Fifa soccer 2000 games

The control is masterful and the variety of special moves at your disposal are easy to learn and exciting to use. I absolutely love the ability to break off a spin after a double stepover. The three different game modes amateur, professional and world class offer plenty of challenge and serious replay value.

But of all the moves with the ball, some of the coolest are things you have control of without the ball. You'll have the option to pull your defense up to initiate an offside trap with the press of a button, and you'll have icon-style passing off throw-ins and free kicks.

The penalty shoot-outs offer the same excitement as the real thing, though no one rips their shirts off after a monster goal. As far as flaws in the game, there aren't many. A few international teams are missing what have you done with the Ivory Coast? But a huge disappointment is the lack of women's teams. It would have been nice to make a cup run with Mia and the gals. FIFA wins my choice yes, even over Madden for sports title of the year. There is one problem with FIFA I don't have enough space to applaud all that's right with this game.

Game speed is perfect and adjustable , the animation is fluid, and advanced moves are relatively easy to learn and intuitive. The computer Al also makes for a worthy match. But FIFA really shines in multiplayer, whether it's head-to-head or cooperative play. That alone is great for U. Switching formation with a single button press is a simple yet ingenious feature. This year's game Is easily the best yet. The controls are supersmooth, the gameplay is tight the A! Even though it's just a tiny thing, I really like the dead ball Icon Attack feature they added.

It makes corner kicks and throw-ins much more exciting. The game's got a rockin' soundtrack, too. Good stuff. America's newly bom soccer league is reporting straight to the game arena with Major League Soccer. To stand out from the soccer crowd, MLS's developers arc focusing on game-play, striving to bring the real experience and tactics of soccer to life by attending to details like eliminating cheesy "hot spots" for shooting and creating CPU teammates who react like real players would.

As far as features go, MLS sports all ten big-league teams, along with all the real-life stadiums and players, including stars like Alexi Lalas. Offensively, players will find several types of passes and shots, while the defensive lineup includes pokes, tackles, and fouls. On-the-strategy lets gamers tune player positioning and tactics or mark star players for coverage. Visually, MLS already shines with impressive polygonal players who sport details like faces, logos, names, and numbers.

Although soccer's still struggling for respectability in the U. FIFA looks to continue the magic, delivering new features like rowdier physical contact, consecutive season play with advancement to the European Cup , season schedules that include league and cup matches, and more than 40 classic teams. Of course, FIFA will provide the usual enormous roster of players and teams, and, if everything comes together as planned, EA Sports is hoping to score the license for the MLS teams and players.

Browse games Game Portals. FIFA Install Game. Major League Soccer. How silly of me. But we'll get to that later. One of the most disappointing aspects of the game is the sound effects. Particularly at fault is the match commentary, which recycles itself at an alarming rate. The pre-match comments are particularly irritating, as they invariably make such comments as "so-and-so has a full squad to choose from today. This is a nice imitation of "match awareness" on the part of the commentators, which would be better if the illusion weren't constantly punctured by naff one-liners.

Another commentary problem is the complete lack of stadium identification. Premier League Stars created a nice atmosphere with little comments like, "we're here at Anfield to see Liverpool take on Everton," and so on. This kind of flavor has been completely stripped, probably because there is now no way to set the venue for your matches. I guess after the stadium slip-ups in FIFA 99 where there were supposed to be all these authentic stadiums but the game ended up having only a handful the EA team decided to get rid of this altogether.

I don't know if Highbury looks like Highbury, but I sure know Columbus Crew stadium doesn't have a roof! So I think the choice has been for the generic here. Also puzzling is the crowd noise. The applause sounds a heck of a lot more like the audience at Covent Garden applauding the concertmaster when he precedes the conductor onto the stage than it does the crowd at Old Trafford screaming hysterically as Alan Shearer converts Sol Campbell's bizarre handball into a place for Newcastle in the F.

Cup Final. What's worse, the crowd often loudly boos the referee for failing to award a free kick for a hard tackle, even if the offender is on the home side! And all of this after EA producer Kerry Whelan was quoted in the New York Times as saying that crowd noises were one of the specific game areas under development.

