Electronic Arts deserves props for putting women's teams in FIFA. It lets us Americans actually play as the best team from our country, so I'm grateful for that. Now watch, and be amazed, as the US Women's National Team obliterates an over matched opponent in today's Eric Vs. 365 game, FIFA 19.
Not much to say about today's game, actually. I only played 2 games of FIFA 19 - one to practice and one to record - and then deleted it (thanks, EA Access). The game is good. It's fine. I had fun with it. I wish I wouldn't have played on dumb baby level difficulty, because it was way, way too easy, but whatever. I got to talk about the USWNT a lot and I think the video is entertaining.
I do want to talk about sports games in general, though. Back in the day there used to be 2-3-4 games for every sport, every year, and that was a huge pain in the butt as a reviewer. Certainly, there were lesser entries that were easy to dismiss, but when it came to EA vs. 2K sports games it was incredibly hard to have to write separate reviews. Despite what morons and fanboys will try to convince you of, these games were always like 90-95% exactly the same experience as each other, so figuring out which one was better was always a challenge. Writing two reviews that basically said the same things was also a pain.
Thankfully, that all basically sorted itself out with exclusive license agreements and suddenly I only had one baseball game, one football game, and one hockey game to cover every year. Yeah, that was bad for the games themselves and bad for consumers, but it made my job as a reviewer easier so suck it.
Then the problem became the fact that, again despite what people want to think, the new sports games that come out every year are better than the previous ones and if you hyped up last year's game too much you look like an idiot when you say "This is the best sport game ever and craps all over last year's!", which is what pretty much every sport game review looks like.
In the last 10 years or so, you probably noticed that the tone of sports game reviews and the scores they received changed. Sports games used to get surprisingly high scores - 9's and 10's - because they were impressive and the reviews were effusive in their praise. Then editors and writers figured out what I outlined above - they were writing the same stuff every year - and suddenly things changed. Scores topped out at 8's across the board and suddenly there were a lot more nit-picky problems to bemoan in the text, which gave people the false impression that sports games used to be better than they are now. No, I'd still say every new game is better than the last.
I'm just glad I don't have to review sports games anymore.
