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Leafing through adverts and reviews of football games going back 10 or 20 years, it's immediately noticeable how little has changed - superficially - in the way we describe them. The box blurb for FIFA 95, for example, boasts of its "fast gameplay" and "pinpoint give-and-go passes". Both phrases that will likely feature in any discussion of its descendant in 2013. This rather charming 1997 IGN review of ISS 64, meanwhile, speaks glowingly of the title's "responsiveness" while asserting that there's "no lag time like in FIFA". Sound familiar?The significance of this is that, while the genre has moved forward - impossibly, unimaginably so when I think back to my sheer astonishment the first time I laid my eyes on FIFA 97 - we're all still striving for the same things. Not a better representation of the sport we love, perhaps, but a better synthesis of all the things we've enjoyed from the dozens of iterations played over the years. Capturing this only gets harder as time goes on, and a 'perfect game', as we might imagine it, moves further and further away. It's a Herculean task for developers, and you can't help but feel a little sympathy for them having to step up to the plate, year after year, and take another swing
It's about time someone threw a curveball.
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