Animal Soccer World

Animal Soccer World This game has NOTHING to do with any type of soccer game. Genre(s): Movie Mini-game Collection Platform(s): PlayStation PlayStation 2 Release: PlayStation June 27, 2003 PlayStation 2 October 2, 2006 Developer(s): The Code Monkeys Publisher(s): Phoenix Games

Animal Soccer World (German: Das Unglaubliche Fussballspiel der Tiere, lit. The Unbelievable Soccer Game of Animals; known on PS1 as Animal Football) is a video game developed by The Code Monkeys and published by the infamous Phoenix Games for the Sony PlayStation and PlayStation 2. It is an animated movie made by the infamous Dingo Pictures along with some mini-games, like memory games and puzzles. It was released only in Europe.

Plot

The animals decided to play a soccer match just because a dog and panther fought and want to see who can kick the ball further & that's all.

Gameplay

The gameplay is quite simple, it is a collection of mini-games that either consist of putting together a puzzle or matching two of the same pieces and there is also a movie available.

Why It Gets A Red Card

1. Much like the previous "games" talked about on this wiki, the "game" isn't even a game. It is just an animated movie with a few minigames as if the developers had no idea to create something more interesting and created compilations of several minigames, what doesn't make sense is that since this plot is about football, you can't even interact with the animals, which is unacceptable in 2003 and 2006, as there were football games all the way back in the 90s.
2. The voice acting is horrendous. Only one person voices everyone and he completely fails at it, since he barely speaks English and his voice is weird. He even voices the female characters. There's also times where he will speak too fast or slow out of nowhere. This shows how very low the production budget was and that it was impossible to hire more than one actor and how poorly written the script was, without any emotions and gender.
3. There is no lip-sync at all. There is also terrible sound direction as most sounds are not even synchronized with the animation, talk about the infamous 1993 Bubsy pilot (for example, the animation of the referee blowing his whistle and the sound of the whistle being blown do not occur simultaneously). Adding to this, the mouth moves in only two frames and this already shows the laziness of the developers.
4. Much like previous "films", the animation is absolutely abysmal, resembling something from the 1910's or very early 1920's cartoon (Gertie, The Dinosaur and Felix the Cat are well known at this time for having much better animation, if not better than this "minigame compilation"). since it was made by Dingo Pictures. It will make your eyes pop out from the shock (in many occasions, the characters are bobbing their heads repeatedly). the animations are very stop-motion and the only thing that distinguishes them from the oldest productions is that the graphics are colorful.
   • To add on to #4: false advertising, since the cover implies the film has the same animation as the box art (not to mention there's an inappropriate drawing showing a bear on top of a pig looking like it's having sex, this drawing is on the bottom of the box art), which it obviously doesn't.
5. Lame story-line: The animals decided to play a soccer match just because a dog and panther fought and want to see who can kick the ball further. Which even for kids' story standers is lazy, even a three-year-old would be able to create a much more interesting plot than in this animation, which is unforgivable even for a production aimed at children.
6. The characters are recycled from previous games (such as The Dalmatians and Lion and The King) made by the same company, as well as the music which is actually asset flipping and a textbook example of developers' laziness when developing games.
7. Unlikable characters.
8. On two occasions, a duck nurse comes through to help an injured character, and makes a siren-like noise that is extremely irritating and totally ridiculous considering the fact that only vehicles can make that sound, not a duck.
9. The character designs are just lazy, especially for Harry the reporter and it rather gives the impression that the author of the design had absolutely no interesting idea to create a more interesting-looking character and instead came up with random character designs and quite often similar copies of each other to hide laziness as much as possible.
10. Odd and somewhat inappropriate dialogue, such as one line from Charlie where he says "Can you make juice for us?", yet due to the poor voice acting, it makes it sounds like he's saying: Can you make jews for us?
11. One song that plays remains in German with a Dutch voice-over. This is bizarre since the entire movie was dubbed to English. There are 2 possible cases here, either the developers, apparently for some strange reason, did not notice that such a scene does not exist at all, or they are so lazy that they did not even want to translate everything to English to the end, it is both stupid and causing uncontrollable laughter.
12. The "movie" is incredibly short because it only lasts half an hour, which is a desperately short duration for something like this.
13. Since this is made by Phoenix, the disc is of poor quality and will overheat so much that it will never load again if you want to put it in your PS2 again which makes it useless almost immediately and can only be thrown into the trash.
14. The mini-games are just mediocre. There's no background music at all, the cursor moves too slow and the sound effects are awful. It's boring to play them and there's no point in playing them at all.
    • All the minigames are of course boring and repetitive because they are all very similar and have very simple rules.
15. The loading times are incredibly long as they can take up to several minutes which is odd since it's just a collection of a few simple minigames with virtually no challenge and that's on PlayStation 2 and something like that even on PlayStation 1 could be easily optimized and even work without major problems on platforms such as Philips CD-i and SEGA CD.
16. Generally speaking, there is very little interactivity here and in the "movie" there is none at all, which makes the collection in general quite poorly programmed and lazily designed.
17. The game tries to rip-off the soccer match scene from Bedknobs and Broomsticks, but the results are terrible.
18. During the soccer match, the animals that are quadrupedal (such as the Lion Cub, Alligator, and the dogs which can only walk on four legs) are shown as being Bipedal (being able to walk on two legs), which is very strange and can negatively affect the intellect of a few-year-old using this collection and thus think that these creatures are bipedal when they are not (very few dogs are able to walk bipedally for a long time, even though the organism is obligatory quadrupedal).
19. When the animals play their music, it layers over the music that was already playing which may give the impression that the developers did not even test this "animation" and just added it blindly hoping that no one would notice.
    • Also almost all of the instruments in the movie are not the ones in the music.
20. The same music is played on a loop for the rest of the movie which also shows a very low budget for this production and laziness because the developers did not want to make a soundtrack, they just added the first better music and did not want to add more.
21. Despite these poor qualities, Animal Soccer World was created in 2003 to 2005, also known as the same years that both Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando and God of War(as in the first game made in 2005) respectively was made.
    • Ironically, 2003 was also the same year that The Dalmatians 2/3 was also created.

Redeeming Qualities

1. The idea behind the story of football for children was fairly interesting although it was terribly executed.
2. While repetitive, the soundtrack is at least decent.

Reception

The game although it went unnoticed by critics, has become infamous for its poor quality and is considered by many one of the worst games of all time. DXFan619, in his video about Phoenix Games, said that this is one of the worst games that he ever played, and criticized heavily the voice acting, which he considers the worst of all time.

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