REVIEW - FIFA Street - PS3

Out of context, the name FIFA Street, presents a myriad of intriguing possibilities. What many of us wouldn’t give, for example, to see the amateur dramatics wing of football’s governing body putting on their own version of Sesame Street, with Sepp Blatter dressed up as Big Bird (or something that rhymes with ‘bird’) and Michel Platini as Mr Snuffleupagus’ French cousin, Monsieur Stuffy-up-himself.

Sadly, the possibility looks less than likely. Although, if you’d have predicted a few years ago that they’d be staging a World Cup in Qatar, many would have suggested you’d been out in the sun for too long.

Certainly, out of context is exactly how EA would like you to take this latest run out for their urban soccer series. Despite this being the company’s fourth attempt at chiseling out a niche for Street, the key point of importance is that it’s the first fully developed since FIFA 08 – the watershed moment for the full FIFA franchise when it began its metamorphosis from carefree arcade kickabout to supreme, turf-scorching simulator.

The knock-on effects of this violent swing in FIFA’s philosophical compass are clearly evident in this new FIFA Street, and result in no less dramatic of an improvement too. The problem with past games in the series was that they were always too simple, too shallow. Far too quickly, they made the miraculous become mundane and their flippancy with the source material meant they lacked that very commodity valued above all others on the streets: respect.

FIFA Street tackles all of these issues head on; studs up. Helmed by key members of the FIFA 12 development team and built on a bedrock of realism formed from key elements of that game’s painstakingly constructed architecture, it succeeds in accurately mimicking the hustle and bustle of actual urban football.

The FIFA 12 Impact Engine handles moments of contact between players with a believable, if sometimes slightly excessive, physicality, while the Tactical Defending system is vital to the non-committal approach needed to contain opponents. FIFA Street 3 also included more grotesquely distorted figures than a Glasgow Rangers’ tax return. By contrast, player models here look accurate while animations are naturalistic and as refreshingly fluid as your isotonic beverage of choice.

Basically then, EA Canada have finally taken street football and done it properly. But while the underlying methodology and mechanics may now be almost identical to those employed in FIFA, what results puts FIFA Street at totally the opposite end of the footballing spectrum.

The reason for this is that, while achieving success in 11-a-side football is very much a group activity, here the route to almost every goal is an individual one. While we’ve all been lectured a thousand times over by domineering sports teachers that there’s no ‘I’ in team, there is an ‘M’ and an ‘E’, and in FIFA Street they’re very clearly capitalized.

Winning here is about commanding the spotlight. Victory comes not from intricate egalitarian passing moves, but establishing superiority through self-aggrandisement; dispatching opponents in one-on-one confrontations with a mixture of psychology, skill and swagger.

These individual duels usually begin with a tentative standoff, one player dexterously manipulating the ball, trying to bait his opponent in to an ill-advised lunge before making it disappear from under his nose with a deft slight of foot, a graceful swerve of the body or an extravagant flourish of balletic ball control. There’s more than a little of the magic trick about the entire process. A Harry Houdini escapology act performed with the necessary Va Va Voom to excite the YouTube generation.

Conjuring up all these moves, from basic step overs to cheeky nutmegs and outlandish ball juggles, requires mastery of the game’s bespoke Street controls. An impressive repertoire of skills that’s superior in both size and showboating-factor to those in FIFA 12 and FIFA Street 3.

Centred around holding the L2 button to shepherd and shield the ball from opponents and pulling off tricks with various prods and pirouettes of the right analog, the Street controls manage to capture the kind of finesse of motions urban soccer demands. It’s a system distinctly reminiscent of those that have given fighting games their longevity. In fact, if Capcom and Namco hadn’t already put pen to paper on their pugilistic exchange program, FIFA Street could easily have been Street Striker X Tekken.

