Since the first FIFA game was released, EA Sports’ line of soccer games became an instant classic, for sure those were the best soccer games available at the time, however it wasn’t until FIFA 98: RTWC appeared that the game became so popular that even people who didn’t like soccer much started playing it because it was so damn fun.

Graphics

It comes like no surprise that graphics in FIFA 2000 have been greatly improved. Players are much more detailed than in previous versions. The detail we noticed in the faces is excellent, each player looks different than each other and we can see how they make expressions depending on what is going on, if they are getting booked or if they are complaining to the referee because of a foul or something.

My principal complaint on how the players look is that they are closer to a cartoonish kind of look instead of a more realistic and photo-like look. Maybe EA Sports should consider using scanned textures instead of drawn art in future versions.

Motion of the players has been improved as well, now the transition from one action to another is almost unnoticeable which make the gameplay much more realistic to eye overall.

In the case of the stadiums, although EA hasn't made an effort to add details such as reserve players area or use higher resolution textures so that stadiums don't have that blurry look when walls are close to the camera, they have made something more important that adds some feel to the game... now the spectators are animated, finally no more flat public in FIFA games.

However, once again my complaint is that graphics (now talking about the public, not the players) look too cartoonish and washed out with those bright colors. Another thing I should mention is that now when you score the net moves according to the ball, so no more static net either.

Back to the topic of 3D cards support, now in the graphics setup we have the option to go as high as 1600x1200 resolution. Playing on a TNT2 card at 1024x768 I hadn't any kind of performance problems and as expected, graphics were much sharper than before.

Audio

Sounds in FIFA haven’t changed much, I mean, no huge improvements in this area. The new theme song might not be as thrilling as previous ones but we don’t buy a game for some introduction song we will bypass and get bored of after playing the game for a while.

This time EA has changed commentators, at least for the US version of the game, ESPN’s Phil Schoen and Julie Foudy are the new commentators, we didn’t have any complaints from the past ones but with this change EA might have wanted to reflect the change and introduction of the MLS in the game.

Now, on crowd and all those sounds, no real improvements here, in my opinion both the crowd and commentators should get more excited when a team scores, oh well… it must be I’m used to hear to South American commentators, they add some spice to a boring game… always =).

 

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