 —요— Another day, another Amiga port on the Super Nintendo. This one is called Adventures of Kid Cleat, made by Crisallist Software in 1983. But folks overseas will know it as Sokker Kid. And I gotta say, of all the SNES Amiga ports this system has, this one at least shows some promise, or at least more so than stuff like Out-to-Launch or Sink or Swim. It's another action-platformer, but it's got some different stuff going on, starting with the story. The World Cup is about the start, but some alien appears on a ship and steals the trophy for some reason, before promptly colliding with an asteroid. What, was ToonSys the driving cat flying the ship? And the trophy falls to Earth breaking into five different pieces, so of course it's up to you to go find them, using your soccer skills, I guess, in all different parts of the world, like London, Venice, Moscow, Tokyo, and New York, just to name a few places. You get a life meter with three lives and five continues to get through five levels, split up into three stages, and there is a password system here, and as you might expect, the levels are divided up into different parts of the world I just mentioned, but as far as the basic gameplay goes, it's still just run to the right, defeat enemies, and avoid obstacles, but the main thing this game has going for it is your accessory, the soccer ball, and there's a lot you can do with it. You can obviously kick it at enemies to get rid of them, but you can also bounce the ball off your foot, so you can launch it at different angles, you can stand on it and use it to jump higher, or to carefully roll over the top of spikes, you can bounce it off your head and hit enemies directly above you. It's actually pretty cool, you can even do overhead bicycle kicks. You're not permanently tethered to your ball either, if you happen to lose it or leave it behind, just stand still and hold the A button for a second, and a new one will materialize, so that's a neat idea. The problem, however, is in the details that we usually take for granted in action platformers, things like the balance of speed between your abilities and enemies on screen, or a steady camera that's not jolting around every time you tap the D-pad. Seriously, your character moves way too fast, and certain enemies move even faster than you do. Like this guy here throwing a wrench at me a hundred miles an hour the split second I'm on screen. Who is that, Sandy Alcantara? This imbalance essentially makes this a pick-up-and-die kind of a game, meaning you can only progress further by moving ahead slowly and carefully, dying inevitably, and then trying not to repeat the same mistakes. What sucks, though, is that the game doubles down on this imbalance by making the camera way, WAY too sensitive, moving it around so quickly that I get dizzy playing this game. This is probably my biggest pet peeve in any game like this. If I can't clearly focus on what I'm doing and where I need to go, then the game practically becomes work at that point. And that's really disappointing because there's a few good ideas in this game. The soccer ball as a regenerative projectile works pretty well, especially since you can do so much with it, and it obviously works well given the whole soccer motif, but the speed imbalance and camera issues take this one down several notches for me. Of course, the usual stuff like bonus games and various items like invincibility and speed boots are here, but there's just not enough here for Adventures of Kid Cleats or Soccer Kid or whatever to make up for those fatal flaws, but just in case you happen to really like this game, the Super Nintendo port was actually sliced in half. There's twice as many levels in the original Amiga version, so if you dig this game, go nuts with that version. This game also got ports to DOS, 3DO, Atari Jaguar, and a Game Boy Advance version, the latter of which itself ported to the PlayStation of all things. And every version features this title screen. I mean, cheese. Why does nearly every game made on the Amiga have to have terrible Mickey Mouse eyes featured on a human being? Seriously, his face looks like emo Phillips got stung by about two dozen bees. Why does every Western developer make all their characters look like Latoya Jackson? But yeah, I was looking forward to playing this one. Even the soccer ball mechanics work pretty well, although they do take a bit of practice to get used to. What takes a lot more practice, however, is getting used to the ridiculous camera jolting around the screen and how absurdly fast enemies appear and throw stuff at you. I'm wondering if there's some kind of improvement patch that can be made to just slow certain stuff down in this game, because I think there could be something pretty good here. But as it is, it's just another below-average action platformer held back by some pretty glaring flaws. Alright, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day!