FIFA for Vita offers a gorgeous experience that capitalizes on the elements that defined the series on consoles this generation—the practice arena menus, Be a Pro, Manager Mode—and converts them to the new handheld. The transition, button-wise, feels well-adapted. If you’re on the face buttons, it won’t feel dramatically different from the PS3 or PSP games. If you’re looking for massive revamps, they’re not in this version.

Also, if you’ve mentally moved on from the moves and tactics that defined FIFA 11 and are deeply ensconced within FIFA 12’s numerous nuances, FIFA Soccer is going to feel a bit behind. That means you won’t have the “stop on a dime” dribbles, and your defensive tactics are moving back to the team’s “heat-seeking missiles.” Again, if you’re someone who looks at the new FIFA engine with some disdain, you’ll love the fact that this game retains FIFA 11’s style, if only for another year or less. Love or hate the step back, it’s still a sound translation of a 16 month-old game, and the excellent gameplay of FIFA 11 drives this experience.

The touchscreen controls feel like a test run more than a useful game mechanic. You can tap the touchscreen to pass the ball, but odds are, teammate AI is not going to be in the place where you need it when you want to thread a ball past defenders. Also, in the middle of a fast-paced game, the action of tapping a touchscreen and the unintended consequences—blocking your view of the opposition’s backline, for example—is tactically counterproductive. It works somewhat well for throw-ins and free kicks, but you’ll be more effective with buttons.

The rear touchpad shooting mechanic, when it works, is a fantastic addition, especially in one-on-ones during Be a Pro and training arena. However, it’s too sensitive, so if your hands normally rest on the back of the machine, you’ll accidentally trigger shots on goal. In future iterations, it’ll be great if there’s a way to rest your hands, but also indicate to the game that you’re ready to take a shot. Keep in mind that these are optional mechanics, and if you can turn them off, if you desire.

Mode-wise, FIFA Soccer is rather spartan. You’ll have the series staples—practice arena, Be a Pro, Manager Mode—but few of the quirks that define current FIFA games, from popular modes like Ultimate Team and EA Sports Football Club to small features like custom soundtracks. The online is a simple 2 player head-to-head. None of the features are dysfunctional, but keep your expectations subdued.

FIFA Soccer occupies a strange place in the series canon. Without making any unfair judgment calls on the development time, it feels like last year’s game translated wonderfully to fledgling hardware. That’s a good thing if you really hate FIFA 12’s engine reboot, but stale if you’re in love with the latest console experience. It’s got enough content for you to get through a few career mode seasons while you wait for a likely iteration timed for the 2013 season that’s loaded with features. But make no mistake, it’s not FIFA 12, and despite the cover athletes, you’ll be disappointed if you dive into this one with expectations of the latest console experience.

The post EA Sports FIFA Soccer review appeared first on Game News.

Box Score is a weekly column that offers a look at sports games and the athletic side of the industry from the perspective of veteran reviewer and sports fan Richard Grisham.

This is the third of a 3-part series examining how FIFA for the Vita went from conception to completion. To read Part 1, click here; Part 2 is here.

“This is where a little piece of you dies.”

So laments Matt Prior, producer of FIFA for Sony’s new Vita handheld. The final months of a game’s development cycle are when the toughest, most painful decisions are made. After a year and a half of planning, designing, building, and testing, Prior and his team must look at each other and kill one or more features they’d desperately hoped would make it into the hands of the players.

“As a producer, you want to make the best possible product you can,” explains Prior. “All producers are gamers; we’ve sat there and criticized other products, but the reality is every team is working its hardest. You have to make those sacrifices and decisions.”

Sometimes those decisions can be taken personally. Each major aspect of a game has an individual producer associated with it; cuts to that mode can make that person feel as if their work has been compromised or, even worse, eliminated altogether. No one said the business of building videogames was easy, after all. It’s a simple, cold calculation. “You’re up against time and budget,” says Prior. “That’s the most brutal, from a producer’s standpoint.”

The last few weeks of a game’s development are frantic. When things are going well, that’s when the daily builds start to reveal the essence of what it will be. “You’re up against the time limit and it’s kind of a critical phase. (That’s your) chance to put the polish on it; hopefully time allows it,” says Prior. “It’s where you do the final bit of tuning. You say ‘oh, we must do this, because it makes it better.’ The game really comes into its own that last little bit where it all gets polished.”

