“Need for skills” – FIFA Street

**FIFA Street** (EA Sports Big, PlayStation 2, 2005)

Trying directly to score goals is not always the way to go in FIFA Street’s 4v4 street football matches. Keep the ball away from your opponents with enough fancy tricks and flicks and you earn a ‘game breaker’, the combo meter turning into a big red SHOOT like Paul Ince’s notepad gone Mortal Kombat. Once you’ve done that you get a netbusting shot that might even knock the goalkeeper out of the way; not a certain goal but something close to it. Better still, and the best feeling while playing it, is to pull off a goal through other means that acts as the final act in a combo, setting up a quick follow-up for a double whammy. The earliest FIFA games helped you towards automated stylish football, and FIFA Street offers a great update on the same approach.

That mechanic comes straight from the most obvious antecedent to FIFA Street, 2001’s NBA Street, similarly released under the EA Sports Big label. NBA Street wasn’t a particularly big deal in the UK or many of the other places that love FIFA games, though, and doing this for football is a less obvious fit than basketball. There is another game whose success in the meantime looks like an obvious catalyst for FIFA Street: Need for Speed: Underground.

The gameplay loop is very similar. Winning games gets you points and new cosmetic options, even if it’s glasses and trainers and different styles of shorts rather than spoilers and neon. Even when you lose, you have an extra impetus for being stylish along the way because that earns you rewards too. Alongside that there’s a bit of taking inspiration from FIFA rival Pro Evolution Soccer’s Master League mode, in the way you gradually add star players into your squad as you beat their teams. The mixture of big and shiny with an attempt at underground cool is very much where Need for Speed: Underground and its sequel managed to succeed, though.

In FIFA Street, its successes in this endeavour rest largely on the shoulders of MC Harvey of So Solid Crew, who lends his voice to the matches. He has to do difficult quadruple service as commentator, hypeman, provider of advice, and stand-in for the mates you’re messing around with. Over a hodgepodge of beats and half-songs which I’m guessing is meant to simulate a pirate radio station, he gets into freestyles, admonishes, laughs, and tries his best with echo effects to make every replay sound like an event. The freestyles are particularly limited and general repetition sets in before long, but he sounds like he’s having a great time, and his infectious enthusiasm is one of the game’s highlights. He’s surprisingly explicit on the similarities to street racing, too, calling you players hot rods, asking where the nitro is, and at one point literally saying “I have a need: a need for skills”.

As often as MC Harvey repeats in-game that football started on the streets, the game is filled with big name players who in many cases didn’t. It gives you matches in Marseille, Lagos, Rio de Janeiro, but they’re little more than names. This was at a time when ‘street’, like ‘urban’, was becoming more prominent as a convenient word to reference Black culture while taking it away from its specific origins. Elsewhere in 2005, the Brit Awards gave the award for Best British Urban to white pop-soul singer Joss Stone, and likewise EA and FIFA were never going to fully engage with the specific cultures their game associates itself with.

MC Harvey being there is a start, but FIFA Street’s vision of global star players gathered on small hard pitches to show off their skills owes as much to advertising as to any actual streets. As with the World Cup’s recent trips to South Africa and Brazil, there’s a sense of acting as if it’s a generous concession to allow those places to be part of the show, even while staying at a remove and leveraging their culture towards the relentless greed of FIFA’s version of corporate sport.

FIFA Street didn’t quite manage a mammoth success on the level of Need for Speed: Underground, but it certainly fared far better than EA’s previous attempts to increase their number of football games outside of men’s World Cup/European Championships years. It was an accessible and fun new way of playing with enough twists to keep it from getting too quickly shallow, helped both by adding the FIFA game branding and offering more of a semblance of an alternative identity. There’s only so far that can go in such a corporate product, though.