It’s not often you can tell a game by it’s case, but there are some instances when it is painfully obvious what the experience will be like. First of all, grab a big name title (FIFA Street might not be a big name, but FIFA is and this is the third of this series) and announce it for the Nintendo DS. Secondly, make sure you make it painfully aware that there is also a mini-game involved. It’s not that the DS is a bad platform, it is in fact my favourite platform, it’s just that there are a bunch of developers that just don’t know how to create games for it.
EA is one of those developers. It isn’t as easy as just putting your a dumbed down version of your latest franchise onto the DS and hoping people will buy it. You’d think that the failure of almost every EA Nintendo DS title would make them aware of this, but it seems to have no affect on the giant dev and publishing team. And it is with that that EA have decided to join the numerous amount of developers out there to quickly add a mini-game onto their product to help make it feel a bit more like a DS game.

FIFA Street 3 is all about, as the title suggests, playing football anywhere but on a field. 3 players per team (plus goalie) and tricks galore. The problem lies in the fact that the game doesn’t really know how it wants to be controlled….. ok, so that’s only one of the many problems, but it is a great place to start. You get the option of choosing either stylus or button controls and while it would have been nice for at least one of these modes to work flawlessly, it seems like that would be far too much to ask.
Tap on the screen to pass, draw a line to shoot and do a multitude of other stylus motions to swap players, lob or introduce some kind of evasive trick or manoeuvre. While the tutorials go through each of these stylus controls in full detail, and in theory it sounds like it should work, the touch controls just aren’t as responsive as they should be. What doesn’t help is the terrible framerate, which seems to have a direct affect on the controls. While the game isn’t doing a lot graphically, there’s a bunch of special effects added that just don’t need to be there and seem to be have put in just to help it look a bit more like the 360/PS3 versions.
So, the stylus controls don’t work too well, so it’s likely that most people will swap on over to the button controls to try and get the most out of the title. And as quickly as you turned them on, you’ll find yourself itching for the non-responsive stylus controls. While lobbing, passing and shooting works (when the framerate is alright) the trick shots are downright impossible and involve some kind of hand contortion and muscle memory reminiscent of the fatalities on Mortal Kombat. There just aren’t enough buttons on the DS for this control scheme to work, and it makes a bad game feel worse. How are you supposed to play a game that makes you feel like it doesn’t want to be played?
The saving grace of FIFA Street 3 is the mini-game EA have plagiarised from the hit series Ouendan/Elite Beat Agents. Select a music track and hit the right spots on the screen to the beat at the right times to make your footballer keep the ball in the air. It starts off fun, and then becomes terribly sad. It isn’t difficult and was simply put in to give you something else to do before dropping it off at EB as a trade-in.

Closing comments

It isn’t often I write up a small review. I enjoy nothing more than to tear a game to pieces and let the readers know the good and points of the latest games. You’ll often even find me writing up a good 10 paragraphs on a game I don’t like just so I can get across just how bad it is. But FIFA Street 3 has dragged something out of me I didn’t know existed. A hatred so deep that knowing this title is in the same house as I am causes my blood to boil….. it in fact causes me to even despise the case it came in — the stupid bigger sized clear DS cases that only EA seem to use. FIFA Street 3 is terrible. Don’t buy it, unless you are going to purge a copy from this Earth.
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