Another winning combination comes in the form of FIFA Street’s various different match types. In a more superficial title, these could easily have amounted to nothing greater than a shallow pool of footballing mini-games, but here, they add so much more than mere novelty value. The best ones, such as Panna – where both teams rack up points for specific tricks until one team scores, cashing in their total and making the other team lose theirs – and Last Man Standing, add a wholly new tactical dimension beyond that in the standard 5-a-sides you’ll also find here.

They also help to emphasise the global diversity of the street soccer sub-culture, something the rest of the game does with a generously generic approach to differences in national play styles and a wide range of venues from the beaches of Rio to a Tokyo rooftop. Unsurprisingly, the urban atmosphere has also been polished with a marketing man’s sheen. Graffiti is artistically tasteful, players never swear and there’s no threat of knife crime or petty theft – if you’re after the latter kind of action, FIFA 12’s Ultimate Team is apparently the place to head.

FIFA Street’s main World Tour mode does an impressively thoughtful job of charting your rise from your home hood to global street stardom; creating or importing your virtual pro, recruiting an initial crew and then building a more talented and experienced squad as you progress through different regional, national and international competitions. The occasional need to grind and the fact that many tricks are initially locked do present niggling challenges to your progress but they don’t even come close to preventing World Tour from being a success.

Online all the game’s best features are closely linked to FIFA 12. There’s a Seasons mode, complete with promotion and relegation up and down the various leagues; FIFA Street’s own take on online Virtual Pro matches where everyone just controls one player each, and incorporation of the EA Sports Football Club, linking your levelling here to any you may have done in FIFA 12.

There are a handful of other small issues. A.I. player movement isn’t always the most considered, and while EA have done well to adapt goalkeepers to things like balls ricocheting off walls, the smaller pitches mean you do get to see more of their eccentric side.

Overall, though, FIFA Street is a series that’s matured. In finally finding the sweet spot between flash and fundamentals, EA have delivered a game that’s more than good enough and unique enough to warrant its continued existence. The fact that it’s not normal football is the biggest reason FIFA Street will probably always be a super sub rather than a first team starter. But soccer-wise, there’s nothing else in its neighbourhood.

Rating: 8/10 

REVIEW - SSX - PS3

Like Sir Edmund Hillary attempting a half-pipe, the SSX snowboarding series has always brought exploration and extreme sports together in an entertainingly unsafe mix. There’s a freedom here that can only be found outside the multi-coloured stockades of man-made ski runs; one that begins beyond the point where even the ‘Danger’ signs give up in futility. It delivers a high that has nothing to do with the low oxygen levels, an addictive and elusive fluency of motion that’s otherwise impossible to achieve. Unless you’re one of those spritely ladies in the Bodyform adverts.

There was a time a few years back, when it seemed like they’d be gritting the roads in hell long before there was flurry of activity around the SSX name again. Videogames had apparently grown tired of adventure sports. The awesomeness had become omnipresent. The dudes, dull. The extreme had become routine. And when Electronic Arts originally hinted that their big idea for a reboot was an SSX meets Modern Warfare mash-up, a kind of Call-of-Duty-does-Klosters, the reception was appropriately hypothermic.

Thankfully, EA have managed to dig themselves out from under this initial avalanche of apathy by revising their plans wholesale. Gone is the FPS fixation, replaced by a piste offering that will rekindle fans excitement with its dedication to the series’ exuberant exaggerations of the feats possible on a snowboard. At the same time, the new SSX also successfully incorporates fresh ideas that have sprung up since the series went into hibernation, adding a clever touch of modernism that drags the franchise out of the gaming ice age whilst still preserving its cool.

While the SSX and Burnout games have always shared a similar ethos, there are also nods here to Motorstorm, along with a hugely flattering cribbing of Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit’s notes on how to do asynchronous online play. The new duel stick movement and trick system also seems directly inspired by the one in SSX’s stable-mate Skate, although classic button controls are still an alternative option for all those c-old skool SSX players.

