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SimCoaster is the third game in Bullfrog's series of amusement-park-themed business simulators. It's the sequel to last year's SimTheme Park, which itself was a sequel to 1994's Theme Park. SimTheme Park differentiated itself from Theme Park by hiding much of Theme Park's notorious micromanagement elements, so it let you concentrate on building and expanding your park while managing the minutiae only as you saw fit. The goals were invisible, but certain benchmarks regarding income, crowd capacity, and so forth gave you rewards. SimCoaster dismisses the elegant design of its predecessor and instead favors the often overwhelming amount of management found in the original Theme Park. It also gives you very specific goals that must be completed to progress further into the game.

If it weren't for the significant changes to the gameplay, SimCoaster would look like an expansion pack to SimTheme Park. This is primarily because it uses the same engine as that of its predecessor. And mechanically, it plays the same as SimTheme Park. You place rides, paths, shops, decorative features, and sideshow attractions. Placement is key, and you want to make sure your guests are always on rides or spending money and that your guests always have easy access to the next diversion once they've finished the last. You can also choose to wander around your park in the first-person camcorder view, a nice feature that lets you witness everything from a visitor's perspective as opposed to your normal, all-seeing overview.

The most obvious change in SimCoaster is that there is more of an overarching goal. You begin as an employee of a theme-park management company. By successfully completing challenges and objectives assigned to you by the owners, you'll earn more stock, get promotions, open new areas to build in, and gain access to special rides. Objectives are different from challenges. The first are your overall goals for that time, and these are usually related to expansion. A typical objective will be to find some way to remove a lake so that you can build there. Challenges are ways of testing your management mettle, and they include assignments like keeping a certain number of guests in your park or keeping your employees happy for a predetermined amount of time. Often, your objectives will be to succeed at a certain number of challenges.

In theory, it's a nice change from SimTheme Park's very open-ended gameplay. In reality, the challenges serve only to add a layer between you and the game. The challenges reward you for almost exactly the same types of things as in SimTheme Park. The difference is that instead of simply being rewarded for having been a good manager for a period of time, you must choose the block of time during which your skills will be judged. It doesn't add complexity, just complication.

What's more problematic is that these additions take your attention away from the enjoyable part of the game: building and planning your park. In SimTheme Park and Chris Sawyer's extremely popular RollerCoaster Tycoon, the objectives seem directly tied to your ability to design a high-quality park. In SimCoaster, the goals are much more focused on management. The original Theme Park was a business management simulator disguised as an amusement park game, and SimCoaster returns to these roots. The problems you deal with will be numerous and varied.

You wear many hats in SimCoaster. You're the park planner, the labor manager, the accountant, and the head of security. You must constantly deal with problems, from employees wanting raises to unruly kids setting fire to your bushes and trash cans. Once your park gets big, the problems come fast and furious, and it can get more than a little frustrating when you're trying to build an expansion area at the same time. Your advisor will pop up to inform you of problems, and eventually she's almost always onscreen alerting you of one imminent disaster or another. You can always turn off her commentary, but you would miss many important problems. An e-mail-like message system, which is the other means of learning about significant events, is easy to overlook when you're putting out fires all over your park.

Minimum System Requirements
System: PII 233 or equivalent
Video Memory: 4 MB
Hard Drive Space: 415 MB

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You'd expect larger-than-life adventures from a squad of superhuman World War II commandos, and Commandos 3 delivers: Central Berlin, a bombed-out Stalingrad, a train packed with stolen art masterpieces, and the beaches of Normandy are all on the menu. There's nothing pedestrian about such assignments, and all 10 mission locations are as tough as they are memorable. Given that you can't adjust the level of difficulty, getting through even a single mission can require as much patience and judicious use of quicksaves as it does stealth and tactical forethought. Unfortunately, Commandos 3 hasn't gained much ground on its predecessors, and those new to the series may have trouble getting past the interface, the locked 800x600 resolution, or the many moments of frustration that every player is bound to experience. Nevertheless, the game's high level of challenge can lead to some proportionally satisfying victories against all odds.

In total contrast with what lies ahead, Commandos 3 starts out easy enough. The two tutorial missions are--with a single exception--a smart introduction to the key members of the commando squad and their highly specialized abilities. As in Commandos 2, the interiors of buildings are fully 3D, and it's possible to smoothly rotate the camera with the mousewheel. While the 3D segment isn't the best-looking part of the game, this extra control makes it fairly convenient to navigate the cramped rooms. The starter scenario gently walks you through the basics of the interface, which differs significantly in style from those in typical strategy or action games. Except when manually set to provide cover fire, the commandos don't act without explicit commands. Moving one character at a time is simple enough, though the lack of hotkeys for specific weapons or abilities becomes a challenge in tight spots. The tutorial's one notable failing is that it doesn't mention that the abilities menu hides choices until it's clicked on, like the one for weapons, which confused more than one of us when looking for the spy's "distract" ability.

