Feature By

Ben Hopper

I'm well aware of the tens of millions of American sports fans who would like to skewer me for the making this statement, but I've always echoed the sentiment that soccer (or football as it's rightly called everywhere else) is the greatest sport in the world. You can say I don't know anything about sports or whatever, but it just always seemed so obvious to me. How is it that North America remains the only continent on the planet that fails to see the excitement of the soccer played at its highest level? Oh sure, more young Americans play soccer than any other sport, but why doesn't that translate into the broader interest?

Well, those are certainly questions for another day (and probably, for another Web site). What we can say about soccer in America is that the game has made several small yet significant steps in overcoming the many obstacles in its way. Next year, a new women's professional soccer league, the WUSA, will debut—a direct result of the U.S. National Team's thrilling triumph on home turf in the 1999 Women's World Cup (Brandi Chastain—oh yeah!). In the 2000 Olympic soccer tournament in Sydney, the U.S. men's team made fans forget all about their dismal showing in the '98 World Cup by advancing to the semifinals—farther than any other U.S. men's team in history.

But what really got the ball rolling in the United States was its hosting of the 1994 World Cup, which made U.S. defender Alexi Lalas a household name, and also paved the way for the formation of Major League Soccer (MLS)—"the first Division I professional soccer league on American soil in 12 years."

Now, the success of MLS is somewhat debatable in the American sports scene, but what can't be denied is that the league has survived through its first four years and has no intentions of ever going away. Perhaps the best reason to put your faith in the future of professional soccer in America and the most telling sign that the MLS is here to stay: Officially licensed videogames are starting to appear, and we're not talking hack jobs, either.

This year saw the release of ESPN MLS GameNight for the Sony PlayStation as part of Konami's "ESPN the games" line-up. Quite simply, it took Konami's amazing International Superstar Soccer (ISS) game engine—the smoothest the console world has ever seen—and slapped an MLS license on it. As someone who was dying for an ISS game with an official license of any kind, that was more than enough for me. You could even argue that MLS GameNight is the best soccer game to ever be released stateside simply because it uses the ISS foundation. The gameplay is that good.

Now it appears the PlayStation 2's sports library is about to get a little fatter, as Konami is preparing ESPN MLS ExtraTime (named after the highlight show) for release in March 2001. Once again, the game engine was created by the ISS guys at Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo, only this one takes full advantage of PS2's next generation hardware. Just like MLS GameNight, ExtraTime will be completely bilingual—featuring English and Spanish text and commentary. Also carried over from the ISS games is the great player customization mode and the cool "goal gallery" mode—which lets you save memorable goals to a memory card and watch them at anytime. Sounds like a dream-come-true to me. Since it doesn't look like Sega's Dreamcast is going to be getting a decent soccer game anytime soon, PlayStation 2 looks like the new console of choice if you want to play a great simulation of the world's most popular sport.

Details about the gameplay and other features will be presented in multiple screenshots with accompanying captions in the following pages.