Original Release: Midway, 2002, PS2/Gamecube/Xbox
A simplified soccer title with huge hits that wouldn’t fly in real life, RedCard is nevertheless more restrained than some of Midway’s other sports titles
RedCard 2003 (Gamecube, Midway, 2002)
Where to Buy: Amazon
How to Emulate: coming soon!
Review by: C. M0use
Midway carved out a niche of over-the-top arcade sports titles that was headlined by NBA Jam and NFL Blitz (to the point it formed a special “Midway Sports” division), but none of their other experiments really caught on the way those two did. RedCard 2003 was their “blink and miss it” shot at doing something like this for soccer, but I think it ended up being an obscurity due to serving kind of an odd niche rather than being a bad game.
First of all, it’s more “toned down” and tilted toward the “realistic sim” side than their usual sports outing. It’s really pretty much a straightforward arcadey and simplified soccer game, just with the ability to get away with some level of violent hits, superhuman “turbo boost” sprints and a basic “super shot” mechanic. I kinda feel like it’s more comparable to what Tecmo Super Bowl did with football than how Blitz or Jam were handled.
It’s also a pretty good game overall, though definitely pitched more to two-player contests and casual one-off single player games than offering any sort of management or season depth. There is a limited “season” mode of sorts but the only purpose is winning games in the finals to earn points that can then be used to unlock new teams and stadiums (including the game’s more silly aspects). Other than that it’s pretty much two-player and random casual games.
Overall it’s a more professional presentation that doesn’t adopt the sort of Mt. Dew Lightning Extreme approach the Blitz games took, bringing in former BBC commentators Simon Brotherton and Chris Kamara to do sober play-by-play and including only official national teams with their early ’00s roster of players. Replicas of actual arenas are also used complete with appropriate crowd chants and the players speaking to each other in their native language. It’s actually a pretty impressive level of aesthetic polish for something meant to be more of a simple and arcadey throwaway title.
The gameplay is also mostly solid, feeling more like a slower-paced hockey game than a detailed soccer sim. There are a few bits that could use some improvement, though, namely sometimes iffy passing (that doesn’t always follow where you’re pointing) to goalkeepers having random bouts of being inexplicably bad.
And then there’s the over-the-top violence element: basically you can get away with hard slide kicks and shoulder tackles to a great degree, and players can also charge a Double Dragon jump kick to the face. You have limited turbo sprints (complete with Flash lightning effects) and also limited ability to pull off a slow-mo super shot. Another gameplay hink is in how the ref calls these, which seems to be totally random. You’ll get away with like 90% of the violent moves, but every once in a while someone catches a card for one seemingly at random.
Overall, RedCard kinda addresses an odd niche, but one that actually worked for me personally. It’s accessible to people who aren’t really fans of the sport but enjoy a more arcadey soccer title, but with touches of authenticity aimed more at serious fans. It’s pretty fun to play and nice to look at, some hinks here and there aside. I’m guessing big fans of the sport didn’t find it to have nearly the depth they were looking for, however, and even if the game is in your wheelhouse it doesn’t have a tremendous amount of stuff going on to keep a single player occupied.
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