Cheating Week #3: I Cheat To Live

Yesterday, I talked about having infinite money. Wouldn’t that be great? All our problems solved at a stroke, the endless forward striving negated and no extravagance beyond our reach? It’s better than winning the lottery – you hear all these stories of lottery winners who’ve blown through millions of dollars in months, left in the gutter again only this time with wildly expensive tastes that they could never satisfy. But with infinite money, you could buy everything there was to buy.

But what if you could buy everything there was to buy and it still wasn’t enough?

Welcome to the world of Speedball II. The game mechanic in Speedball is pretty simple – it’s a brutal kind of American Football played with a metal sphere and two teams of nine. You get ten points for a goal and ten points for every injured opponent, although there are ways to double that. The playing areas are littered with coins and other bonuses as well, so there’s a slow, steady improvement curve. You start off getting kicked around like a dog, but slowly you get enough money and bonuses to improve your team during the pit-stops between games, where you get to build up your men into hard-fighting machines in the gym or make transfers for better players if you can afford them. It may take dozens of hard-fought seasons, but eventually you will make it to the top.

Unfortunately, you only get one.

You get one season and if that doesn’t turn out to be enough to put you in the top two, it’s game over. Please write in and tell me I’ve missed something because I’ve only played bootleg copies, and that the instructions clearly state etc etc – I would love to be proved wrong on this one. But the game’s even more brutal in the ‘knockout’ and ‘cup’ modes – you’re started off as a fresh new team, weak as a kitten, and immediately made to fight tooth and nail with a team that’s about twenty to forty skill points above you in every area. One punch from these hard boys and you go flying across the arena while they make for the goal. It’s like being back at school. Needless to say, if you lose once in ‘knockout’ then game over. In ‘cup’ you get two chances with the scores from both games being added up at the end, but all that means is that you’re pushing even harder in the second game to cover your losses – or worse, you got lucky once and you’re ground into the dirt straight afterwards.

There’s no save mode either, that I can see.

It’s an unforgiving game.

I mentioned ’skill points’ – there are about eight or nine attributes your players have, things like speed, attack and defense, power, IQ when not being controlled by the player. These start off at a round 100, and you’ve got enough money on you to get a couple of them up to 110 or so. You enemies are starting off with 125 or 150 in their weakest area, and that’s Division Two. We’ll come to Division One in a second.

As you can imagine, without infinite money, you’re scraping to survive ten seconds in ‘knockout’ or ‘cup’, and ‘league mode’ is just an excuse to have your head kicked in for a solid hour instead of two minutes. But if you have infinite cash, you’re suddenly laughing. Suddenly you can boost your men up to 220 in every field, so you’re ploughing through the bastards in Division Two like a scythe through wheat, taking pleasure in racking up the injuries and seeing if you can send the whole team off. You pass the ball to the opponents just so you can bounce them off the wall a couple of times and take it back. It’s a good way of letting off steam. Until you get to Division One, of course, and suddenly you’re up against people with 240, 250 in some skill sets, and you can’t bulk yourself up that far. So they’re VERY strong, VERY fast and they can take the ball away from you in a hot second. It’s most noticeable in the non-league modes, where one minute you’re kicking ass and the next minute Division One’s toughest team comes to fold you into origami, but it’s still a shock in every mode of play.

Oddly, it’s still a good game – with extra time in the gym and some judicious transferring you can boost your total team score up to 225 or 230, so you’re only a little bit less good than they are. It’s a brutal challenge, but it’s possible to fight your way to victory if you’re lucky and smart.

But let’s not forget – you’re in the position where it feels like a winnable challenge because you cheated and got infinite money. I’ve got to assume that if I didn’t get myself some infinite money, I’d be chewed up and spat out.

Wait, I can assume that! Because I didn’t! And I am! Hooray!