UEFA EURO 2004

EURO 2004 saves us from the end-of-season blues, it's off to Portugal we go for high quality international football action.

If you're expecting an anti-FIFA rant or perhaps a run through of the well-worn "cash-in" clichés then you've come to the wrong place on this sunny Monday afternoon. The last two versions of FIFA have been excellent games that unfortunately suffer from the ghost of the FIFA franchise's past reputation and immature fanboys who seem to thing a choice of videogame denotes more knowledge of football. But enough with the negativity for now, all is well in the world, here at Xploder towers the sun is shining, my local team once more holds the FA Cup and there's a bank holiday weekend on the way. This time of year can be crushingly boring for a football fan, yes we've just had the excitement of the FA/Scottish Cup and the hilarity of Leeds' relegation, but with poor showings by British sides in Europe this year the season has drawn to a slightly understated close. All we have left to tide us over until the start of a new season is transfer speculation and paper talk.

But no, because this year we have an international competition. UEFA's EURO 2004 kicks off in Portugal next month. There's bound to be a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth as England take on France, with the possibility of meeting the same team in the final. Host Portugal gets to duke it out with neighbouring Spain and there's one of the strongest rivalries in European football when Germany take on The Netherlands. So fun, fun, fun on the football pitch this summer. And obviously, we have inevitable licensed game from Electronic Arts. Coming halfway between two versions of FIFA, as you might expect, it owes a lot to FIFA 2004 with a few new features and tweaks that make FIFA 2005 a rather exciting prospect.

EUFA EURO 2004 features 51 teams vying to qualify for the 2004 finals in Portugal. The first games are as far back as 2002 and the qualifying campaign even features friendly matches. One might expect the inclusion of the ten EURO 2004 stadiums in the game, but EA has provided some locations from across the continent that were used in the qualifying competition. Games can be played in such locations as Old Trafford, Anfield, The San Siro etc. EA's England squads are often as baffling as Sven's and players who like to tinker will be delighted with the ability to pick their own international squads from a large selection of available players. The friendlies and qualifying games are an ideal time to find someone to slot into the that difficult position down England's left flank. And of course one can make sure Alan Smith gets a run out instead of Emil Heskey.

The player stats are augmented by a new morale feature. This coloured bar shows how happy a player is and between games one is informed of any change. So a player that's left out of the starting line-up may lose morale, whereas a player scoring a goal will have increased moral. One now has the additional worry of players keeping happy as well as fit to play. If qualification is successful then a final squad has to be picked to take to Portugal.

While the EURO 2004 competition is the centrepiece of the game there are several other game modes to keep the player occupied. There's the usual friendly, the opportunity to just play the EURO finals and a training mode. The most interesting two modes though are Home & Away and Situation. Home & Away creates an encounter between two teams and adds the away goals rule. Situation is used for creating specific events, such as being two goals down with ten men and only five minutes left on the clock. Hopefully this feature will be retained for the next version of FIFA to recreate some of the more exciting moments in club football, such as the last few minutes of the 1999 European Cup Final.

Onto the pitch now and the gameplay will be familiar to anyone who has played the most recent version of FIFA. Played at the simplest level the game offers the usual ability to easily knock the ball around to teammates. For those more practised players there are the manual passes and the off the ball control, that allows one to make runs with other players before passing the ball to them. The off the ball control has been changed slightly this time around but isn't very different from the version in FIFA 2004. The most welcome change is in the manual through-ball control, now there's a chipped through-ball that's great for dinking over the top of centre backs to a charging centre-forward.

Despite some cosmetic changes to the controls and the inclusion of the chipped through-ball the real change to EURO 2004 comes in the form of a much raised difficulty level and increase in the intelligence of computer opponents. I've been playing the FIFA franchise for eight years and consider myself fairly handy at the game, yet I contrived to lose 2-1 to Wales, when playing as France. The computer opponents really do put up a strong challenge now and the defensive play is particularly good. It's much more difficult to cut between the centre-backs and the old standard of forwards splitting the backs when a midfield player runs on goal has been fixed too. Goals are not as easy to come by as they once were and the higher skill levels make for an exciting and tactical game.