The prologue is a taste of how, with one mouse click, the Green Beret's speed and deadly knife strike can be overwhelming in close quarters. And within the span of 15 minutes or so, you'll meet the other core commando members (whose ranks have been distilled from Commandos 2 to the core group): The sniper has the longest range of any friendly unit, the sapper is an expert with bombs and heavy weapons, the spy can disguise himself with the uniforms of German soldiers and officers, and the thief is fast and capable of climbing up walls and other objects. The sixth member, the diver, appears only once, in the third campaign. One advantage of having the number of commandos pared down from the previous game is that there's no getting confused about what each one is for, and if you ever get really stumped in a mission, solving the situation can be just a matter of stepping back and thinking about the special abilities of the commandos assigned to a specific scenario.

This is a World War II game, and it's presumed that you know the odds the Allies are up against and have seen the character types in war movies, so don't expect a drawn-out story. The three campaigns kick off with a summary voice-over briefing, and most missions feature a little character banter in in-engine shots, but otherwise, it's time for the action. Fortunately, the missions themselves are quite distinct, and there are a couple of unexpected events over the course of the first two campaigns. While most maps require you to complete just one set of objectives, the two very large maps in the first campaign are broken up into a series of segments. One of the game's several cinematics occurs after the first short sniper-hunting mission: An intense round of bombing levels several buildings, then waves of paratroopers descend near your location. These flashy sequences are impressive and set the stakes, but it's typical of the game's uneven pacing that all this flash precedes a stretch of slow going and that some of the best parts are buried in the middle of the campaigns, where impatient gamers may not see them.

While there's more than enough opportunity to show off your stealth skills, Commandos 3 has more than a few situations where the object is simply to kill all the enemies on the map. This isn't as simple or as straightforward as it might sound, though, given that the interface isn't designed to let your men run and gun. Without much ado, the second mission offers some do-or-die training on the combat system, sending handfuls of assault-rifle-toting Germans at you in waves. To the game's credit, there's rarely just one way through a combat situation, and there's the chance to get some really heavy firepower. The beefy Green Beret can pick up an emplaced machine gun and walk around mowing down enemies within a medium-range cone, and it's even possible to use an artillery piece. For some reason, the commandos usually only pack their specialized weapons, but looting downed Germans provides the opportunity to get some decent small arms and set up ambushes.

Minimum System Requirements
System: Pentium III 700MHz or equivalent
RAM: 128 MB
Video Memory: 32 MB
Hard Drive Space: 2000 MB

Recommended System Requirements
System: Pentium 4 2GHz or equivalent
RAM: 512 MB
Video Memory: 128 MB

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Number of Players: 1 Player

If you're going to rip off a game, it's a good idea to make sure that you pick one that's both current and successful. So it's hard to understand what DR Studios was thinking when it decided to essentially remake the 1997 bomb Theme Hospital. The British developer's Hospital Tycoon is like a reheated version of Bullfrog's ancient hospital-management sim, which was actually a cheap copy of the company's Theme Park. Unsurprisingly, this copy of a copy of a copy is bland and derivative, with only a halfhearted attempt at establishing a Sims-style ambiance to make it stand apart from all the other shovelware out there with the word "tycoon" crammed somewhere into their titles.

Oddly enough, the biggest difference between Theme Hospital and Hospital Tycoon is that the latter has a more developed theme. Whereas the decade-old Bullfrog game was a straight god game, the story mode of play here drops you into a soap opera with all the angst and twice the cheese of a TV show like ER or the late, great St. Elsewhere. In addition to the usual tycoon-game management chores, you get to follow the escapades of heartthrob doc Rick Steele and the rest of the staff at Sapphire Beach Hospital. Everything here is certainly more fantasy than reality. The glass-walled hospital looks more like the famous Sydney Opera than the usual pile of bricks that passes for houses of healing in most metropolitan centers these days. Steele and a babe nurse are featured in posters all over examination rooms. And patients complain of kooky made-up diseases like "mummifried" and "lightbulbia." This is probably better than having to deal with budget cutbacks, fat nurses, and people staggering into emergency with flesh-eating disease or voluminous goiters, though everything is a little too kid-friendly here.

