Please note that my review and ratings does not take into account the multiplayer aspect of these games.

For long one could draw parallels between EA's football (or other sport) series and the football shirt market in a frightening fashion. While their exclusive license deals with FIFA have allowed their football games to make huge sales, I'm sure you can tell what their slogan, "It's in the game" has put itself towards here.

The first FIFA title I played was FIFA International Soccer for the SNES. It had this great piece of music playing when setting the game up, but the play itself was clearly a limited interpretation of the game. By the time I was getting back into football the Euro 2004 tournament was just weeks away, so when I saw FIFA 2002 for a few quid I decided to give it a shot. I had a rough idea of what to expect as I had enjoyed an earlier FIFA release before I took up this interest again. With almost a decade seperating FIFA International Soccer and FIFA 2002, I was surprised to find the odd similarity.

In many football games it is a standard that precise passings are brought about by the simple tap of a button. In FIFA 2002 you have to measure the passes that you make, which as you can imagine is done by holding down the button for a length of time before releasing to determine their weight. As I was getting into football, and indeed picking up on intricacies like the offside rule, it helped me appreciate the aspects of football like the execution of the through ball. Sure other football games have a specified button for this move, but there is no guarantee the pass is how you envisioned it. Here you are indeed the playmaker of your own game.

Weight behind crosses and shots as usual, are still in play. I don't like having to frantically button tap to dash though. What I like though is how in doing so it wears the player out so you are not over-reliant on that skill. However, as in the old FIFA I played, the chances of scoring are sky high when you get into the right positions for shooting past the goalkeeper. There are a few other ways of scoring, but another unrealistic aspect was that all proper shots made always end up on target.

As my brother does not have an interest in this sport I was never able to play multi-player. I'm sure this would have been fun. A problem I had with playing against the computer opponents is that, on the higher difficulty level they can read when you go in for the sliding tackle thus jumping over to avoid it. This no doubt detracts from a realistic competitive challenge, should you need it.

One thing EA Sports does have spot-on is with the presentation of their games, with this being no exception. The in-game graphics however, are not so strong although I found the character models to be amusing for a while. The commentary is good, although one common occuring problem with PlayStation (at least) FIFA games it seems is that there would be skipping problems with the running audio segments, which will surely make you turn it off. Now I keep my games in as tip top condition as I could, so scratches were minor. If you want smooth running commentary then a pre-owned game is perhaps a no-go zone in that respect. However I say this from the experience of me and my friend.

While I had fun with FIFA 2002, it soon became apparent how limited it was, despite the renovated passing scheme. Winning games depended largely on making it into the sweet spots, before mimicking the effort which got you your last goal, and presumably all the others. There are a number of features to unlock here, but the play itself lacks the strength in depth to become a football game for keeps.

-> [FIFA 2003] review! <-
I remember I bought this game not too long after I unlocked everything in FIFA 2002. As a game that was only over a year old then, I thought £3 for new condition was a good offer. As long as it was an improvement over 2002 right?

So when I got home, I loaded the game up, watched the cool opening FMV sequence which featured the players on the case, and began setting up the game. I played the PlayStation 2 version of this game over at someone's house and so those menus were familiar. They seemed slow though, individual parts took a while to load up.

When I finally got started, I couldn't believe what I saw. Did I happen to switch to FIFA 2002 in the blink of an eye? There are minor differences though, well okay the character models appear to be the same but somehow it's as if the detail on these are not as high as they were in 2002. Even worse, the animation appears jerky, as if the one or two frames of animation were taken out to compensate for the heavy menus. I played on for a while, in the hope that there were changes to how the game played. Nothing noteworthy, this really is just a substitute.

Sorry but this experience was not a good one. It seems too much of a shame job by EA Sports, it does not even resemble the PlayStation 2 title, although I would not expect it fully to. Here they have simply given a previous title the expected updates, gave it a good kicking before cashing in on those who had yet to make it to the next generation of consoles. Luckily for me I was able to get the same amount of cash on a trade-in towards a proper game.

FIFA 2003 rating: 2/5