The actual music is fairly innocuous but nothing to write home about. The menu sections have music playing, but I turned it off as it spools off the CD and slows down the switch from one menu to the next. When you think about it from a programming point of view it would be extremely difficult to write code that would match the phrases perfectly to the action, but overall, it's not bad and it adds to the atmosphere. It's by no means perfect, he quite often says things at the wrong time or completely out of context or you can hear the difference between one sample and the next, but it's Motty and when you are concentrating on the game, you don't really notice most of his glitches. EA (probably) paid him a large stack of cash to sit down with a microphone and say in his unique voice, all the player names in several different ways, the team names and lots of phrases to make up the running commentary for the game. For those of you who just said "Who?", Motty is to football (soccer) what John Madden is to American football. These days, the big thing is digitised commentary from a big name and they don't come much bigger than John Motson. I remember when I was a lad (grin), back in the dark ages of the Spectrum when football games played a silly tune on it's beeper and made a nasty white noise when you scored. This might be a good time to mention that my system doesn't quite meet EA's minimum processor by a few Mhz but that doesn't seem to cause any problems, but I don't think I'd want to play it on anything less, try the demo first if you can and are worried about performance. No longer do we have to look longingly at the 3DO version's visuals. On the aforementioned P90 it runs fine in the higher resolution and looks great. VGA looks quite reasonable on my 486 and runs very smoothly, SVGA drops a lot of frames, but is almost playable. This can be VGA or SVGA depending on how fast your system is. The Virtual Stadium engine uses moving multiple camera angles and scaled sprites which have been motion-captured, SGI-rendered and then extensively touched up so that they look right. Spinning in the bottom left corner is a 3D gold VS logo, just to keep your processor busy in those spare clock cycles when you wander off to make a coffee.ĭuring the game itself, you have a choice of seven cameras from which to view the action, although I usually stick to the default tele cam view. Getting around the menu tree always requires a return to the main menu on the way. The menu system is very slickly presented in SVGA, but not quite as easy to use as it could be. Sometimes, the screen zooms in and shows replays of offsides, fouls and goals from a random viewpoint chosen from the replay facility. The video screen is also used to show animations when goals are scored, ranging from flying cheerleader hippos to celebrating players. Little FMV clips are displayed on the stadium's video screen at half and full time reflecting your performance in the match. Nonetheless, the intro sequence is very long, very pointless and oozes quality as the images flow from live-action video to the SGI-rendered sprites and back again. Unless you have a quad-speed or better CD and a fast graphics card, the intro will be somewhat jerky in places - I have seen it running on a P90 with a 4X CD and it's very smooth, but my DX2-50 with 2X CD struggles. Now, Bruce Macmillan and his team at EA Canada have brought into the world a new baby, son of FIFA - has evolution improved on his ultimately flawed parent? You want FMV, you got it. The CD version added a commentary which was nice but it still had the same old isometric view and the same gameplay faults. And, for some obscure reason, EA made up the names of all the players and you only had international teams to play as. Worse than that, the players often seemed as though they were doing their own thing and you sometimes spent more time battling the control system than playing football. The original FIFA often degenerated into a series of long range shots, interspersed with charging down the keeper's drop kicks when you were a goal down with seconds remaining. The PC version was virtually a straight conversion of the original Megadrive game and whilst it was graphically the best football game around, it just didn't have the playability of Sensible Soccer and perhaps even the Amiga Kick Off 2, even if the latter did sometimes play a little like a pinball game. When the 3DO version of FIFA appeared a while back, us PC owners were left drooling over the quality of the multiple camera views and stunning graphics. It is the second game to feature the new Virtual Stadium technology (the first being NHL Hockey '96). Read Full Review The new king of the football sims ?įIFA Soccer '96 (hereafter known as FIFA96) is the eagerly awaited next generation version of Electronic Art's footy game.
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