Gee, that's great. So what will they get excited about? Chelsea's injury-time winner at Stamford Bridge against Arsenal? Then why do they sound like they're applauding the Academy of St. Neville Marriner doesn't play soccer. The music, while really not an important part of the game since you only hear it when you're not playing is a little disappointing this year, as we're treated to Robbie Williams.

Not much needs to be said about this, except that after last year's music, anything else was bound to fall short. Oh well. If the audio serves to detract from the game's portrayal of soccer, the video does the opposite. The subtle improvements from FIFA 99 add up to a game which resembles actual soccer action much more than its predecessors.

First, the players' body movements are far more convincing. Players shoulder charge, shield the ball with their bodies, and hold off defenders with their arms as they try to fend off challenges. You can even control a player's arm shielding, and as you try and touch the ball past an opposing player the game acts very much like an actual soccer game.

In addition, while you shield the ball, your skill move options are different from when you are in free space. What the player faces do for the close-ups, the player movements do for the gameplay.

Furthermore, the tactical behavior of the players is much more realistic. Goalkeepers come out of the box to clear balls that have gotten behind the last defender. They also punch away free kicks believably.

Passes are also more varied, and I have seen some nice backheels which left me applauding the EA animation crew. The soccer ball also acts more like it should: it deflects off of other players in a very realistic manner, and I have had shots deflected away for corners or passes knocked over to different players because the game accurately modeled the collisions. This part of the game is steadily improving, and is finally starting to really look authentic. The lack of customizable controls has been a strike against the FIFA series for a while, and it hasn't been remedied here.

There is one nice touch added where your passing "radar" now not only shows you in which direction your target player is headed, but is also colored to indicate whether the player is open: a green arrow means he is, a red arrow means he is not, and a yellow arrow means, well, it means just try and see what happens.

Unfortunately, these arrows are often wrong, so when making a pass to an "open" teammate you often give away possession and can get caught on the break. But it helps a little. One thing from Stars I'd like to see is the excellent control system in that game allowed you to determine the strength of your passes and shots. Touch the button quickly and you get off a light shot; hold it down for a second and you unleash a piledriver or a devastating through ball.

By contrast, FIFA reverts to the slightly pedestrian "everything the same" motif found in the '98 and '99 editions. More than once I've found myself in some space and wanted to wind up and let go, but couldn't control my shot like this. Another element that has been changed is the way in which set-pieces are handled. The emphasis is no longer on the kick-taker but on the receiver. Each set-piece gives you the option of targeting one of four players, each of which has an appropriately colored diamond above him indicating which button will target which.

All you do as the kick-taker is choose who will receive the ball. There is now also the ability on defense to double-team a selected player. Even more soccer flavor is added, as you can run players around before the kick is taken in order to confuse the defense. While the kicker now has the ability to bend the ball around walls nice touch , I almost prefer the control I had in FIFA 99 where I could control how hard I took the kick, and whether it was aerial or along the turf.

More explanation of this by the manual would be appreciated, but of course this isn't the kind of thing you're going to see elaborated upon in a page flyer. So what's the gameplay like? The Amateur level is woefully incapable of putting up a challenge for experienced players, and after a week even newbies will tire of playing Andorra and beating Italy Professional level is better, and is what I normally play on. However, you will eventually master this and want a greater challenge, which is when you'll switch to the hardest level and have the experience that Barak describes.

Your players will be unable to hold the ball for more than a fraction of a second, and you will be passing the ball around madly, unable to use many of the skill moves because those actually involve dribbling.

I'm sure that with sufficient practice you can put on quite a show at World Class level, but the point is that no matter how good you get, the game will simply make you look like that guy in the Who song [Elton John? Now that's frightening In the end, while the gameplay at the highest level is very challenging, and while the Professional level does allow for some passing and space, the fact is that it simply isn't soccer. You'll never chip the keeper from thirty yards, all your goals will be scored inside the box, and your defenders will never step up to deliver a telling header off a corner.

