PS1

FIFA Soccer 2002: Major League Soccer

FIFA Football 2002, commonly known as FIFA 2002 and known in North America as FIFA Soccer 2002: Major League Soccer, is a football video game released in 2001, produced by Electronic Arts and released by EA Sports. FIFA 2002 is the ninth game in the FIFA series.

Sport

Time to beat: about 17.3 hours

Overview

Power bars for passes were introduced, and dribbling reduced in order to attain a higher challenge level. The power bar can also be customised to suit the gamer's preference. The game also includes club emblems for many more European clubs as well as for major Dutch clubs such as PSV, AFC Ajax and Feyenoord, although there was no Dutch league of any kind (they were under the "Rest of World" header). This game also features, for the first time, the Swiss Super League, at the cost of excluding the Greek League. A card reward system licensed from Panini was also introduced where, after winning a particular competition, a star player card is unlocked.

Similar to FIFA 98, this game features a Road to the World Cup game mode featuring the real-life format of each qualification zone as well as every team that had participated in it (except Oceania), however the World Cup itself is not featured, either as part of the mode or as its own mode. If the player chooses any nations that had automatically qualified for the 2002 FIFA World Cup (i.e. France, Japan, and South Korea), the player is instead tasked with improving their FIFA ranking through international friendlies.

The game received "favourable" reviews on all platforms as reported by the review aggregation website Metacritic. Gary Whitta of NextGen said of the PlayStation 2 version in its final issue, "With improved tactics and graphics, FIFA 2002 once again cements itself at the top of the virtual soccer universe." In Japan, where the GameCube version was ported for release on 15 November 2001, followed by the PlayStation 2 version two weeks after (29 November), Famitsu gave it a score of 34 out of 40 for the former version, and 32 out of 40 for the latter version.