There are a fair amount of football games for the PlayStation which begin with a letter that precedes 'F' in the alphabet, but the truth is that all of them - bar Actua Soccer 2 - sit along a quality spectrum that starts at 'Okay I guess' and ends at 'diabolical'. Before the twenty-year FIFA (or EA Sports FC, or whatever it is called now) hegemony, football simulators used to be ten a penny. It wasn't really until the early 2010s that FIFA's status as singular soccer kingpin became commonly accepted, though there was a brief period in the late 90s and early 00s (ie. before Pro Evolution Soccer) where it surged in front for a while.
Unlike most of the other 'annual upgrade' sports games, where I tended to only play one or two of them in this process (for the sake of my own blood pressure), for FIFA I've gone for all of them. I think it'll be interesting to see how it started, and then mark out the point at which EA Sports stopped bothering and began focusing on the PS2 entries. I owned and played two of these back in the day - 2000 and 2002 - though I spent a bit of time playing a N64 copy of Road to World Cup 98 at university on a communal console a few buddies and I picked up for a few quid. After 2002, the next time I would give a FIFA game a real go would have been FIFA 16 on the PS4. It was quite different at that point, and had started leaning into the ridiculous card-collecting micro-transaction cash cow which is all the game is today.
Twenty years earlier, though...
FIFA Soccer 96
The game's subtitle, Virtual Stadium Soccer, hints at a mid-90s trend to jazz up the new technology to create 3D representations of stuff by slapping on the prefix 'virtual'. From the top of my head, I remember Virtual Safari, Virtual Springfield, and come to think of it, Virtua Fighter, Virtua Cop et al count too. Even Actua Soccer was named VR Soccer in the USA. EA Sports had created a 'virtual stadium', and you were going to play virtual football in front of a virtual crowd, and score lots of virtual goals. The word has lost all meaning to me now.
At Virtual Stadium, a recent nearby nuclear meltdown has turned the sky green.
It's a far cry from where we ended up even by the end of the PS1, let alone now. The virtual stadium - the only stadium available - is 3D, but everything else is represented by 2D sprites. It would have been the first time we'd have had commentary in a football game, thanks to the storage capacity of the new-fangled CD-ROM technology. We're treated to John Motson shouting "Oooohh" over and over again, with a few heavily compressed .WAVs in between, but it would certainly have been a novelty. Seemingly in lieu of the sort of close-camera 'reaction shot' stuff you might get in breaks in play on a real broadcast, in FIFA 96 goals and fouls are followed by strange 'cut scenes' where short animations are displayed on the (virtual) stadium's big screen, with lines like "That's got to hurt".
There's a bit of an odd approach to 'tactics', where you are able to declare how far up or down the pitch you play.
The gameplay itself isn't horrible in comparison to some of the other games I've played, but it's definitely not yet what one would be able to meaningfully call a true football simulation. Players are tricky to move about, and it's really quite hard to play. I played for a while and was only able to score a couple of goals, with one of them almost certainly being an accident. I'm not sure it was something that I just needed practice at, either. The computer, on the other hand, finds it seemingly straightforward to bang them in against you. Potentially things would have been a bit better when playing against a mate.
Set pieces don't really work.
It's worth noting that there are a heck of a lot of sides with which to play. Dozens of international sides including heavyweights such as Zambia and Singapore, as well as the top divisions of (among others) England, Italy, Spain, Brazil, and, er, Malaysia. Motty even calls the names out correctly in-game, though I didn't check to see if he respectfully recites the team sheet for Kuala Lumpur FC. It is fun to be able to play against a Blackburn side featuring the classic Alan Shearer / Chris Sutton combo, though.
The target square thing doesn't actually influence where the ball goes very much.
It's overall pretty weak, but in 1995 you could have done a lot worse than FIFA 96. Mainly due to a lack of decent competition, though.
Kept my attention for: Around an hour
On the cover Jason McAteer and Frank de Boer
Overall: 4/10
FIFA 97
FIFA 96's Virtual Stadium didn't finish the job. Yeah, the stadium itself was 3D, but what about the players?
It looks like it's based on the FIFA 96 code, rather than starting from scratch.
Yes, with the likes of Actua Soccer and Adidas Power Soccer snapping at EA Sports' heels with their fully 3D game engines (not that they'd have needed to worry, both of those games were cack), a response was needed. What we got was the first step along the path to what you'd remember as "PS1 FIFA". The players are modelled and animated in 3D, but extremely roughly. From afar, the players resemble something more akin to origami dolls of footballers than anything particularly corporeal. Everything is a bit choppier and staccato. It doesn't handle as well as FIFA 96, though it's unlikely anyone would have truly comprehended this at the time, such was the fuss about 3D technology.
