Still the best for budding Beckhams

AS Sir Alex Ferguson keeps telling interviewers, the football season doesn't really hot up until after Christmas. But with computer soccer games, it's the run up to Christmas that sorts the winners from the losers.

That's the time of year budding Beckhams hope to spend hours in front of the telly living out their football fantasies. And that's why the two biggest football franchises - FIFA and International Superstar Soccer (ISS) - are once again squaring up to each other. Management simulations should be in the shops well before December 25 but right now, it's the on-the-pitch sims that are already here.

Of the two, it's FIFA that has the longest history. It first appeared on the venerable Sega Mega-Drive and caused an immediate stir with its excellent sprite animations, decent sound effects and sophisticated gameplay.

Since then, the FIFA series has been through good times (FIFA 98/2000, in particular) and bad (remember FIFA 97 on the Saturn or the absolutely atrocious FIFA 64 on your Nintendo 64?).

And despite countless challengers (most notably from ISS and the Michael Owen-endorsed World League Soccer series) FIFA has remained stubbornly at the top of the bestseller lists every Christmas.

Nor do I expect things to be any different in 2004.

FIFA has it all: the beautiful introductions, the music, the faithful recreation of all the stadia, the accurately modelled faces of all the players and, most importantly of all, the most clubs and the most authenticity. Watching FIFA 2005 is like watching Match of the Day.

Of course, when you get the introductions out of the way, none of this really matters (except the FIFA license) because it's the way a football game plays on the pitch that makes or breaks it.

As a hardy perennial, it's become progressively harder for EA Sports to make meaningful improvements to the series. The big deal this year is the rather grandiose "fluid player kinetic system" - a general tightening up of player responsiveness when taking possession of the ball for the first time.

In previous FIFAs, your first touch often let you down as the game insisted on finishing whatever animation it was doing first - so Beckham or whoever would run beyond the ball or make a wild tackle before doing anything meaningful.

This year your team can trap, flick or pass the ball almost immediately.

It's easier to pick up and play than its chief rival, too. A quick tweak of the set up screen and you'll soon be bagging three-nil wins after the first five minutes.

That makes FIFA accessible but also takes the edge off the long term challenge because familiarity has a tendency to breed contempt.

There are plenty of moves (including the defence splitting through ball that used to be the ISS trademark) but more often than not, it's easier to hit the sprint button to dodge past on the flanks then send over a pin-point cross. It's usually met by one of your strikers and even if it isn't the opposition defence will play safe and put it out for a corner, giving you another chance.

Corner taking is the one part of the game that isn't straightforward, though. EA's attempt to give the player more control has flopped badly. Even after a couple of hours' play I couldn't "get" the corner technique required for success. Dead ball situations are just as baffling.

The game commentary is polished and it follows the action well - something that still can't be said of an ISS title.

The cut scenes - those computer generated "movies" between the game-playing action - are also of a uniformly high standard and the action really is end-to-end stuff.

There's also the prospect of online games against real opponents but this year's incarnation of ISS boasts a similar option (if you buy the Xbox version).

If you want to know how ISS measures up, watch this space for an upcoming review. For now, you'll be relieved to hear that FIFA 2005 is as slick as it has ever been. Unfortunately, it's also as shallow as ever.

VIEWTIFUL JOE, Publisher: Capcom. Format: PS2. Price: £19.99: Family friendly? Yes, but it's as tough as ever.

AN award-winning combination of old school beat 'em up and 21st century level design, Viewtiful Joe makes its debut on the world's most popular games console some months after appearing on the GameCube.

About the only criticism levelled at the Nintendo version was the fiendish difficulty level that made it a wrist-aching challenge of monumental proportions.

So this time around, PS2 owners get an easier setting that allows less patient gamers to ease themselves in slowly with constant restarts.

Capcom has added a new character and slashed the price to less than twenty quid - making Viewtiful Joe something of a bargain, even to those of us who have played the original.

Published: 22/10/2004