Although a confirmed PES acolyte, I look out for each instalment of the FIFA series with genuine interest. That's because EA Sports is always trying something new with its long-running franchise - and often the ideas seem to have been scrawled down during some kind of surreal shamanic trance possibly involving certain plant-based chemicals.
Take for instance the 'off-the-ball' feature from a couple of years ago, which invited you to simultaneously control your own player, plus the player you were passing to.
Now, some pedants wrote this off as an extravagant and ridiculously demanding means of covering up for poor AI - surely your team mates should be able to make runs and read balls for themselves? However, there was clearly a highly developed zen-like philosophy behind the feature - the idea that the passer of the ball was also the receiver had profound karmic connotations that most reviewers failed to spot. I also enjoyed the fact that it was near impossible for most people to get their fat fingers around. This is not what we expect from an EA game.
So, anyway, FIFA 2007 is on the way, and, once again, EA has some intriguing ideas up its copious sporting sleeves.
For a start there's the 'Interactive League' feature, which allows you to control your favourite team in an online version of the Premier League, Bundesliga or whatever big division you fancy. And interestingly, matches take place concurrently with real-life meetings. The press release says:
Experience the future of online gaming as you play your games according to the real-world schedule. When they play, you play. Track your team's progress as the aggregate results determine your club's position in the league table. Now you actually take to the pitch for the glory of your club. This is the season where you make the difference!
This seems to be suggesting that both your own results, and the results of your real-life side are taken into consideration to formulate your standings in the online league. Already, EA is making some kind of complex post-modern comment on the relationship between real and simulated events in the digital era. Baudrillard - the French philosopher who declared that the Gulf war of 1990 didn't really take place as it was simulated into insignificance in advance - would certainly approve.
There's also the slightest suggestion of another blissfully over-complicated control modification. Apparently, you'll be able to add top and back-spin to freekicks. Finally, the football sim meets the tennis sim. Why have they been kept apart for so long? Who cares if adding precise spin to a deadball is a skill that actually alludes many professional players?
EA is also promising to deliver what other sports sim creators have only ever promised - proper cross-over gameplay between handheld and home platforms. FIFA 2007 boasts a management mode compatible with both PSP and PS2 - you'll be able to make changes on one format, then upload them to the other, giving you permanent access to your side. This, unavoidably, is the future of gaming. It is the EA dream - all your waking hours at the mercy of a single publisher.
The defining moment of EA's press release, however, is the boast that FIFA 2007 features "intelligent A.I". So that's intelligent Artificial Intelligence. IAI. This represents an interesting assumption about what exactly the term AI has meant for the fifty years it has been in general use. Whatever it meant, it wasn't good enough for EA. "Watch as your players jostle and collide realistically while trying to win balls. Experience the realism of the world's superstars who come to life with signature moves and authentic playing styles," we are told. This is AI, you idiots.
Reviewers who lazily refer to each iteration of the FIFA series as 'just like the last but with better graphics' are doing the brand an immense disservice. EA Sports is continually refining its engine, just as Konami is with PES, it's just that EA is a mad scientist, obsessed somehow, with both grassroots realism and the idiotic, illusory grandeur of 'signature moves'. In EA's schizophrenic universe, every Roberto Carlos freekick has a good chance of going in; no Ronaldo step-over is ever a wasted petulant extravagance. It is a mythological understanding of reality - gods fighting among men, at once ethereal and human.
Konami just tries to make a good honest football sim. Really, when you think about it, how dull is that?