The camera can now do this.
While FIFA would begin to retain as a sort of trademark its use of real music in the menu screens as opposed to simple synth BGM, FIFA 97 is probably the only one I've known to use thrashy rock music to accompany your game mode and team selecting, as if you were playing WWF Attitude. It's not especially bad, but certainly not what you would expect coming into it so many years later. Speaking of team selecting, the same wide array of international teams as the previous year are available, and the bizarre promotion of the Malaysian league continues. I really don't know.
We now have extremely rudimentary goal celebrations. It would be a few more years yet before we got the insane mocapped choreography of later titles.
FIFA 97 also sees the launch of the short-lived indoor five-a-side mode, which was a great idea that it was a shame to see get binned. Motty is joined on comms by Des Lynam in the (virtual) studio and Andy Gray making the first of what would be very many appearances on co-comms. The commentary is generally more sophisticated than in FIFA 96 and probably found the format with which it would sit for at least the rest of the entries on the console. The introduction of 3D players also meant that it was possible to create a more 'TV broadcast' look, with close-up camera views of the players taking free kicks and the like.
Five-a-side mode. HP Pavilion computers only got discontinued this year.
Is it any good? No. No, it's pretty rubbish. The efforts toward 3D-at-all-costs really turned it into a bit of a game that plays as if stuck in treacle, and it's even harder than its predecessor to score goals and win games. Games are also eerily quiet, and visually it looks rough as a dog, too. Objectively, you would have to say that FIFA 96 is the better game, but some people at the time won't have been able to look past the shiny 3D graphics.
Kept my attention for: Around an hour
On the cover David Ginola
Overall: 3/10
FIFA Road to World Cup 98
Now we're getting somewhere. We didn't actually get a proper FIFA 98 - EA Sports and their canny minds concluded that rather than risk disturbing sales of World Cup 98 (which is basically the same game) six months later by having a game called FIFA 98 which people already owned compete with it, they'd prefix this one with the words "Road to". Insert GIF of that guy tapping his head.
Ian Rush? I checked, and his last international game was in January 1996, around 18 months before this game.
The FIFA that everyone remembers starts here. The formula had been cracked, and from now on, changes to the gameplay each year would be fairly minimal and mainly revolve around animation improvements and the addition of various gimmicks. It's much easier. Almost too easy - one of the reasons people started preferring PES a few years later was boredom at the ease at which you could curl in a wondergoal with a simple tap of the circle button. The crowd noise is back. Generic BGM has been binned in favour of real music for the first time - the game intro tune is Blur's Song 2. Commentary is the same trio of Motty, Andy and Des, but it's been tightened up a bit and some of the (rather humourous, it has to be said) howlers have been removed.
The game has taken shape.
With the game being about World Cup qualification, it makes sense that the number of international teams available to have a kick around with has shot up to incredible levels. Why play through the boring UEFA qualification stages when you can take up the mantle of taking Tajikistan, Burkina Faso or the Cook Islands to the World Cup? Just don't ask what happens once you win qualification, though (it's nothing - you'd need to shell out 30 notes a while later for World Cup 98 for that). Malaysia's league is still amongst the fully playable club teams.
Don't count on being able to play as Vanuatu in the upcoming World Cup 98 game, even if you qualify.
There are a few other things that stand out. A few series stalwarts - L2 can now be pressed to do some simple 'tricks', which is helpful for rounding the keeper, and tapping triangle gives you a boost of speed for a while. There is a 'training' mode, which lets you practice set pieces, which are still pretty clunky. The five-a-side mode is present, too, for the second and final time. It's hidden away though - you have to select it as a stadium in the 'friendly' mode.
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Amazingly, this is actually (sort of) what the Newcastle away strip looked like in 1997.
It's not all great. Load times are outrageous. Visuals haven't quite been perfected, but are far better than FIFA 97's sharp-edged mannequins. The fact that the game is dedicated to the World Cup qualification stages means that playing a proper tournament is blocked off. But at the time this would probably have been the best football game around, if you weren't a fan of the dodgy licencing on ISS Pro.
Kept my attention for: Around an hour
On the cover David Beckham
Overall: 6/10
FIFA 99
Road to World Cup 98 had found the formula. All FIFA 99 had to do was massage it into shape. And that it did. Who can forget that opening Fatboy Slim-assisted cinematic?
Crossing and headering is finally a legitimate tactic.
