Real Football

Real Football kicked off in 2004 one of Gameloft's longest-running sports series, meant to give Java and Symbian phones a mobile alternative to big football licenses like FIFA or Pro Evolution Soccer. Without an official license for clubs and players, the game built on its own teams and names, yet it tried to mimic the pace and camera of a classic football simulator shrunk down to a phone display with sharply limited resolution.

Matches were controlled purely with the numeric keypad - the direction of passes and shots came from keys 2, 4, 6, 8, with shooting and passing handled by the action buttons, and the game compensated for the missing analog control with simpler ball physics and shorter matches. The modes offered league progression and tournaments, which gave a reason to come back to the game even after finishing the first season, and between matches the player could follow the evolving table and team statistics. The top-down or angled top-down graphics were a solid standard for mobile sports at the time, even though the player animations necessarily stayed sparse.

Real Football was sold through carrier stores as a paid download, and Gameloft subsequently updated it year after year into new editions with improved graphics and rosters, much like big console series do with their annual releases. Today's editions of the series run as modern mobile titles, but this original version for feature phones is effectively unavailable now that the portals it relied on are gone.

Why play it: For veterans of mobile football who want to see how Gameloft made up for missing licenses with its own engine and yearly updates.