FIFA Soccer 2005 Review

Some people say that living in a big city will help a man become a more social creature and learn certain intricacies about human culture that simple folk will never pick up on. Is that really true? I was born and raised in a small Bavarian village. In that village, simple people lived their common, sleepy lives.

Use your head, son! Use your head!

There is a 99% chance that this ball will end up in the net.

You'd think that city slickers are smarter and more eloquent, but if you sit down and really think about it, you'll soon realize that they, more than anything else, just never really had a chance to be humbled by Mother Nature. They were never faced with the vastness and almost infinite awesomeness of some of nature's wonders - like seeing bright green grass stand in contrast to the beautiful, misty, snow-covered mountains that tower over the horizon like gentle giants reminding you of your own mortality. Yes, city slickers think they have it all, that they understand everything, but all they really have is their man-made microcosm in which they dwell in seeming symbiosis with other folks of their kind. They let their lives and thoughts be polluted with greed, vanity and depression, the hound dogs that are on the heels of every human who is forced to be in close contact with other humans in an environment molded by the humans to reflect their own screwed up psyche.

It was not so in my small Bavarian village. There, healthy women with milky breasts would milk healthy thoroughbred cows for fresh Alpine milk - where their essence would mix to blur the lines between feeding and sexuality. In my small Bavarian village, every small wooden cottage had a story behind it and every haystack a different sexual escapade to tell. And at the end of the day, the village folk would gather around atop a hillock and just sit, smoking long pipes filled with dried tobacco grown by hand and gaze in amazement as the fading Sun would make way for the bright shining stars.

City slickers don't have the privilege of seeing stars in the evening. No sir, all they see are the reflections of the city lights covered by the murky, smog-filled sky. It's like they live in a cage, a prison. Surrounded by tattered, ugly and angular buildings, mammoths of industry with no more use than the dust that fills every inch of the poorly cleaned streets, when they look up and they don't see the skies, they see some kind of horrible creation of their own kind, and then they blink silently, stifle tears they never knew to shed and force themselves back into ignorance.

Every once in a while, a city slicker would try to get out, but then he'd be pulled right back in. This yearning for clean life would soon pass as another sure-shot deal would wave in front of him like the tip of the penis sticking out of a Thai transvestite's tight leather skirt after a wild night of drinking and partying.

Gangbang, yay! Gangbang!!

The goalie likes to fall down like a goddamn idiot.

So who is winning this battle really? The human spirit has a lot to offer, unfortunately it's like a sweet poison and you can only have it so much before you overdose, while the clean life of the countryside will give you that much-needed connection with nature and this horrible longing for socialization.

In light of all this, it's clear that FIFA 2005 is pretty much the same damn game, game play-wise, as FIFA 2004 and FIFA 2003. Some subtle additions have been made to the game, but nothing that would warrant this galloping annual release schedule that EA keeps forcing us to keep up with. While the added management options offer a little more depth, you'd be much better off just playing a good Soccer management game, or if you're looking for a good soccer simulation (which FIFA 2005 isn't as it's still very arcadish and full of silly and inaccurate AI solutions), try your hand at Winning Eleven by Konami, probably the best soccer simulation currently available on the market.

FIFA Soccer series is experiencing a steady decline due to lack of innovation, much like the population of my small Bavarian village is experiencing a steady decline because no one cares about the fucking mountains anymore.