Unfortunately, ISS 64 doesn't make good use of the Control Stick. It's much better to play using the D-pad. That's too bad, because it would have been cool to control both speed and direction with the Control Stick instead of having a separate dash button. The D-pad setup works good, except that the players often feel a little sluggish.

Controling the players on the field is just part of the ISS 64 experience. Depending on your tastes, the game can be made as simple or as complex as you like. There are options for everything! Player substitutions, strategy changes, weather, player marking -- everything. The beauty of it is that beginner players can still enjoy the game without using many of these advanced features (with the game set to a lower difficulty).

While most complex sports games are less than exciting, everything about ISS 64 has an extremely enjoyable feeling to it. The graphics, sound and gameplay are all very involving. All of this makes for an interesting game of Soccer.

There's an astonishing attention to detail in ISS 64. From the Ref writing in his handbook as he issues a Red Card, to the coin toss, to slipping on wet turf during the rain, to the victory dances when a goal is scored, to the play by play.... It's all extremely detailed and fun.

After getting the hang of the basics, I wanted to learn and use ISS 64's advanced features. There are so many of these features that I wasn't able to try them all out during my evaluation of the game! These features aren't useless or overly complex at all. There's a way to switch from All Out Defense to All Out Offense during play. There's player substitution (it's actually easy to tell who needs to be substituted by the way) and more. You can even make your own team and save it to a Controller Pak.

ISS 64 offers some of the best Controller Pak options to date. In the 61 pages of ISS 64 data, you can save two ongoing seasons (or one World League season and one International Cup season), game options, player rosters and more! And if that's not enough, each Controller Pak can hold two ISS 64 Notes (121 pages). You can even have a match between custom rosters on two different ISS 64 Controller Pak Notes!

There are multi-player options abound in ISS 64. In an Open Game, just about every combination of cooperative and vs. play exists. You can have two-on-two, four against the CPU, three-on-one... this extends throughout the many different play modes (although some modes only allow for players to be on the same team). ISS 64 gets my vote for best N64 multi-player game so far -- even better than Mario Kart 64.

Unlike most sports games, ISS 64's one-player mode is lots of fun. Each game feels unique and exciting. The game's options allow even beginners to do well once they learn the controls.

The play-by-play is varied and appropriate. The only two problems with it are that the announcer's inflection often changes with each word and often it can be hard to make out what he's saying when the crowd goes wild. But the announcer isn't just there to sound cool, he actually helps! At the start of each half, he clarifies which goal each team is playing toward. No mix-ups a la FIFA 64 (although you can score in your own goal, so be careful!).

Also unlike FIFA, it's very easy to tell the teams apart. A colored shape (a circle for player 1, star for player 2, etc.) appears around the character being controlled. This makes it easy to tell who's who, even if the uniforms are similarly colored. Passing is simplified by arrows pointing off-screen to open players and an X marker over on-screen open players. If a pass is kicked when an arrow or X marker is on screen, the pass is almost always successful.

ISS 64 is also the first sports game I've played where every camera angle is playable -- even the closest one. In fact, the closest camera angle gives a sense that you're right on the field. The feeling after charging the field and scoring with the camera zoomed in is very enjoyable!

As far as the graphics go, they're clear and realistic. The polygonal players are so seamless that they look and move more like blocky sprites than polygons. The animation is smooth, varied, detailed and realistic. It's really something to see a goal keeper swing from the top of his goal to see where a high kick landed in the crowd. Player's will also help opposing team members up off the ground after a rough slide tackle. There are a ton of cool things like this. The shadows on the ground during night games are also remarkable, as are the weather effects.

While ISS 64 isn't a perfect game, there's certainly a lot more that's right with it than wrong. As a multi-player game, ISS 64 is definitely worth friends pooling their money for. As a one-player game, it does the Sports genre proud. Even people who don't usually find Sports games fun will probably find ISS 64 quite enjoyable -- as long as they can get the hang of the controls. Because one-player ISS 64 probably won't appeal to everyone, I can't give a single overall Safe Buy rating to the whole game. As a result, I've given ISS 64 a one-player rating and a multi-player rating, just like I did with Mario Kart 64.