Then, of course, there are the bugs.

“No game in the history of gaming has ever gone out without bugs,” continues Prior. “Bugs do get shipped; they have to if you want a game on time. As a producer, your role is to make sure those bugs that are shipped aren’t detrimental to the overall quality. You hope it doesn’t really affect the consumer experience. At the end of the day, that’s the paramount thing. We want to make the best possible game.”

While Prior and his team are making the tough calls on last-minute adjustments and frantically prioritizing the issues to tackle, he’s also taking his game and putting it in the hands of the general public and press for the first time. It’s one thing to do this on a platform people are comfortable with; quite another to do so on something so different and innovative as the PlayStation Vita.

“You’d be amazed at how many thousands of ways people could hold the device; it’s one of those things you never really think of when designing it,” laughs Prior as he describes the initial ‘game-ops’ sessions with people the team invites to the studio to play-test the title. “We love watching people pick it up and hold it. Almost no one holds it the same way, so we have to kind of say ‘We’ve got to adapt to this.’”

Almost immediately, Prior and his team discovered that they’d need to provide several options for control. In particular, the presence of a rear-touch pad on the Vita presented a challenge. While FIFA takes advantage of the screen for passing and shooting, the team realized they’d need to give users the ability to toggle its use on and off – at least until the person got a handle on how to best play using the screen.

“Rear shooting is off if you desire,” explains Prior. “You can’t design for everyone. There is no best practice in how to hold it even though the device has got the grooves on the back. Clearly you’re meant to hold it with your fingers bent, but very few people actually do that off the bat. We sat and looked at people and how they held it and we said ‘we’ve got to be kind of clever.’”

As Sony has begun holding events promoting the Vita (at both invite-only sessions and its Vita Social Clubs), FIFA has been one of the showcase titles. As a title with wide appeal, terrific visuals, and unique control offerings, it’s easy to see why Sony would choose to show off the power of their new handheld with such a big, deep game.

Even so, the newness of the machine, coupled with its unique rear touchscreen has many people talking. On his influential show Weekend Confirmed from January 20, host Garnett Lee voiced a combination of optimism and concern based upon his initial experience.

“I’m sort of torn,” said Lee, explaining his first go with the game and, in particular, the rear touchscreen. “You can do what you couldn’t do before in FIFA, which is shoot a low hard ball into a corner. [However,] my fingers are so long that I have a hard time holding the thing and not having them touch the back touch[screen], which defeats the purpose.”

As with any new hardware, it will take time for players to get familiar with, and ultimately comfortable using, all the features the Vita offers. FIFA has clearly been built with a tremendous amount of passion, which reflects in the conversations I’ve had with Prior. Whether or not FIFA ultimately succeeds when it’s released next month depends on many things, not least of which is the reception the Vita gets from the North American market. One thing is clear, above all: Matt Prior has poured his heart and soul into it being something to be proud of.

Richard Grisham has been obesessed with sports and video games since childhood, when he’d routinely create and track MicroLeague Baseball seasons on paper. He currently lives in New Jersey with his wife and four-year old son, who he’ll soon be training to be an NFL placekicker. As a freelance journalist and writer, his work has appeared in GamesRadar, NGamer, and 1UP.

The post Box Score: Taking the leap, Part 3 appeared first on Game News.

Box Score is a weekly column that offers a look at sports games and the athletic side of the industry from the perspective of veteran reviewer and sports fan Richard Grisham.

This week’s column is the first of a three-part series examining how FIFA for the Vita went from conception to completion.

“What can we do? What can’t we do?”

These aren’t just the questions of expectant gamers waiting to get their hands on the PlayStation Vita in February. In fact, they’re the exact queries Matt Prior had for everyone around him back in August 2010. Prior had just gotten the word that he would be the producer of FIFA for Sony’s brand-new, high-tech handheld console. As the “owner” of the game, so to speak, he would be responsible for its design, production, delivery, and support. Depending on the time of day, Matt would be frantically scrambling to assemble the right team of developers and engineers to ensure his vision for the title, answering pointed questions from senior corporate executives about its potential for profitability, or trying to – literally – get his hands on the new little machine that would define his job for the next two years. All against the backdrop of delivering the world’s most popular sports game on brand new hardware at the system’s launch.

