Is anyone aware of any games that attempt spaceball - essentially football, but in space?

Maybe Blitzball from Final Fantasy X is close?

Yes very close, any full games rather than sub-games?
If not, I'm wondering why not - and anyone please feel free to speculate, its seems like a very logical digital sport to me...

Why not? I suppose the difficulty of both graphically representing the play field and aiming/controlling a character in three dimensions.

Take space-based RTSs for example - they'll artificially limit movement as conceptualising relative 3d positions from a 2d screen is pretty damn difficult without orthogonal displays or something like that.

Most attempts like this tend to limit play to a plane, thereby making the "space" element purely eye-candy with little impact on gameplay.

Yes one exist, and it's a free game:
http://www.uniball-central.net/

I tried it once, and it looked very hard, but fun if you invest time in it. This is football (Soccer) into space!

Quote:

I suppose the difficulty of both graphically representing the play field and aiming/controlling a character in three dimensions.

Actually I think that such a representation could be fairly easy. If you think of the UI of 3D RTS games like Homeworld, then you can see that such a UI is achievable.

However, you might also ahve it that the player is playing just one of the players, and in this case, the UI would be more like that of an FPS or a Flight Sim.

I have also been thinking of a game like this, a 3D soccer type game.

My idea was to make it a bit like European Handball ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_handball ).

1) Each player can hold onto the ball for a certain amount of time (a few seconds) before they have to pass it or touch part of themselvs to a Boundary (a wall, floor or ceiling).

2) They can touch the ball with any part of their bodies.

3) Each "field" has a Goal Zone into which no player except the goalie can enter (ie a forcefield)

4) The Goal is a circular target (not a hole) at the back of the goal zone. The closer the ball hits the centre of the target the more points (ie: 2 points for the centre, and 1 point for the outer part).

5) The physics are Newtonian, that is unless a player is next to a wall, or another player, they cant get much thrust (they can sort of swim through the air, but this does not give them much speed).

6) Pushing off an other player will give both of them a push away from each other.

7) Throwing a ball will give a equal and opposite force to the player (but being heavier than the ball, this won't give a lot of speed to them).

The idea of the game is that players are bouncing off the boundaries as they move around the playing field, throwing the ball towards each other and attempting to hit the goal target.

As there is no way the ball (or a player) can leave the playing field, there is no out and even after a goal, the ball still remains in play, so this should keep the pace of the game high. Also as the players can't hold onto the ball for a long time, they either have to quickly jump between the boundaries, or pass it to another player, so this too, should keep the game's pacing high and give each player an opportunity to have the ball and give plenty of opportunity for the other side to intercept the ball.

And here I was hoping you were planning on making Spaceballs: The Game.