Ég er mikill áhugamaður um fótboltatölvuleiki en tek fram að ég er ekki búinn að prófa þennan, og myndi sennilega ekki snerta hannn með 10 m löngu priki. Anyways, ég fann nokkuð gott review um hann og ráðlegg þeim sem ætla að kaupa sér hann að lesa það fyrst, þið sjáið ekki eftir því. Leikurinn fékk 7,4 á gamespot og þar af 9 fyrir gameplay, sem sannar enn einu sinni að Kanar vita ekki rassg*** um fótbolta. Hér kemur reviewið:


EA Sports' FIFA World Cup 2002

Ever wonder what you're missing?

While playing Pro Evolution Soccer and listening to Chris James waffling on about London against Piemonte in the North West Stadium, or Ravoldi being tackled by Revon, I occasionally find my thoughts wandering towards FIFA. I think, “Well at least it has authentic licenses so there's none of this made up nonsense” or “Maybe they have improved it over the last few versions. Maybe it's not complete garbage anymore.”

So, I decided to find out with EA's latest attempt to become king of the football games; World Cup 2002.

First signs are good, as the intro shows in-game graphics of England versus Spain mixed with behind the scenes footage of famous composer Vangelis putting together the rather stirring (i.e. just sounds like some music from Star Wars) official World Cup 2002 theme. This gets me a bit girly excited, but I'm not sure if that's just down to the fact that the real World Cup is only weeks away.

So, onto the in-game menus which look familiarly slick (Konami take note), but I'm immediately struck by the lack of options. Friendly, World Cup Mode, Options, and Bonus Content does not an in depth game make. Rather, it seems that EA have opted to make things as simple as possible from the options upwards.

Diving straight into the full World Cup option (no pussy footing around with friendlies for this kid), I'm then asked to select a team, from around fifty World Cup Qualifiers and also rans, but no Netherlands for some reason. The game provides little titbits of information about each team such as their in game ranking, when they qualified or didn?t for the 2002 World Cup and their best ever World Cup showing. All nice touches. You're also shown a list of each team's default starting eleven with star players having a star next to their name, just in case you don't know your Zinedine Zidane from your Niall Quinn.

Plumping for England, and pausing only to remove Steve McManaman from the starting line up, it's straight into the opening game against Sweden. This begins with a sweep around the superbly rendered stadium at Saitama and a dazzling laser show as the players take the field. It's immediately evident that the players' faces are the best yet seen on any game, with almost photo-realistic representations of large numbers of the game's stars. However, you also immediately notice that all the players look like over-muscular trolls with extremely large heads. It's as if EA were so impressed with the modelling of the heads that they decided to make them as big as possible.

Things settle down as the players take their positions and wait for kick off, and the commentary provided by John Motson and Andy Gray kicks in. Motty starts waffling about what a marvellous occasion the world cup is and then Andy Gray joins in with a few pearls of wisdom and then, we're off.

Immediately I'm struggling not to press PES buttons, and marvelling at how slow all the players are trotting about the pitch. A few nice touches are evident, such as audible shouts from the players, animated subs benches and an ever-present referee, and then I discover the sprint button. I remember from playing FIFA of old that bashing the triangle button was the key to success and decide to give it a go. The ball breaks to Owen, with his star above his head to indicate that he is a star player (do you see?) and I set off toward goal, stabbing triangle as I go. Owen leaves a fiery trail behind him and easily surges through the static Swedish defence and has a one on one with the keeper. “Goal!” I think as I press the shoot button, and little Saint Michael launches the ball into orbit as I realise that I pressed the wrong button. Damn these different controls. Motty decides that I should be wearing a clown suit with shooting like that as the camera careers in to show a close up of a strangely zombie looking big headed Michael Owen waving his arms about in frustration.

I don't know what he's worried about as I immediately get the ball from the Swedish goal kick, pass to Owen again and after a few taps of the triangle am clean through again. Thinking about what I'm doing this time I press the right button and Owen unleashes a preposterous, unstoppable curving exocet of a shot that leaves a glowing trail behind it and makes an exciting whooshing noise. Goal. Simple as that. The crowd goes wild and I?m treated to twenty seconds of Owen posing about in front of the delirious Sweden fans and a few shots of the beaten goalkeeper waving his arms at his defence. Still, it's only one nil and all to play for.

Sweden kick off and immediately lose the ball and I go and score another goal. And another. The game ends eight nil and I go on to win the World Cup at my first attempt. And that's the problem. This is not real football. At no time do you get a sense of a real game of football, with all the subtleties that entails. Instead it's basically a race between your star players (don't forget, they're the ones with stars floating above their heads) and the opposing defenders.

Try to play a passing game and you find yourself passing the ball out of play with regularity. Try to make use of through balls and find that another of your players who isn't making the through run will overtake the one who is and get in the way. Try to play a long ball for a striker to flick on and find that it is almost impossible to head the ball at all. Try to send in a cross from the wing and find that every ball is either cleared or goes straight to the keeper. Erm, one-twos sometimes work, and it is possible to do keep ups. (Press R1 and then keep pressing the shoulder buttons to stand still doing keep ups while the opposing team's players stand still and watch in stunned appreciation of your skills).

To sum up:

Plus Points:

Menu screens look very good and there is a load of bonus footage of Korea and Japan, John Motson and various other stuff that might be kind of interesting.

Player faces are probably the best yet seen.

Some of the animation is good, such as the way players react to yellow cards, bad tackles etc.

Stadiums look ace, with pretty decently rendered crowd as well.

Commentary is passable, with Motty and Andy Gray doing a decent job of describing the action and throwing in a few snippets of information such as telling you that David Beckham was sent off in the last World Cup. Much better than the PES commentary.

The music is quite good.

Official licenses mean that the various kits are pretty spot on and a damn sight better than those strange efforts in PES.

Minus Points:

Woefully shallow gameplay with no atmosphere or sense of real football.

Stupid arcade style fiery trails and swooshing noises when star players are in action.

Unresponsive controls.

Little challenge on easier difficulty levels, stupidly tricky on harder levels.

Very little beyond multi-player mode to keep you playing. I was bored after a few hours.

Substitutions are greeted by about five seconds of black screen and the word ?loading? as your new player's zombie face is loaded from the DVD.

Player's heads are enormous.

It's impossible to keep your eye on the game time due to it being located at the bottom of the screen in hard to read white on red

No radar

On the default camera angle, when the action is on the far touch line you can't actually see what?s happening and none of the other camera angles are of any use.

Strategies and formations are very basic and don't seem to have any effect.

This is not a good game. Yet again glitzy presentation has taken predominance over anything approaching good gameplay and EA has dropped another shoddy football game which is shockingly shallow, very arcade oriented and just plain boring. It also seems geared towards people who don't actually like football that much or know anything about it, or maybe to young children.

Features such as the identification of star players, because you're obviously not going to know that Luis Figo is a better player than Jason McAteer unless the game tells you, and the EA assistant which informs you when players are tired and then tells you who to substitute for them so that you don?t have to bother with any of that boring analysis of your team and individual player's qualities to select the most effective sub, are indicative of this.

Perhaps this is indeed the key. EA seems to have realised that they simply cannot compete with Konami on proper football game terms and have decided to go for a different audience all together, appealing to people who wouldn't normally buy such a game, but seeing as it's the World Cup will give it a go, and Grannies buying the game for their grandchildren.
Anyone else who buys this game in preference to something from Konami is an idiot.



<br><br>jogi - smarter than the average bea