Around this time of the year, most soccer fans are getting impatient to see what Electronic Arts has done with their beloved FIFA game. Last year, after a few criticised editions, EA hit bullseye with the revamped FIFA style. I absolutely loved the game and played it over and over again so I have nothing but good hopes for this year’s incarnation. For me personally it will be the 13th FIFA game I play so it’s about time for a brief history of the series and what it means to me and other gamers.

Thirteen you say? Yes, I have played all editions from ‘95 up to 2003 and all the extra editions for world cups and European cups. I’m not really sure but I believe the series started with edition ‘94 which I, obviously, never played.

The ‘95 edition caught my eye at the store because it looked so different from other soccer games like sensible soccer. EA managed to show the game in a more isometric point of view instead of a top down view with players of a few pixels. The players were moving and had animated bitmaps, it was something I had never seen. My only problem was I didn’t have a console or a strong PC I could game on so I had to play it at a friends house on his SEGA Megadrive. I played it for hours and hours until I eventually got bored with winning every match with a difference of at least 30 goals.

Edition ‘96 was basically the same but a bit better looking and with updated teams of course. In that same year EA released the Euro ‘96 soccer game and let you play with your own country. So EA made money two times from almost the same game and they would repeat this every two year with each major tournament. A tactic that was criticised by many people at first but it was actually nothing more than the introduction of merchandising in the gaming industry. Nowadays you can’t imagine a major sports happening without it having its own game in some kind of way.

Then came edition ’97, a true revolution and the standard for all soccer games to come. No more moving bitmaps but 3D players in a 3D stadium. At that time you had the new consoles like the Sony Playstation and the SEGA Saturn who had a strong graphics card. For the PC there was the birth of 3DFX which made it possible to render all this at a decent rate. Although the game wasn’t flawless (slow moving players and bugged keepers) everybody loved the game and it topped the gaming charts for weeks. Every stadium had a nice intro and the game’s audio commentary with the legendary Motson and McCoist was awesome. A neat extra was the indoor soccer which provided hours and hours of fun in multiplayer.

The series improved with edition ’98 and World cup ’98 until it peaked with the ’99 edition. In that year everything that could be reached with the current game concept at that time was reached. The graphics were top-notch, the audio was flawless, the gameplay was realistic and online matches were introduced. Some players had their own special moves which was a nice addition to make the game more eventful. There were two downpoints that were uncovered in most reviews: the audience was still a flat bitmap and there was the famous corner bug. This corner bug was a flaw that came out of nowhere but lasted 2 editions. When the opponent took a corner they would score nine out of ten times no matter what you did.

In version 2000 they made the mistake of changing almost nothing. I could have lived with that but the fact that they didn’t fix the most important bugs and only focused on updating the engine was unforgivable. This was the first time ever I was disappointed by a game in the FIFA series. The Euro 2000 game was not much better but at least the corner bug was gone. Everyone here loved the game and so did I but that was mainly because our country was organising the cup.

2001 was an even worse year. They updated the engine and fixed all major bugs. All went well up to that point but they also announced a totally new gameplay and this is where they went wrong. The new gameplay was based on realistic passing and ball handling but none of these things were as they were supposed to be. The realistic passes were meant to make you aim towards the right player instead of the automatic passing of the previous versions. What it actually did was make you give one or two passes and then run towards the goal with the ball and hoping for an opportunity to score. The realistic ball handling was OK but it seemed like the computer opponent had no problem doing all kinds of things that you couldn’t do because of it. So basically you had the same old gameplay from two years back without the old bugs but with newer ones. The last flaw in this version was wrong names. My favourite team had two players in it that weren’t even there and one name was completely misspelled.

In 2002 they made another mistake by trying to fix the old formula and the gameplay changes. EA pretty much succeeded in this but it wasn’t enough. They were still king of soccer on the PC but on the next-gen consoles they were loosing the battle against Pro Evolution Soccer and This is Football. What the game lacked in gameplay, it made up in graphics. The motion capturing and the graphics were phenomenal and all that beauty was running smooth on lower systems too. But it was This is Football that had the best engine with real faces and an animated crowd. Again, the World Cup version was nothing more than a change of teams and a small bug update. And oh yea, in 2002 the corner bug was reintroduced to make us all a bit more frustrated.

So for the 2003 edition no one was expecting anything from all the changes they were promising but then at the end of October FIFA Football 2003 hit the charts like a bomb. They had chosen for a complete restyling that was closer to the much loved NBA games. The game was filled with action with a capital “A”. Replays, tackles and amazing goals... it was all there. Instead of changing and fixing edition after edition they changed the whole gameplay feeling and it was a hit. Playing nice combo’s and actually achieving the things you had in mind was finally a reality and the game got good critics all over the place. One of the nice things was that you could control other players that were not at the ball just to have a better position play (think depth passing). Another nice change was the “on fire” player: when everything was optimal for a nice goal, the player would shoot a flaming ball that could result in a nice goal. This year the realistic ball handling was correct and it applied for the computer as well. The graphics were awesome and they took the realistic faces from TiF2003 to a higher level. The only thing that remained was the flat crowd but it looked a lot better than it used to. The only real annoying thing was the commentary. After ten years of Motson & McCoist they were repeating themselves too much and I’m really hoping they will change them forthis year.

As you can see I’m quite a fan of the FIFA series and even though not all games were as good as they could have been. I’ve played them all with a smile on my face and I’m pretty sure that most of you who like soccer and games feel alike.
It’s a good thing that Pro Evolution Soccer is coming to the PC so both titles can keep each other at the edge of there abilities and maybe we will have two superb soccer games. But deep down inside I am hoping that FIFA 2004 will crush the opposition and once again claim its throne as king of the PC soccer games.

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