some quirks about the game that allowed you to do some interesting stuff on offense...namely bounce passes. And when you got a real 2v2 head-to-head game going, all bets were off because you could run pass routes completely different than they were designed.

For nostalgia sake, the XBLA is great, but I do wish they had done the Tournament version of the game instead. The company that did the port has done a bunch of other old arcade game ports, so maybe they will get to the Tournament version eventually.