“Tell me places, all the places” – FIFA 2010 World Cup South Africa

**2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa** (EA Sports, PlayStation 3, 2010)

It’s not often that FIFA games lose the voiced “it’s in the game” intro. In FIFA 2010 World Cup South Africa, it’s replaced with a cheer and a blast of vuvuzelas, the droning soundtrack for much of the tournament. It’s kind of an obvious idea, but it does get across right away that it’s a special event. That’s an appropriate scene-setter for a game which doesn’t do anything too unexpected but is the high water mark for FIFA World Cup video games before their quick descent into non-existence.

Essentially, the 2010 World Cup game plays like FIFA 10 with an added burst of speed and power. Because FIFA 10 was really good, and because it’s just for the summer, this is a good decision. It keeps all the same sense of myriad options at your feet, of being able to be creative in your football, and adds even more urgency to getting on with doing that creation before your chance is taken from you.

With online play as an important feature but not yet the point, I remember the happiness of starting over and playing through tournaments against other people on a levelled and simplified playing field. I never quite took the Netherlands, my side of choice, to the World Cup, but enjoyed all the ways I could come close along the way.

Last time EA did a World Cup, in a very different time, they had a confusing morass of passport stamps to incentivise you to add some variety. For 2010 there’s some lovely World Cup trivia built in to the achievements setup, like the one for scoring a goal as a team who had previously been to the World Cup but not scored (I went with Greece). There was also a rolling live offering with the chance to play scenarios from the real games of the World Cup soon after they had finished. The more fixed qualifying equivalent was closer still to recreating the world-expanding feel of FIFA Road to World Cup 98, drawing properly on every bit of the sprawling qualifying tournaments.

It’s also maybe the closest EA ever got to addressing the problem I talked about for FIFA World Cup Germany 2006: how a video game can capture the more unlikely events which football matches sometimes turn on, particularly in high-pressure tournament situations. FIFA video games don’t even have handball, much less playoff matches determined by goals wrongly allowed after Thierry Henry used his hand to keep the ball in play.

For 2010, though, the scenarios drop you in just after big events, including that one. Commentators and crowd are tuned to an appropriate fever pitch, and it really can feel like you’re picking up the pieces after something momentous. Less so when you get to the end of said playoff match and the default commentary refers to the winners picking up three points, as if it was a league stage match. The lack of care is deflating. Even at the best moment for a World Cup game, its ultimate status as a lower effort cash grab couldn’t completely be avoided.