A legendary game that is so painfully bad, it’s a classic.
The game is played in an isometric view, which was strange because all the footy games before was either in a birds-eye or a sort of first person view. The view works out pretty well though, it’s the gameplay that makes this game a 2.5. It’s just terrible. The shoot and pass buttons do the same thing, he just hits it either way (not to mention the stupid glitch where on goal kicks you can stand in front of the goalie and the ball will bounce off you into the net). Scoring is easy, but if the keeper does save it he makes the same stupid save animation every time (like Fifa 03 wink wink).
Just about everything else in the game is terrible too. The graphics are poor, the sound is downright broken and there hardly anything to do with it. The graphics are “blobs” running around the screen and you don’t really know who has the ball until you give it away. The sound, well don’t get me started on it. I can understand they can’t put commentary on to the SNES because of technical constraints. What you shouldn’t do is replace it with a mega blast of white noise. What is being described as the “crowd” is actually pure sound, but really high. I swear my hearing has never been as good as when I hadn’t played Fifa. I didn’t even have it on at full blast but nevertheless I was writhing on the floor like one of those Japanese kids watching Pokemôn, trying to reach for the remote.
Yet after all these bad things, sometimes I have a cerebral itch to play bad games. I don’t know why, I just do. So I whipped out Fifa and started playing it with my mates and you know what, we had great fun taking out each other with fouls switched off, scoring jammy goals.
The games still crap though.