FIFA Soccer 08

 

One of the three titles I’ve most wanted a console to play (along with Guitar Hero and any NHL title — which will finally come to the Wii in September 2008 when 2K Sports releases NHL 2K9), FIFA is a game I’ve played a fair amount, mostly in short, intense bursts. I think this is mostly because there are thirty-eight games in most leagues’ seasons, and it’s easy to make it through a whole season in a week or two.

FIFA delivers most of what I wanted in a soccer football game. It has some ridiculous number of domestic leagues from around the world, even lower-level domestic leagues, but I’m especially glad it includes the Czech Republic’s Gambrinus Liga, and my favorite side, relegation dwellers Bohemians 1905. You can compete for several tournaments, but the two biggest — the World Cup and the European championship — are missing (normally they release these as special titles to coincide with the actual event, although it looks like FIFA Euro 2008 is only available in Europe, and not for the Wii).

The gameplay tries to take advantage of the Wii’s unique controllers, with mixed results. It’s a little hard to master, and even when I swear (literally) up and down that I’ve made the right gesture to execute a certain maneuver (like yanking up on the Wiimote to take a powerful shot), the game seems pretty arbitrary about actually performing the move that gesture is supposed to make.

Another fault is that some of the controls are poorly thought-out. For instance, on a ball in the air, yanking the Wiimote down is the gesture for both heading the ball and volleying it (kicking it in mid-air), which is fine, except when you just want to head the ball down to a nearby teammate, only the game interprets the maneuver to mean you want to boot the ball fifty yards out of bounds.

Particularly aggravating is how FIFA seems slow to respond to certain commands. For instance, making a run with the ball, I often get dispossessed because my player will keep running in a straight line instead of making a cut or turn, which is what’s supposed to happen when I move the control stick on the Nunchuk. And it’s also irritating whenever the game executes a command about three seconds too late, causing my player to perform an entirely different maneuver from the one I intended when I made the gesture in the first place. For instance, sometimes I’ll sprint after a loose ball and make the gesture to try to kick it, but I get beaten to the ball by a player from the other side, at which point FIFA finally remembers my kicking gesture, only without the ball that’s a slide tackle, which is either completely worthless and takes a player out of the play, or even worse, results in a foul or booking.

Back when I was having a hell of a time trying to manage the controls, I decided finally to attempt the ostensibly easier “Family Play” controls, a simplified, Wiimote-only control scheme FIFA describes as something like “you say when to pass and shoot, we handle the rest!” The trouble is, passing and shooting are the only things you control in this mode; you don’t even get to move your player around the pitch, which makes it kind of hard to anticipate when you should pass or shoot. I actually abandoned this effort just a couple of minutes into the first match, because I found it harder to use than the “total control” scheme.

There is a practice mode called “Football Academy,” where you can practice all sorts of maneuvers from the very basic shooting and passing, to the more complex balls through the air and other advanced functions. It’s helpful, especially as a refresher when I haven’t played in a while, but it’s still not perfect. For instance, it’ll tell you how to head the ball, but there’s no guidance on how to control the header. And that’s especially bad, since the instruction manual for the game is even less detailed about game controls; I looked repeatedly in the manual for how to send a simple cross through the air, and found nothing for that, though it did tell me how to do a ground cross. Like that’s real useful.

And don’t even get me started about the artificial intelligence. At least when it comes to defending, I never cease to be amazed and how the computer-controlled players on my back line appear to back away from an attacker pressing forward with the ball, standing stock still or, worse yet, moving away from the center of the pitch to give the attacker a clear path down the middle of the pitch to my goal.

Do I have any good things to say about FIFA? Sure. The biggest plus it has going for it is that it scratches the football itch for me. Even when I get hopelessly frustrated by my feelings of powerlessness, I still like to play it, just because I like football more than most sports, and I’ve clamored for a football video game of my own at least since I started sporadically playing FIFA World Cup 2002 on someone else’s Xbox in my dorm. That iteration of FIFA thoroughly blew away the more meager offering I had on my old Sega Genesis, which was FIFA Soccer ‘95, if memory serves, a good enough game, but lacking any league or player licenses, which meant generic squads and players with fictitious names (I remember the Los Angeles team had a striker or midfielder named “D. Fung,” whom I figured had to be an inside joke about LAPD criminologist Dennis Fung, who testified in the O.J. Simpson trial). And FIFA 08 is a good but not great football title. The controls are a mess, and there’s a lot missing (major international tournaments like Euro or the World Cup, but also UEFA Champions League, UEFA Cup, etc.). But it’s still a sports game, which means it has endless replay value.