EA Sports

When it comes to sports games, Electronic Arts is the proverbial 800-lb. gorilla. If you can think of a sport, it's likely that EA Sports has come out with some high-profile game for it. In some cases, this results in game franchises that dominate their market. One of these franchises is the FIFA series. If you live in the U.S. and you like to play soccer games, it's more than likely that you've spent some time with a FIFA title. Always very popular, FIFA games have also been pretty much decried by any true fan of the sport. Offering unrealistic and unsatisfying gameplay, previous FIFA titles have racked up huge sales while remaining a negative blot on the American soccer consciousness. Recently, it's become increasingly obvious that other franchises, including Konami's high-quality series of soccer games, have been steadily eroding FIFA's grip on the market. In response, EA has come out with FIFA 2002, a groundbreaking game for the FIFA series.

According to ESRB, this game contains: Comic Mischief, Violence

NHL 2002 ultimately succeeds at bringing NHL-styled hockey to the XBox. While it isnt a perfect recreation of the worlds "coolest sport," it does a nice job of capturing the major nuances of the game and recreating them in videogame format.

A zombie-like vacant look plagues all the boxers faces. Outside of several trademark punches and gestures for only a few select boxers, all the rest of the boxers move identically to one another to the point where it looks ridiculous when boxers appear to mime one another.

According to ESRB, this game contains: Animated Violence, Mild Language 

Game Description: Question: Who's a better fighter, Lennox Lewis or Joe Frazier? Answer: you. With Knockout Kings 2001, you can choose a champion from a long list of past and present greats--all with near-photo-realistic faces and signature moves. The game also includes today's top female boxers, including Mia St. John and Lucia Rijker, as well as in-game strategy from seasoned trainers and commentary from boxing experts Al Bernstein, Teddy Atlas, and Max Kellerman.

On paper, I'm sure Black Ops and Electronic Arts thought they had a winner. Their new game would only have Ready 2 Rumble: Round 2 to contend with, and it would be featured on the powerful, and (relatively) new PlayStation 2. But as other PlayStation 2 developers have done, Black Ops rushed the game to get it onto store shelves, and the results are disappointing.

Like most of this year's baseball releases, Triple Play 2001 seems to be stuck in mediocrity. It could be argued that this is a case of the PlayStation's limits finally being met, but I think it is far more likely that developers have simply given up on doing anything even remotely interesting on the five-year old console in favor of its new big brother, the PlayStation 2.

This title could have been released two years ago, and I still would have proclaimed the graphics and animation to be hideously shoddy. If this is the best they can do with 32-bit, 3D graphics, I'd gladly see the return of sprite-based 16-bit graphics for baseball games that I can recall as being much more attractive.