FIFA 99 isn't really all that different to RtWC 98. As a matter of fact, if you put screenshots of the two next to each other, you'd need to look closely to tell the difference. Its superiority comes through adding polish where needed and bringing in one or two new ideas that compliment the existing setup. Now that the gameplay had been put right, EA Sports had an opportunity to start focusing a bit more on the 'like watching it on TV' experience.
It's come a long way in the two years since FIFA 97.
Match introductions are now cinematic affairs, with teams striding out and lining up for a photo while some match facts and HUD graphics are displayed to provide some match context. Motty has binned off Andy Gray, to be replaced with Mark Lawrenson and (sometimes) Chris Waddle, of all people. Such a mix was a bit of a one-off, and it would be a long while before three differing commentators returned to FIFA games. There's a pretty comprehensive (though at the same time, limited) team and player editor. For the first time, the UI in the in-game menus starts to look a bit more like what we remember as FIFA up until the late 00s rebranding.
Beckham comes pre-set as a 'nutter', foreshadowing 'that' sending off vs Argentina by almost a year. If only he had played this game.
I'm sorry to report that the Malaysian league has finally gone, as well as the five-a-side mode. Black armbands all round. What has come in instead, though, is the sniggeringly-named 'European Dream League', which is perhaps incorrectly referred to in the in-game commentary as the European Super League. I've discussed the period's relationship with the notional Euro giga-league before and how it differs with today's extremely dim prevailing view, but it does draw one to wonder whether such a league might have 'stuck' if it was implemented 25 years ago.
Snow? Orange balls? You're damn right.
It's still quite easy, but that was never something that bothered me too much. It's a superior title to its predecessors simply based on an aggregate of small improvements on RtWC, which is all they needed to do.
Kept my attention for: Around an hour
On the cover Dennis Bergkamp
Overall: 6/10
FIFA 2000
After FIFA 99, EA Sports likely knew that they'd secured the golden goose and they didn't need to change much with their approach to the game particularly. There was also the small matter of the PlayStation 2 on the horizon. If they were going to start anything from the beginning, there would be no point doing it on the PS1. As a result, FIFA 2000 is not quite 'more of the same', but is a small evolution on 99 nonetheless.
They weren't able to secure the rights to Ronaldo, so 'No. 9' he is.
FIFA was now at juggernaut status, so could pour money into securing the services of pop stars like Robbie Williams for theme music. So desperate was Robbie to live a dream of being a professional footballer in a football game, it seems, that he is given level pegging with actual professional-footballer-turned-sometimes-political-fruit-loop Sol Campbell in the introductory footballing FMV. He would get his wish in real life with Soccer Aid a few years later, I suppose.
Visual improvements on 99 are extremely minor.
The gameplay itself has had a few quality of life improvements. There is now a little arrow around your player pointing in the direction of the player to whom you would pass the ball if you pressed X, and it is colour-coded red-amber-green based on whether the pass is likely to be cut off or not. I'll admit I totally missed this function back in the day. Commentary is back to Motty and Lawro, and poor old Des Lynam has been put out to pasture in favour of the new, cool football presenter Gary Linker. One definite improvement is in the sound department - fans make far more noise, start chants when you're ahead (including shouts of 'Ole!' after several passes are strung together) and generally sound more like an actual spectator audience rather than background audio. There are another stack of playable teams, both obvious and quite random.
There are a ton of 'classic' teams to have a go with.
One of the things that is quite obvious is how much easier it is compared to FIFA 99, which was already pretty easy. While the first two games were too difficult, the pendulum has now swung too far in the opposite direction, and entering half-time at five-nil up is a feat which is excessively easy to perform. There are always the harder difficulty modes, I suppose.
The lengthy celebration animations were starting to get stupid. Have you ever actually seen anyone do this?
The prevailing opinion on FIFA 2000 is that it didn't do enough differently to 99 to be considered an improvement and the 99 still reigned supreme. I think that it would have been easy to think that at the time if you had just been watching the jump from 96 to 97 to 99 and were hoping for continued revolutionary upgrades. With the fullness of time, I don't think one could argue that 2000 is actually the better game.
Kept my attention for: Around an hour
On the cover Sol Campbell
Overall: 7/10
FIFA 2001
FIFA 2001 laid claim to a couple of firsts. One is that it was the first of the series to be released on the sparkly new PlayStation 2; something that by its nature required an entirely separate game rather than a simple port. The other is that it was the first to feature authentic looking team strips (some, at least), sponsor logos and all, meaning that it looked less like Manchester United were turning out one weekend wearing reddish-looking jumpers rather than football shirts.
Proper team shirts make it look so much better.