You won't have your centre-forward take the ball with his back to the goal, move away from the box, and turn to deliver a perfect pass releasing his overlapping right midfielder. This is where the new animations are so nice. Despite all the too-perfect passes and back-and-forth running, the body movements now remind you that this is still the "beautiful game.

I've held off on this for as long as possible, but it's time to address the game's treatment of MLS, which seems to have been deemed important enough to have warranted a license and its name on the front of the box. This treatment is, in a word, shameful. Ok, two words: shameful and embarrassing. First of all, there are 15 leagues represented in the game. Fourteen of them can be played in season mode. One cannot. Can you guess which one? Of course. This comment is not intended as a slight to those leagues, but simply an illustration of the fact that while American gamers can play full seasons using leagues which they most likely know very little about and probably aren't that interested in, they can't use season mode to play their home nation's league.

Although Turkish fans have something to gripe about as well: EA have incredibly omitted Galatasaray. Actually, when I say that you can't play MLS in season mode, I should amend that to say that you can if you use the "custom league" option and manually select all the MLS clubs to participate.

The problem with this is that MLS has a distinctively American flavor where everything comes down to the playoffs, rather than ending in a regular-season winner.

This, in turn, depends on the very American system of conferences, where teams are separated geographically, with most play being between members of the same conference. Sadly, if you use the custom league option, you have no choice but to amalgamate all the teams into a single, European-style division. How generic. Don't even think about having the clock count down, the lack of injury time, or the infamous "shootout. Rumor actually has it that MLS will eliminate the shootout next year thank God , but the whole thing really makes a mockery of EA 's famous slogan: "If it's in the game, it's in the game.

The second problem is with the club rosters. Many of them are just plain wrong. For example, when I went to set the lineup for my own Chicago Fire, I was puzzled by the defensive alignment: C.

Brown, Francis Okaroh, and He wasn't there. Not even as a sub. Simply missing. Sure, Zenga was released by the club in September as the team's playoff hopes faded, but this doesn't explain why so many other players who had left their clubs long before Zenga did are still there. In fact, if you want to play your favorite MLS club, the odds are you'll have to do some heavy editing before you're able to field any kind of realistic side.

The game does have an editor which gives you the ability to edit player names, positions, and appearances, so those with more patience than I can eventually set things right. I'll be looking for custom files on download sites, thank you. Another inexplicable decision has to do with match commentary. Now, I readily admit that when it comes to soccer announcers, there are really no good American ones, just like there doesn't seem to be any good MLS referees.

However, the choice of Phil Schoen is almost an insult to those of us who have ears. While not quite as bad as Ty Keough, Schoen is typical of the American style of commentary where players' personalities or lives are discussed more than the game itself.

I think this has to do with the nature of football and baseball, where five seconds of action are followed by five minutes of doing nothing and announcers have to fill the space with stuff no one cares about anyway.

During a soccer match, of course, this isn't necessary. Nevertheless, I have heard American announcers feel the need to finish their sentences about a player's exploits as a windsurfer or something while he was scoring a goal. This doesn't happen in FIFA , but associations are not easily broken, and I have a feeling many American soccer viewers will cringe at the sound of a voice they would prefer not to have to hear while playing a computer game.

Foudy is better, but the whole thing sounds rather incongruous. I wonder if the inclusion of Foudy was some sort of attempt to carry the overmarketing of the Women's World Cup as far as possible, since her commentary is advertised on the box with a picture and only a single mention of Phil Schoen, even though Schoen does the majority of the speaking.

Furthermore, a lot of the phrases seem to be identical to the ones in FIFA 99 , except that now they're spoken by Schoen and Foudy instead of Lawrenson, Gray, and Waddle. This is almost acceptable for MLS matches.

After all, I hear it on television, so I'm used to it. But to have a Newcastle-Sunderland derby narrated by these two? Simply surreal. It would be like having Des Lynam announce the Super Bowl. Not much creativity on the part of EA there, and more evidence that the MLS part of the game was hastily thrown together. Lastly, there are the stadiums. There isn't even a pretense of modeling these, and games are played instead in stadiums which have no relation to the fields they are representing.