The final rendition of the beautiful game to be released on the Dreamcast, 90 Minutes: Sega Championship Football was a title that many Dreamcast owners - me included - had quiet optimism for. We had already seen the likes of UEFA Striker; the Silicon Dreams World League Soccer based revival of the Sega Worldwide Soccer franchise; and the 'it's football Jim, but not as we know it' shenanigans of Virtua Striker 2 all come and go with not much in the way of fanfare.
90 Minutes represented one final throw of the dice for a platform that didn't have a FIFA or a PES, but one which also had its logo plastered all over the football highlights every weekend as players from Arsenal, Sampdoria, St Etienne and Deportivo were banging in the goals. It was quite an odd juxtaposition that a games console that was trying to elbow its way into football culture (see also the Dreamcast Beach Football Challenge) didn't really have a killer app in the genre.
90 Minutes was going to change all that though. See, the big guns were on the case now with Smilebit, the same studio behind the incredible Jet Set/Grind Radio entering the chat. FIFA? PES? Ha! Sega is back and they're bringing their own ball. Anticipation was high for 90 Minutes, and it was only natural that with such pedigree in the driving seat that many were expecting Smilebit's first foray into football to play a blinder. Sadly, upon release it became painfully clear that rather than being a contender, 90 Minutes was little more than an embarrassing own goal.
On the face of it, 90 Minutes seems to have everything you could possibly want from a football game: decent visuals, a multitude of play modes, a pseudo-official license (player names, but not clubs) and the promise of a new game engine created from the ground up for the Dreamcast by one of Sega's most revered first party studios. Upon firing 90 Minutes up, all of the above seem to start slotting into place. The menus are practically bursting with modes and options; everything you would expect is present and correct. Want to create your own club with its own strip? Head out onto the training pitch to practice your drills? Select national squads? Tinker with gameplay speed and sound effects options? You can do all of this and more, all the while traversing some pretty well laid out menu screens as inoffensive background muzak soothes the lugholes.
So you've selected your teams, messed about with formations and substitutes, chosen one of the five beautifully rendered stadia to play in, and your choice of weather and time of day. So far, so good. And then you head out onto the pitch and the whole house of digital cards comes crashing down.