Its not exactly the debut 3D FIFA would be hoping for
Written: Jun 26 '04
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Good atmosphere,decent graphics and sound
Cons: SLOWDOWN
The Bottom Line: I cant really recommend FIFA 96 to anyone other than FIFA collectors. It really just isnt very good.
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| flash-hammer's Full Review: FIFA Soccer 96 for Saturn |
To celebrate the other night’s Euro 2004 tie between Germany and the Czech Republic, I thought I would review the FIFA title from the year the two teams met in the final of the European Championships. While I own the actual Euro 96 game for the Saturn, it isn’t listed on here, so I decided to go with the two incarnations of FIFA 96 I own instead.
I was actually surprised to learn that there was a FIFA 96 for the Saturn. Probably because I remember 96 being the year everyone got FIFA for their Megadrive/Genesis or Super NES, so I just assumed it was a 16-Bit title.
The game featured Club teams from a variety of Leagues around the world including Brazil,the USA, England, Scotland, Spain, Italy, Germany, Holland,France,Sweden and er, Malaysia as well as a huge selection of National sides, and some ‘All Stars’ teams.
There are 4 types of game offered to you in FIFA 96. Friendly, Play-off, League and Tournament. All of these are self explanatory, and are the basic wants of any football title.
This was the first FIFA that used ‘EA Sports Virtual Stadium Soccer’, which is, in normal speak 3D.
While the graphics aren’t exactly brilliant, for 1996 and EA’s first foray into 3D, they are pretty damn good. Like its SNES counterpart, Saturn FIFA 96 benefits from having a pitch and stadium that genuinely feels like a large pitch and stage. This helps the game’s atmosphere greatly.
Bettering its 16-Bit counterpart is in the kit department. While the striped tops aren’t exactly perfect in this, they do at least semi-resemble striped football shirts. The players aren’t exactly easy to distinguish from one another, but this was early stays still.
The game controls in a manner like this:
While on the ball, A is lob,B is pass, C is shoot and Z is sprint.
Without the ball, A is slide tackle, B is switch player and Z is sprint.
Other, more complex moves can be performed by pressing two buttons at the same time.
While far from perfect in the way of responsiveness, the controls do come into action in a satisfactory manner, and are decently enough laid out, but I fail to see the point in the double button pressing when the Saturn pad is left with 4 spare buttons.
The sound in the game is decent enough, with the crowd noises helping to set the scene. One strange thing is that after about 5 minutes, the crowd go silent, as if the soundtrack of them chanting has finished. You would think this would go on for at least the length of the match.
Irritation/commentary is provided in basic form from the BBC’s John Motson. This is ok, but gets very repetitive.
So, for its age, the game is holding up ok isn’t it? Well yes, but that is all it does. When you choose what game type you want, and your teams, and you wait through the respectable enough loading times, you get a football game that in its time would have been pretty awesome, but now is just aged beyond purpose.
While I don’t need great graphics to enjoy a football title, great gameplay is required, and the playability in this game is severely hurt by the fact that the game suffers from horrible cases of slowdown during the matches. This spoils any flow the matches have, and renders the game almost unplayable in some matches. What makes this worse is that when this doesn’t happen, you actually find a competent football to be played, and I did find myself enjoying it for a while, before I hit a shot and the whole game slowed right down, before springing back to life a minute later when the ball was in the net. While I chuckled to myself, this would be horribly frustrating in multiplayer.
Ah, now multiplayer. When you make a sports title, it should be geared for multiplayer play. The multiplayer seems even more horribly slowed down that it is pretty impossible to garner any enjoyment from the experience.
The game is also horrifically slow in comparison to not only today’s football titles, but also other genre games on the Saturn, and even older 2D efforts.
If I’m sounding a bit hard on an early 3D, 8 year old title, that’s only because I know that EA could, and did do better, and that the Saturn was not only capable of handling much more complicated titles better, but that it did so on several occasions.
In short, FIFA 96 for the Saturn wouldn’t have been a terrible game at the time, but I don’t believe it ever would have been anything better than ‘OK’. The fact that it is 8 years old, on a system that 3rd party companies found it notoriously hard to make games for, doesn’t particularly help it. Sports games age like no other type of game, due to the fact at least one new one is released every year, and this is over 8 updates we are looking at.
But I still wouldn’t really recommend it to anyone other than FIFA fanatics who want every version of every FIFA. There are much better football games, much better Saturn football games, and much better FIFA games than this available. So there really isn’t any need for your average football fan to want this title.
Other Football Reviews
Fever Pitch/Head On Soccer for Sega Genesis
International Superstar Soccer Deluxe for Super Nintendo
Sega Worldwide Soccer 97 for Sega Saturn
Olympic Soccer for Sega Saturn
FIFA 96 for Super Nintendo
FIFA 2003 for Microsoft XBox
AC Milan Home Shirt 02/03 by Adidas
France Home Shirt 02/03 by Adidas
Italia Home Shirt 00/02 by Kappa
AS Roma Third Shirt 01/02 by Kappa
Escape to Victory
Recommended:
No
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flash-hammer
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