2006 FIFA World Cup Germany XB360 Review Portland OR

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So it's almost here again. The pinnacle of sport, the soccer/football World Cup. For about a decade now EA has dominated the football genre in terms of licensing with its exclusive FIFA deal and many of the world's most famous leagues. However recently an unofficial game, Pro Evolution Soccer, has challenged EA's dominance of the genre and is now seen as the premiere football game. EA is quickly playing catch up and have turned FIFA from an arcade style game into a simulation with excellent results. This continues in the official World Cup game, and surprisingly, EA has added a huge amount of depth to the title, but as expected it does come up short in a few areas.

FWC: Germany 2006 contains many game modes to choose from but obviously the most complete one is to play through the upcoming World Cup tournament. However there is a lot more meat to the game than just that. You can setup your own custom tournament and play through a league style format or play an exhibition game. The tournament itself is also in depth as you can choose to either join the tournament at the Finals stage or play through the qualifiers in each FIFA confederation zone. This allows those teams who did not qualify to make it and gives the game much more replay value and authenticity.

This is of course the second game from the FIFA franchise on the X360, however it is the first to be released in Australia so we were of course expecting a huge improvement on last generations titles. We were a little disappointed but overall EA has done a good job of using the power of the next generation console. The mechanics of the FIFA series has once again gone down the simulation path and the game plays much slower than what you would have seen in the World Cup game four years ago. It's all about precision passing, and tactics rather than screaming through the defense from your own goal line to score an unrealistic goal. The thing is that when you pull off a stunning move to beat the offside trap, you not only have a clear shot on goal, but feel a reward that not many other soccer games can provide.

In terms of licensing you're not likely to be found wanting here, unless you specifically want club teams which are being kept under wraps until FIFA 2007. However almost every country in the world is represented in the FIFA confederations and the qualifying tournaments reflect the exact structure of how they played out. If that seems a bit boring you can mix up the qualifying groups in each zone but you can't move teams from zone to zone so Australia can't play in UEFA for instance.