It’s that same pursuit of freedom and flow that still remains the key ingredient, though. Something the game makes abundantly and tantalisingly clear during its opening skyboarding tutorial in which you’re released into the heavens to go twisting and turning, pirouetting and plummeting like a snowflake caught in a blizzard. In a way, it’s the ultimate tease, as finding such unfettered enjoyment on the ground can be both an infuriating and infatuating challenge that requires its fair share of dedication.

The mountains themselves are the star names from nine distinctly different regions across the planet. From the Rockies to the Himalayas, if they were to make a Mount Rushmore of mountains you’d find almost all of the potential contenders here. Every single one is based on precision NASA satellite modelling, which the developers have then spent months altering and accentuating to make the natural and manmade features as entertaining as possible to pilot a plank of wood down. It’s a thoroughly intelligent division of labour. Not so much a case of pimp my ride as pimp my mountainside.

The Google Earth-style world map hovers on the menu screen like a giant snow globe, just waiting for you to jump in and shake things up. And after a helicopter-assisted pilgrimage to a peak, the slopes are wide enough to allow you to cut a dashing figure through the deep powder, gridding on rocks and rails, flipping off snow cornices, shooting through ice tunnels and soaring across crevasses. All the while accompanied by a cleverly orchestrated soundtrack whose beats fade out every time you take off, before dropping back in again at the exact moment you do.

The single player World Tour mode consists of a trio of different event types, each of which carves out its own niche of specific skill requirements. Addictive and enraging trick events demand calculated craziness and consistency to build score and maintaining your multiplier by chaining together regular, Tricky and Super Tricky moves into runs that resemble episodes of Got to Dance staged on downhill courses. Race events are slightly easier and less engrossing, but with tricks equalling extra boost they still require a balance between sprinting and showing off to be the first to the finish line.

The Deadly Descents should be the Tour’s signature moments. Billed as the ultimate survival runs, the only objective here is to make it to the bottom of the mountain as a murderous Mother Nature attacks you with the likes of avalanches and altitude sickness. Defeating them all requires the kind of equipment list – ice axes, oxygen tank, wingsuit – that would make you customer of the year down at your local Millets, but sadly, the grandeur of the ideas behind the Descents isn’t matched by equal amounts of fun, and they end up being the game’s most novel, but weakest, components.

It’s not just on the Deadly Descents where having the right kit is key, however, and the SSX shop consistently coughs up a random selection of boards and other apparel for purchase. Even with the correct gear, there will still be times that you find yourself disappearing down a seemingly bottomless ravine, and for just such situations, SSX provides a rewind feature that, for a points and time penalty, helps you avoid après ski that involves having your dinner fed to you through a tube whilst your doctor and family discuss whether it would be kinder to let you slip off to that big board meeting in the sky.

There is a story binding all the World Tour action together involving Team SSX going head-to-head with a former member whose gone rogue, but it’s annoying and largely irrelevant and full of stupid exaggerations of snowboarding stereotypes. On the Shaun White Irritation Scale these guys, rather appropriately, crank things up to X-treme. One, for example, is known as The Chamonix Assassin, which is about as intimidatingly posh a nickname as The Eton Ninja.

Once the World Tour is in the books, the game’s Explore mode allows you to revisit any of the game’s 153 different drops any time you wish. But SSX’s real killer longevity hook comes in its online offerings.

RiderNet, is basically Need for Speed’s Autolog perfectly adapted to tackle Alpine terrain. By collating and curating the fastest race time and highest trick scores of you and your friends and serving them up to you in one easily digestible feed, it stimulates competition almost effortlessly. More impressive still, however, are the Global Events that require you to put your money where your mouth is, paying an entrance fee to take part and receiving a bigger or smaller share of the total pot when the contest closes depending on your performance.

The absence of traditional multiplayer events is a disappointment, but they would have only been the icing on what is already a mountainous cake. As it is, the new SSX is an appropriately extreme, surprisingly strategic game filled with the kind of freedom that makes you feel like a force of nature sweeping down a mountainside. The chairman of the board is back, and he’s never been more exciting.

Rating: 8/10