Rock, Paper, Shotgun

This is turning into RPS’ biggest Foot-to-ball day ever. Walker posts about little plastic men. And I, following up from last week’s post on Football Superstars, had an exchange of e-mails with CyberSport’s Creative Director on their Football MMO. Can RPS cram in more foot-to-ball before the end of the day? No. We probably can’t. In what follows, Steve is enormously expansive about the history of Football Superstars. This is fine reading for not just anyone interested in Football – but anyone interested in the still-unexplored possibilities of the MMO. Sez I.
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I found myself drinking with assorted comic people last Thursday, and found myself in conversation with the spouse of an artist friend of mine. I knew he was working at an MMO company, but I didn’t know which – and he reveals he’s working on Football Superstars, which I wasn’t really aware of but seemed exciting and since it was available to download and play now, I couldn’t see why we hadn’t already blogged about it. Bar RPS’ famous aversion to Foot-to-ball, natch – in fact, an aversion to even reading each other’s posts about it, as Jim had totally blogged about it and I hadn’t noticed. Now, I’ve finally played it and discovered that rather than the management game I presumed, it’s actually an action-lead football game, with a one-player one-actual-team player model. A handful of Impressions and video beneath the cut…
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CyberSports have sent words that their foot-to-ball massively-multiplayer virtual world, Football Superstars, has now hit the 250,000 registrations mark. It’s an interesting proposition, not unlike the quite-good-and-similarly-free-to-play Empire Of Sports, with players able to create their own ballists and then partake in games from 3-a-side up to full 11-a-side matches. Foot-to-ballists grow in competence over time allow you to increase “stats” as you “progress”. And it’s a real-time action sporter too, unlike the similar sports-fixated Football Manager Live.

It’s all rather mysterious to us, of course, since we recognise none of the terrain, shotguns, or base-building that we find to be essential to a real game. Perhaps you understand what this foot-to-ball phenomenon is all about?