Tech News on G4No goal for 'FIFA 08'November 27, 2007By Adam Swimmer - G4 Canada |
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I'm not much of a soccer player. When I was a little kid, I played on one of those peewee teams and was most likely the worst player in the league. And aside from a few pickup games I played back in university, I've pretty much avoided the game. (Though I've occasionally watched the World Cup.) But when it came to the soccer video games, I was decent. At least better than I was at other sports titles. Or rather, that's what I thought until I picked up FIFA 08. Following the 2008-09 year in soccer, you can play in the English Premier League as well as 29 other leagues, such as Bundesliga German league and Major League Soccer in the U.S. (and yes the Toronto FC is there too.) You can also play a preset world tournament or create your own with up to 24 of 44 national teams. There's also an online component. The gameplay is a little awkward. The controls appear simple enough. You move around with the left analog stick and the right one determines how you kick the ball as you're running. But they're really hard to get a handle on. Granted, I admit that big sports gamers may have an easier time at it, but for me the characters ran too slow and trying to line up a shot was a nightmare. The cameras don't help. In an attempt to show as much of the field as possible, the view is far back, making it much more difficult to see which players are yours, especially if the generic-looking players have similar coloured outfits. (In the instant replays, they do look like their real world counterparts.)
There is also a bunch of team management options. You can change your team's formation on the field, assign offensive and defensive strategies to specific players. And you can download your team's latest roster from the main menu. (You need to have the up-to-date rosters to play online.) The announcers, soccer players turned sportscasters Andy Gray and Martin Tyler, do a reasonably good job here. Not quite as impressive as the commentary in NHL 08, as the two are a little unspecific when referring to teams or players. They say something about how one team dominated the first half of play, as opposed to saying Manchester United gave Manchester City a good walloping. But I imagine this is because of the immense number of leagues and tournaments to choose from. You can't really expect these two to sit there for a month, repeating the same phrases over and over, substituting in the names of the 621 teams and 14,000 players. At least not unless they got huge wads of cash for the effort. Unfortunately this compromise does make the announcing a slight bit more stale. And frankly, although I'm not an avid soccer fan by any means, I imagine it is a little strange to have those guys commentating on a game in Brasileiro Série A, or really any games outside of the English Premier League. Ideally, Electronic Arts probably should had added more announcers. Of course, that would have meant more money and more time and then the game may not have made it out until after the season was over. And they'd need to rejig it again for FIFA 09 because of new players and trades and what not.
In the end, I have to give FIFA 08 a bad rating because I just couldn't play it. I personally think it is a poorly made game. But if you're a soccer game fan, you might disagree.
FIFA 08 Format: Playstation 3
Developer: EA Canada ESRB Rating: E for Everyone
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A new feature to the FIFA series, allows you to play in the Be A Pro: Co-op Season mode. You choose a single player on a team and learn to “master” his moves over the season. Although slightly more interesting than the goalie mode in NHL 08 because you can actually run around the field, you still spend much of your time chasing after the person with the ball or trying to determine if the person running at you has it. And really, you can pretty much just leave your character standing there playing with himself as the game plays on without him.
For the most part, the sportscasting is intuitive. When I accidentally scored a second goal on my own net in the first half, (Yes, I said I sucked, didn't I?) Gray and Tyler seemed heartbroken. They talked about how devastating it was for morale to have two own goals in the same game. I was mildly surprised they had recorded extra dialogue for that eventuality. So I decided to score a third, fourth and fifth own goal. (Oddly, my computer opponents didn't try to stop me scoring on myself.) Unfortunately, the developers obviously decided to cut the commentary at two own goals because that's what I kept hearing about over and over. Oh well...
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