Once I let my ego go and sat down and read the book it started to make sense, and the wins started piling up. I will admit I didn’t win all my games, but the win-to-lose ratio was much better. I am assuming it had to do with being too used to playing on the larger consoles and never playing on a handheld, but when I figured out the controls, they made sense. The controls were very responsive, and very accurate to what you pushed or drew. There are two different versions of the controls. You can either use the stylus or just use the keypad which played a bit more natural vs. the big consoles.

It seems to me that with such a small screen or screens for that matter, there really wouldn’t be much to a game that depends on graphics, but once again this game proved me wrong. Granted, it didn’t have the graphics to the point where you could count each blade of grass, but all the important components were there. The swishing of the goal net when a goal was made, the flipping of the ad boards and the movement of the players helped make the game more accurate and enjoyable. Once again this is where the money may have something to do with it, as the actual players are generally generic and non-descript, yet I have a feeling with the size of the screen, how detailed could the players be to make the game better? Honestly I’m not convinced it would. The referees come out to hand out yellow and red cards, but seem to disappear otherwise, again probably due to hardware limitations.

No soccer game would be a so without someone screaming GOOOOAAAALLLL! Real Soccer 2009 is no exception. Yet that seems to be about the only sound to come from the game.  There isn’t any commentating, and the music that is involved in the game doesn’t makes much of an impact. Admittedly, I wouldn’t want to listen to any music as I’m trying to crush my opponent, but it seems that something might add to the game here.