While FIFA 2000 could be accused of being too similar to 99, you couldn't say the same about 2001. The graphics have had an overhaul, with the ugly-as-sin collections of gurning footballer faces finally thrown in the bin and replaced with...well, something slightly less ugly, at least. There are some HUD improvements, with names appearing under the players for the first time. I was never a big fan of this change, as it detracted from the 'TV broadcast' feel that the earlier games were clearly going for, but whatever. The difficulty might also have been turned up slightly from the 'My First Football Game' depths of 2000, but it might just be my imagination.
Unfortunately, that's it for the neutral-to-positive changes. Everything else feels like a step backwards. Gone are the dozens of random teams to play as - the 'Rest of the World' bracket of squads has been reduced from a lengthy list of motley clubs like Al-Nassr and Slavia Prague to...er, Galatasaray, and that's it. The international team list has been shortened too, to just the big guns. FIFA 96 let you play as India and Zambia. No such luck here - though rather strangely, Palestine stands out as the lone rogue option.
The legendary Pep Guardiola as a player, long before his 0 Premier League titles with Manchester City.
Gary Lineker has been immediately jettisoned from his one-game stint, too. In fact, the 'in the studio' presenter has gone entirely, and you're down to just Motty and Lawro re-using a few of their lines. What happened to the real-life bangers on the soundtrack? The 'Tournaments' game mode has also been truncated and is actually a bit of a lie; 'Tournament' would be a more truthful name, with a simple World Cup style tournament the only option available.
Hmmm...No.
It's interesting that they decided to cut things back. By this time, FIFA wasn't exactly alone as a football sim, and you had plenty of others like ISS Pro Evolution and This Is Football which were already doing things that FIFA wasn't. You have to wonder if by this point they were focusing more efforts on the PS2.
Kept my attention for: Around an hour
On the cover Paul Scholes
Overall: 5/10
FIFA Football 2002
From FIFA Soccer, to simply FIFA, and now to FIFA Football. Not to worry, by 2006 things would be back to just FIFA again, where it would remain until EA Sports lost the branding altogether 17 years later.
A few more of the shirts get the fully licenced texture treatment.
I've had a go with something which is quite close to FIFA 2002 already, in the shape of 2002 FIFA World Cup. It was offensively bad. It was a strange feeling. I owned FIFA 2002 as a lad and can dig up a lot of memories of having fun with it, particularly the player editor. Was I just clueless? Is this just false memory syndrome?
No Road to World Cup 2002? Nope, they bundled it all together this time.
I don't feel like this is as bad as 2002 World Cup, but it's definitely not as fun as I remember it. FIFA 2001 was a step backwards. 2002 is more of an exercise in taking everything that 2001 seemed to be hinting at changing up, and going all in with it. I respect the effort, but it's all just a bit over-engineered in comparison to the simple yet fun arcade-ish gameplay of 99 and 2000. Once again, the pursuit of 'realism' and whatever has just slowed everything down to a crawl and made things clunky to play with.
Gaze upon yet another 'cross' getting sent into the stands behind the goal.
This year, they introduced the 'hold down the pass/shoot button down to alter its power' mechanic, which remains to this day and is considered more or less mandatory for a 'realistic experience'. Well, whatever it is, it's poorly implemented in FIFA 2002. Don't expect more than two in three of your passes to reach their mark, and expect most of your shots to fly upward into row Z. Don't even bother trying to cross the ball at all, as it is no longer possible - your player will just boot the ball into touch, or lump it backwards. In two short years, a working passing-and-crossing game has gone from doable to not worth bothering with, and you must resort to the old fallback of just running at defenders down the middle.
Hmmm...still no.
The gameplay is poor, but at least they showed a bit more commitment to the non-football aspects to the game than in 2001. The bags of clubs and nations missing from 2001 are back, and the soundtrack, while now being entirely early-00s techno-trance stuff, is actually good. I guess that's what teenage football enthusiasts were listening to in those days. It's also visually the best looking so far. FIFA 2002 isn't very good, but it was also the last of the 'proper' PS1 FIFA efforts; from here on in, what we would be getting were low-rent copies of what was being served up on PS2.
Kept my attention for: 45 minutes
On the cover Thierry Henry
Overall: 3/10
FIFA Football 2003
FIFA 2003 feels like a bit of a 'greatest hits' version of all the games which came before. I was expecting a distinct lack of effort as the market for PS1 games started to bottom out, but this is actually an improvement in many areas on 2002's turgid-ness.
The UI starts to resemble a low-res PS2 game.