DR Studios attempts to further this soapy feel with Sims-like characters that speak in garbled simlish, have personality traits, and hook up or hate one another by turns. As with The Sims, you can take control of these yobs and force them to commit malicious acts on one another like shove and intimidate, or social acts like shake hands and tease, but there is rarely any point to doing so. Everybody mostly gets along, so you're best off to let the staff run on autopilot and interact however they see fit. This leads to some odd spectacles, if you bother to watch. Why is popular Doc Buffman making out with the hated Nurse Dakota? Why are Professor Brahms and Nurse Daisy having a teasing tickle fight in the research room? You'll never know. Or care, because these actions have little impact on your objectives, which stick to the tried-and-true like curing diseases, building specific equipment, and beautifying hospital corridors with fountains, statues, and the like.

All of the Sims stuff doesn't fit well with the management aspects of the game, either, and it really sticks out like a sore thumb when you skip the story episodes for sandbox play (which you'll likely do in short order, as all the story really does is add some dull cutscenes, offbeat stories about staffers, and things like missing vials filled with dangerous germs). Game mechanics stick to the god-game template every step of the way, leaving no real room or need for doctors and nurses to play hanky-panky in the operating room. Patients arrive with weird, supposedly humorous illnesses like explosive sneezing or golf rage, or some ailments that you can't immediately identify. You then build examining rooms to make diagnoses, research facilities to figure out unknown maladies, and special equipment like operating rooms and acid baths to treat them. There's a real lather, rinse, repeat thing going on here.

Depth is not a part of your doctoring, however. Research is automatic. Whenever patients befuddle your docs, the afflicted party eventually just wanders over to the research lab where a professor is waiting to whip them around in what looks like a cyclotron in order to both diagnose the ailment and prescribe what equipment is needed to make them all better. All identified illnesses are immediately uploaded to what's called the curadex files, where they're listed alongside brief descriptions of the symptoms, the equipment needed to cure them, and the cost (apparently Sapphire Beach is located in the USA) of the treatment. You get some reasonably oddball cases as time goes by, and get to build more involved equipment and carry out more serious (if always G-rated and goofy) medical procedures, but everything is spelled out for you so bluntly that you don't so much play a game as you color by the numbers. About all you ever have to figure out is which type of staff member is needed to run the hardware that you buy, since the game doesn't tell you this information.

Audio and video are hit and miss. A big problem with the sound of the game is that it also doesn't fit with the blended Sims/management-game philosophy. The simlish here is just god-awful. It's loaded with repetition and seems entirely random, not the quasi-pig latin that you can almost make out in the Sims games. Also, this gibberish is used as the audio counterpart for printed English dialogue when you communicate with your administrative assistant and others, and that's somehow amazingly annoying. The music also doesn't quite fit, with the score consisting of downbeat elevator music instead of the up-tempo tunes that a game this purportedly zany desperately requires.

Minimum System Requirements
System: Pentium 4 1.6 GHz or equivalent
RAM: 512 MB
Hard Drive Space: 750 MB
Other: Windows XP/Vista

Recommended System Requirements
System: Pentium 4 2.8GHz or equivalent
RAM: 1024 MB

Hard Drive Space: 15000 MB

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Number of Players: 1-12

If you own Civilization IV, then you've probably conquered the world a fair amount of times by now. (You've probably been crushed an equal number of times, as well.) If the usual conquer-the-world-style gameplay that takes you from the Stone Age to the Space Age is beginning to look a bit familiar, then you're in luck. Nearly nine months after Civ IV shipped, we have Civilization IV: Warlords, an expansion pack that adds a lot of excellent content to an already great game.

Civilization has a long history of expansions. The second and third games in the series each had two expansion packs released for them. Warlords continues the tradition by introducing both improvements and additions to the regular campaign game, as well as introducing a slew of new scenarios that offer a completely different style of play from the epic game. The expansion adds six new civilizations, and while they're introduced to flesh out the individual scenarios, they're all available in the regular campaign game, as well. You can now play as the Carthaginians, the Celts, the Koreans, the Ottomans, the Vikings, and the Zulus. Just like the civilizations in the core game, each of these civilizations has its own unique units, famous leaders from history, and snazzy musical theme.

Warlords takes its name from the new warlord unit in the game, which is sort of like the old great-general unit from previous Civ games. Indeed, in the regular campaign game, warlords appear as great generals, sort of like how the great artists, great engineers, and other great-people units would pop up from time to time in Civ IV. Armed with a variety of powers, great generals can lead your armies in war, and they can bestow experience points on regular units under their command. Or, great generals can speed up your military-unit production in a certain city or make it so that new units start out with extra experience.

