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Some tensions never let up, even after well over 20 years. Do you remember the battle between Kick Off and Sensible Soccer? For most of us it was one of countless 90s playground spats - SNES vs. Mega Drive, Blur vs. Oasis - that's passed into the irrelevance of childhood memory. For Dino Dini, it remains a little more personal than that. If you're of a certain vintage, you'll doubtless have heard of Dini - a man who, for a long while, was synonymous with the football genre, whose name was drawn in neat black type across the top of games boxes that played a part in millions of childhoods. It's one of those monikers embedded within the wonderful wizardry of 90s computing, when developers were able to put a proud stamp on their work - Geoff Crammond's Grand Prix, Sid Meier's Civilization - that gave them a strange kind of aura. The kind that gives you a jolt when they're suddenly rolled out during the middle of an otherwise unremarkable showcase of PlayStation games.
I'll admit it caught me unaware. Halfway through a Sony event highlighting its forthcoming downloadable slate for PlayStation 4 - games such as Housemarque's fine looking Alienation, the weird juvenilia of David Jaffe's Drawn to Life and Kill Strain, a game with a title so forgettable it took me some 30 minutes stoking search engines trying to recall exactly what this intriguing MOBA is called - Dini's given the stage to present his grand comeback, Dino Dini's Kick Off Revival. A few minutes later I'm sat on a sofa playing it with him, relishing in the sharp tang of nostalgia that comes with playing a brilliantly tactile football game that's faithful to the originals.
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