First, the bad news - this was the first year of the aggravating 'EA Trax' music switcher, which ruined many an Electronic Arts game in the years to come with its generic, lowest-common-denominator rock-pop stuff turning game soundscapes into homogenous blobs. Andy Gray has once again got the chop to make way for soundalike Ally McCoist, though I guess that's not 'bad news' particularly. The team and player editor is gone. The other bad news is that the same terrible hold-X-to-pass stuff and floaty, slow gameplay still remains - though this comes with an important caveat.
Scoring goals is back to being excessively difficult.
EA Sports must have realised that their game was fast becoming terrible after 2002. That means that this time, you are allowed to choose between 'simulation mode' and 'arcade mode' - with the latter being a long-awaited return to how the game played in 99 and 2000 (ie. fun). The game really prefers that you'd persist with their 'simulation' gameplay, though; almost chastising you for choosing their old-hat, non-'real' mechanics from a less refined age. It's not a straight swap back in all respects, but more of a mix of the best parts of both. I can get on board with it. The AI in general got much worse after 2001, and unfortunately that has been retained, but you can't win them all.
It's amazing really that it took this long for a pitch radar to arrive.
The hated European Super League is back again, too, dressed up this time as the 'Club Championship'. I'm starting to wonder if this was a bit of an early 00s psy-op. Once again, it is the same format - a handful of big-to-middling European teams and the only real difference in gameplay between this and just creating a custom tournament is that Motty references it in his commentary.
We'd still see a couple more years of Highbury.
It's better than 2002, but still slow as hell and a far cry from the good old days.
Kept my attention for: Around an hour
On the cover Roberto Carlos, Ryan Giggs, Edgar Davids
Overall: 4/10
FIFA Football 2004
FIFA 2004 would have been the fourth FIFA game to be released on the PS2, and by this point the market for a PS1 version had shifted away from Europe and into far-flung developing countries where older console formats were still played with. The Official UK Playstation Magazine had long since finished printing by this point, after having already clung on far longer than it had any real right to. In Britain, most PlayStation consoles were probably in a landfill rather than getting much use.
Fans chant 'Shearer, Shearer' when he touches the ball. I doubt this was new.
So this game is mainly just FIFA 2003 with updated rosters. The UI has had its look and feel changed up, but underneath it all it is very much the same thing with only the background bitmaps being different (a bit like in the two ECW games). The commentary is the same, the available teams are the same, the crap EA Trax background music is the same.
It's the same game.
There is one important difference - the 'arcade mode' mechanics from 2003 (which is actually just how the older games worked) is now the default setting. In fact, there is no 'simulation mode' tripe at all. The mess from 2002 has finally been washed away. It brings tears to my eyes.
Kept my attention for: Around an hour
On the cover Thierry Henry, Ronaldinho, Alessandro Del Piero
Overall: 4/10
FIFA Football 2005
FIFA 2005 was released in October 2004. We were less than a year away from the PS3 being publicly revealed (with the famous boomerang controller). If you sighted a PlayStation game on shop shelves around this time, it would have been in a second hand bargain shelf, with scratches on the box and '£2' inked in biro onto a generic sticker on the front. You certainly wouldn't have ever come across this, which would be the last game ever released on the old grey box.
One last time, fellows.
As I expected, it's just FIFA 2003 again, with virtually no changes since 2004 other than some updated squads, and I'd be sceptical that they would have all been correctly updated, too. I wonder what it would have been like to be a game developer, shunted into a side office and told to spend the next few months working on a PlayStation port of FIFA 2005. You'd be embarrassed to tell your mates. Your parents would think you're a failure.
This is just here to document the fact that Grant Holt exists in a PlayStation 1 game.
The PS2 version of FIFA 2005 had online play and a detailed 'create a player' mode. Things had moved on a long way since FIFA Soccer 96.
Kept my attention for: 20 minutes
On the cover Patrick Vieira, Fernando Morientes, Andriy Schevchenko
Overall: 4/10
And that's that.
Oh, go on then. FINAL RANKINGS:
- FIFA 2000
- FIFA 99
- FIFA Road to World Cup 98
- FIFA 2001
- FIFA 2003
- FIFA Soccer 96
- FIFA 2004
- FIFA 2005
- FIFA 2002
- FIFA 97
It's funny to think today how FIFA's biggest criticism at the time was a lack of any effort being made to do anything different game-to-game, and how they were just team updates and little else. The same criticism applies now, but at least it's true. The last three games in the list above were indeed all the same, but the console was dead at that point, and how can anyone say there is no difference between FIFA 96 and FIFA 99? The 2000, 2001, and 2002 editions are all demonstrably different. Compare and contrast with the last decade and a half of FIFA games. With stuff like 'season passes', these things are basically just subscription services now.