FIFA Soccer 2002: "Hmm, should I tackle him...or bump him safely?"
Written: Jun 09 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: everything but the cons
Cons: poor colission detection, other tiny little errors
The Bottom Line: Ok.
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| Rock_On's Full Review: FIFA Soccer 2002 for GameCube |
INTRO:
I’ve been a long time soccer fan since before I can remember. I’ve also been playing the sport since I could walk. Hell, I would crawl around hitting a soccer ball with my head. I’ve been on 47 different soccer teams, 3 out of state teams, and 2 global teams(played in a ton of countries in Europe). Even with my love of soccer, I never bothered playing any of the soccer video games because I didn’t think they could stay true to the sport...until one of my buddies who works up at Blockbuster gave me a free rental, so I picked up the only game they had left, FIFA Soccer 20029Lost Kingdoms was freshly rented out, although I had had it in pre-order anyway at Funcoland).
PLOT/STORY/GAMEPLAY/CONTROL:
First of all, your mission in life in FIFA Soccer 2002 is to pick a team from the different parts of the world, and take them to the ultimate honor in the sport of soccer...the World Cup. What’s the World Cup you may ask? The World Cup in Soccer is the equivalent to the Super Bowl for Football, Stanley Cup for hockey, World Series for Baseball, and the NBA Finals for basketball. It’s the reason players put their flesh and blood into practice and actual matches(games).
Now soccer isn’t the most popular sport here in America, even Golf edges out before Soccer. But it’s very popular over in Europe, where they call it Football. Instead of having one team in each state, there’s one team from the states, and that’s USA(course you can play Minor Leagues).
Soccer is a sport of hard work, both physically and mentally. You have to be able to move the ball, and have a little bit of speed. Usually people think the faster you are, the better you are at soccer. This is sometimes true, however when players replace speed with skill and accuracy, they usually end up losing the ball to a slower player that has a ton more foot skills(course’ someone who’s fast AND has good foot skills and control with the ball might have better luck).
Ok anyway enough of that, in FIFA Soccer 002, you have the option of choosing a play now mode where you can choose a team to play as and against and then getting the game started ASAP. I often used this when I was too lazy to set up a season or tournament. Other modes include Season where you can play through a series of games, Tournament which has different tournaments that can be played in and there are more to unlock, then there’s World Cup Qualification where you play to earn a place in the World Cup.
You have a wide variety of moves you can use on the field, including different styles of passing and shooting on offense, and slide tackles and such on the defensive side.
On the offensive side, you’re not going to be able to be Superman and fly by the whole defense, so you need to push the ball up field by a series of passes from teammate to teammate until you can score. You've got two types of passes, a lob pass and a ground pass. You can charge up a pass by holding the pas butt and you’ll see the power bar at the bottom of the screen. The longer you charge it, the harder you’ll kick it and also the less accurate it’ll be. However the less time you take to charge the attack, the shorter distance and more accuracy you’ll have. Usually the weaker but more accurate kicks are used for passing the ball to someone near you, with a defender between you. Lobs are passes that are kicked in the air, used to pop a ball over a defender's head or to kick long distances up field. You’ve also got a 1-2 pass where you’ll pass to a player, and then they’ll feed it back to you on a through pass.
When you shoot the ball, you don’t want to over power a shot or else you’ll send the ball flying over the cross-bar(I have problems with this in real games). Of course you don’t want to under-power the ball and it roll right to the goalie, and then of course you don’t want to kick the ball right at the goalie or wait till’ the last minute to shoot. For EVERY shot, pass, or anything where you kick the ball; including goal kicks, free kicks, and corner kicks...you have to aim your player in the direction you want the ball to go in order to kick it that way.
On the defensive side of things, you’ve got two choices; [1] Take the safe side of things and “bump” into the player to steal the ball, or [2] Risk the chance of getting a yellow card by slide tackling. Since I get enough rules while I’m actually playing the sport, I don’t want to follow them again, so the game actually got boring because I couldn’t do anything without getting called. And that’s one of the bad things about FIFA Soccer 2002, the refs suck. The AI for the ref’s in this game is terrible, as I’d make a clean slide tackle and I’d get called on it.
I don’t like the way this is done because sometimes it’s impossible to tell where the ball is going to be kicked because of the camera angle. A new feature added to the 2002 FIFA installment is the curve feature that adds a new twist on gameplay. While timing and judging the right power and angle for a shot or pass, you can press the “L” or “R” buttons to curve the ball left or right. You can use this feature in a variety of ways whether it be to curve around an opponent, or to totally trick the goalie’s train of thought. Everything controls fairly well, the controls aren’t too difficult to get attached to, and the only problem you might have is getting offensive and defensive moves mixed up, but of course those are easy to learn too. The controls for shooting the ball are actually quite off to me, because no matter what camera angle, you can’t get the exact angle of where you need to shoot(especially that rotating camera...I’m about to shoot and all of a sudden it swerves around and messes me up).
Aside from utilizing the curve ability, there are lots of other moves and abilities that, once mastered, can make you the ultimate king at FIFA Soccer 2002.
GRAPHICS:
I’m actually getting tired of EA porting all these sport games to the Gamecube from the PS2, why can’t they just release them at the same time or something like the new Spider-Man game was. Either way, I guess I should be glad that they at least cleaned up the graphics a bit. I’ve not played the game on PS2, but from screenshots and watching one of my friends play, I can tell that the textures were smoothed out a little from the PS2 version.
I was quite surprised with how realistic the player models were, however there were little graphical problems like when you shoot the ball at the goalie and you see a replay, the ball seems to go right through the goalie. The collision detection in FIFA Soccer 2002 is also very poor, it felt like Max Payne in slow-mo. Then there’s some character to environmental graphical quirks I noticed, but a lot of people may not notice this. Otherwise Character models look really nice and player movements are as realistic as they could get right now. Hopefully FIFA Soccer 2003 will make them even better.
Stadiums all look the same to me, but whether it be rain or shine, the grass and everything looks just fine. I didn’t notice that this was included, but I wish that when it was raining, the ground would be wet and soggy, therefore affecting how the ball rolls and bounces and stuff. Oh well, maybe next year.
SOUND:
This is where the game really lacked. Stadium sounds were so weak, and there were hardly any sound effects a’tall. My biggest gripe though is the broadcasters. They get very annoying and have a limited amount of lines.
I never hear any of the songs that the manual boasts it does except for the opening movie, but some of the artists include Gorillaz, DJ Tiesto, Conjure One, Cirrus, Vitae, BT, and a few others that you've probably never heard of.
Rocky’s Corner:
FIFA Soccer 2002 is a nice game for a rental only, and probably the most soccer enthusiast would only warrant a purchase of the game. Although some people may like the game just because. I don’t know, but the game just got bring after a while and I don’t need a simulation when I play the game almost every day.
~Happy Gaming
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
Rock_On
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Member: Rocky
Location: Brownsburg, Indiana
Reviews written: 367
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still alive.. for those who care.. =)
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