Players : 1-4
Sega WorldWide Soccer 2000: Euro Edition
is another football game, but how will it entice me given that I hate watching
the sport on TV? The answer is that it's the best football game I've played
since Sensible Soccer and Kick Off on the Atari ST a good few
years back.
There's a number of mode in which to play this game although most of them are
fairly similar. First off is an Exhibition mode (one-off match),
the self-explanatory European League, European Cup, International League
and International Cup, plus a Euro Championship mode, each of
which offer all the competing teams you'd expect.
A wealth of options are also available allowing you to set such variables as
Referee leniency, team formation and line-up, substitutions, off-side rule, coin toss, game time,
replays, after touch and a scanner which shows whereabouts the players
are on the pitch.
Graphics, Sound and Playability
When it comes to football, I'd be lying if I said there was anything unexpected
here. You have a pitch with a number of players running about on it. Thankfully,
the movement is very fluid and you can play from a number of different angles.
I didn't like the isometric 3D angle, a la FIFA 97, but the side-on
Match Day-style or top-down Sensible Soccer options are much
easier to get to grips with.
When you get to the replay options, you can play it out from absolutely any
angle and move that around the players too, thus recreating those sweeping-camera
movements from
The Matrix.
And a big pat on the back to the programmers for adding in an anamorphic
widescreen version for those with big TVs and are into similarly-featured DVDs.
This is the only way you'll see any of Euro 2000 in widescreen format since
the foreign cameramen couldn't be bothered to shoot the matches with a 16:9
lens.
There's not much different between this and other footy games in the sound
department. A football being kicked is the same in mono as it would be in
Dolby Digital Surround EX 6.1, but there's also a running commentary from
pundits Trevor Brooking, Peter Brackley and James Richardson.
As you might have guessed, I'm not the greatest football fan in the world
but the commentary flows pretty well and realistically. However, there's
occasionally different intonation in the voice which spoils it a little when
they mention certain team names, the change in vocals making it sound, at
worst, like the stuttered voice of BT's directory enquiries service. Also,
while the player names are given, SWWS 2000 is Seaman-free
because the goalkeeper is ALWAYS known as... "The Goalkeeper".
When it comes to playability, it's faultless and recaptures the spirit found
when I played Sensible Soccer and Kick Off and it does exactly
what you want it to do when you boot the ball! If I'm finding little to say
in this paragraph it's because there's nothing bad to comment about it - it's
great fun and you should get stuck in now.
Overall
SWWS 2000 is not the game that's going to break new ground, but then
when it plays as well as this - particularly in two-player mode during an
alcohol-fuelled session - why change anything?
GRAPHICS
SOUND EFFECTS AND MUSIC
PLAYABILITY
ORIGINALITY
ENJOYMENT
|
|
|
OVERALL
|
|
Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2000.
[Up to the top of this page]
DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TXW32R4 32" widescreen TV
connected to either a Creative Dxr2 DVD-ROM player or Microsoft Xbox and
played through a Sony STR-DB930 amplifier.
PC games reviewed by the editor are on:
