FIFA 97

A lot of the effort that went into FIFA 97 was directed at upgrading the visuals. The 3D motion captured, texture-mapped players are lovely to observe, as are the panning and rotating camera you employ during replays. Visually, FIFA 97 really is a semi-modern 3D FIFA game.

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The first true 3D FIFA game.

Plus I do enjoy the aggressive sounds of the raucous music and the crazy fans. And of course, the bevy of slick sim features that are key to the FIFA franchise, always satisfy. What would a FIFA game be without thousands of real life players; hundreds of teams (255 in 12 international leagues); true league rules and strategies; play-by-play commentary; and assorted environmental conditions? Additions like everybody playing being able to decide their own individual difficulty level, indoor matches, and a new animation process that EA has dubbed “Motion Blending”, have all combined to make the game highly marketable.

You can do all the standard customizations in FIFA ’97. You can pick a strategy for your team, from “Defend Agressively” to “Attack.” If you’re politically inclined, you can take control of the Republic of Ireland and trade all your IRA members to Southampton. Or you could build a team packed with the world’s best center-forwards and run everybody’s pants off. You can control your view of the pitch, your starting lineup … like I said: all the standard stuff.

But it’s when you actually begin trying to direct your players in competition against the computer that the game starts showing its weaker points. Part of why this is a problem is due to the great deal of stuff going on everywhere.

Snap24_1No PC soccer game has yet achieved complete success in recreating the intricate and varied movements possible in a soccer match in a way that is easily controllable with a keyboard, but FIFA 97 adds two control methods in this regard – simple and complex. Tha latter features something called passback mode, which allows you to control an offensive players other than the ball handler. Overall, FIFA 97 holds an advantage over competing games, with fluid gameplay, a variety of play modes, better roster size and better multiplayer.


System Requirements: Pentium 133 MHz, 16 MB RAM, Windows 95


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