No pressure.

“We’re first out of the blocks, and we don’t know what we’re building on,” says Prior of those first few weeks of discovery. “We’re kind of the pioneers, blazing a trail. We’ve got no one to go to say ‘How did you do this on this;’ you kind of have to work it out all by yourself.”

To say developing for the Vita is unique is an understatement. On one hand, because of some high-level similarities to the overall architecture of the PS3 as well as its enviable processing power, Matt and his team did not have to completely start from scratch. “We’ve got the game, we know the game; there are some similarities at the core. All the licensing (the leagues, FIFA, the governing body itself), all of that knowledge base is applicable.”

On the other hand, there’s a staggering amount of work to determine just what FIFA will be. Prior and his team have to finalize their vision for the game, pitch that plan to senior management for approval, analyze what the makeup of the their staff will be, choose which game modes will be in the plan, schedule the development tasks, ensure the budgets make sense, and get the design documents going. After all, there’s only one launch date, and it won’t move. Prior simply has to hit it with a highly functional, beautiful game that will be devoured by an insatiable – and demanding – fanbase.

Oh, and there’s that whole “two touchscreens” thing to deal with.

“From a game design standpoint, you have to work out what you want to do with the Vita and what makes it unique,” explains Prior. “How can that be adapted to FIFA? We wanted to do a lot of controls around the touchscreen. We didn’t just want to make gimmicky touchscreen features; we wanted to create features that affected the game at a core level.”

“We saw the touchscreen and how it gives you the ability to point and press exactly where you want to go,” he continues. “We thought, ‘How could we address some of the more frustrating things about FIFA?’ We play FIFA a lot in the office, and there’s rarely a game that goes past where someone doesn’t scream ‘NOT THAT GUY!’ when they make a pass. The reason for that is you’re kind of at the mercy of the AI; you might be looking at the player on screen and trying to make a pass, but the AI, just because of its limitations, might assume you wanted [a different] pass. With the touchscreen, you press on the screen, and there’s no ambiguity.”

Building an all-new – and significantly more intuitive – way to shoot on goal was another obvious opportunity once the team laid their eyes on the Vita’s back-touch mechanism. “It clicked straight away, almost,” chuckled Prior. “The physical dimensions of the Vita lent itself very well to football in the sense that the (back touchscreen) looks like a goal.”

Dreaming up new and different ways to control FIFA is one thing; determining exactly how many different ways to play is quite another.

“We wanted to make sure this is a full and complete experience,” Prior says with conviction. “We’ve seen time and time again launch titles on new hardware come out very lightweight, kind of tech demos. FIFA represents the biggest and most complex game we’ve ever made for a handheld.” His goal was to ensure that all of the major game modes a FIFA player would expect would be represented, including Be A Pro, Tournaments and all the major leagues and players, Career Mode, and online play.

Unfortunately, as Prior analyzed the development schedules of the PS3 FIFA 12 and his own game, he realized that the team wouldn’t have the technical bandwidth to link the two titles (hence the decision to not assign a “12” designation in the name) and share the experience between the PS3 and Vita. It’s not because of a lack of desire, according to Prior; there are only so many things that can be done in a short amount of time. “That’s one for the future for sure,” he says. “It’s kind of a no-brainer, and the framework is there.”

Amid all this, Prior is excited and upbeat, bursting with pride at the chance to deliver a potential system-seller on Day One. “It’s a challenge and an honor,” he says. “FIFA’s one of the biggest games in the world.”

NEXT WEEK: Development starts, and the “a-ha!” moments begin…

Richard Grisham has been obesessed with sports and video games since childhood, when he’d routinely create and track MicroLeague Baseball seasons on paper. He currently lives in New Jersey with his wife and four-year old son, who he’ll soon be training to be an NFL placekicker. As a freelance journalist and writer, his work has appeared in GamesRadar, NGamer, and 1UP.

The post BOX SCORE: Taking the leap, Part 1 appeared first on Game News.