The early to mid 1990s had been a boom period for football games, particularly on consoles. In of this retrospective, we saw how Sensible Software had turned the classic top-downer into a sheer artform, while EA had introduced glitz and glamour into the consolers' world, and Konami had established a reputation for firm and solid playability. Acer Aspire 5570z Drivers For Windows Xp Download. But it had all begun to take a turn for the worse in 1996, with EA guilty of a shocking crime against gaming in the shape of the ill-advised FIFA '97.

As the focus began to shift towards the visual power that PC games could offer, but with football gamers in dire need of a saviour, who could they turn to as 1997 drew in? 1997 Quite remarkably, the publisher that managed to resurrect the reputation of PC-based football games turned out to be none other than. EA themselves. Almost as quickly as they'd conspired to destroy themselves, they somehow managed to resurrect their franchise in truly laudable fashion, thanks to the mastery of FIFA: Road To World Cup '98. RTWC, as it became affectionately and somewhat inevitably known, was an absolute triumph. Indeed, looking at it side by side with FIFA '97, it's hard to believe that the two games are direct successors. The ugly, lanky, polygonal players were thrown out, replaced with shorter, chunker and more fluidly animated ones, and they now played on a pitch that didn't try quite so hard to look realistically grass-like, being that curious shade of 'computer game football pitch' green, but was far more pleasing to the eye, particularly at the speed the game moved.