While the additions to the core game are nice, they're not exactly ground breaking. The regular campaign feels pretty much the same as before, only there are new leaders and civs to contend with. There are also a number of new wonders of the world, but for the most part they blend into the existing wonder set pretty seamlessly, save for the Great Wall, which has the cool effect of erecting a huge wall around the borders of whichever civilization completes it first. Still, the real meat in this expansion is in the scenarios, which are basically brand-new games in many regards.

These new scenarios are engaging, though they do skew a bit toward ancient-world settings and conflicts. Still, the campaigns here are interesting, and each features a unique challenge. These scenarios are essentially modifications of the core game, and they feature rewritten tech trees and unique units that are appropriate for their settings. So instead of getting a full-fledged tech tree that covers everything from the wheel to fusion power, you might get a more focused tech tree that lets you create upgraded versions of existing units or that unlocks certain upgrades. Many feature a limited number of turns in which to accomplish your objective, something that might not sit well with conservative Civ players that like to sit back and build up their cities. Risk taking is rewarded instead, which will probably sit well with aggressive Civ players, and it may also teach conservative players how to become more opportunistic.

A number of new scenarios are basically retellings of epic conquests from long ago. Alexander's Conquest focuses on Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC, and your job is to conquer your way eastward across the Persian Empire and into India before you run out of turns. You really have to push aggressively to accomplish everything before time runs out. The Peloponnesian Wars and the Rise of Rome scenarios also cover the ancient Mediterranean world. The former is a challenge thanks to the geography of Greece, as you must master sea power to move armies around the many islands of the archipelago. You can play as either the Spartan or the Delian League (Athens). The Rome scenario, on the other hand, focuses on the Mediterranean at large, and you can play as the Carthaginians, the Romans, the Celts, the Egyptians, or the Grecians to see which civilization is ascendant.

Two of the scenarios are set in the Far East. The Genghis Khan scenario really turns convention on its ear, because the goal isn't to conquer and settle so much as it is to conquer and pillage everything to the ground. The Mongols also have a unique build mechanic, since they're essentially a nomadic society. Rather than build cities, the Mongols bring their camps along with them, and where you set up your camp determines what kind of units are recruited that turn. Grassland means cavalry, while desert means infantry and forests can be catapults, assuming you've recovered the technology from a sacked civilization.

Meanwhile, Chinese unification lets you play as any of the major houses vying for power in the fourth century BC. Your goal is to become the emperor of China, and you can do so by force or through diplomacy by getting enough rivals to vote for you in the council, so this scenario is sort of like the regular campaign game in that regard. However, there are interesting new rules. Basically, religion is replaced with bloodlines, and the way to get other factions to be more agreeable to you is to arrange marriages and "spread" your bloodline around. The tech tree has been reworked extensively to allow for the massive armies that were featured during this era, and there are cool and unique little features in this scenario, such as the ability for each faction to build national walls. These are sort of like the Great Wall wonder, except each faction can get one. The new vassalage feature (also available in the campaign game) is useful here, as you can subjugate a foe and make them your devoted ally.

Then there's Omens, perhaps the most interesting and unique of the scenarios. It's set in 18th Century North America, making it the most "modern" of the scenarios in the game, but it's not what you expect. You play as either the French or the British as they attempt to colonize the New World and spread Catholicism or Protestantism, respectively. The goal is to convert at least 75 percent of the map by the end of the game. The kicker is that a divine spirit appears at regular intervals and basically unloads on whichever faction is in last place (including Native American factions). This means that there's constant pressure to stay ahead of your opponents, because if you fall behind at the wrong moment, you're in for it. The divine spirit is unstoppable and will easily crush any military unit in its way using fireballs. The only thing that you can do is try and hold out as long as you can, and it goes away after a while.

Finally, the Barbarians scenario lets you play as those pesky barbarians that plague the campaign game. In fact, this scenario starts out just like a regular Civ IV game, only the artificial intelligence controls all of the civilizations. The game will begin just like a normal game, and at a certain point your barbarians are introduced. You'll start out with enough gold to purchase different barbarian units and unit upgrades, and then you have to destroy as many civs as possible. You can't capture cities; you can only sack them, as well as pillage terrain improvements. This gives you gold, which can be used to purchase more units at your mobile camp, which must be defended. This can be fun, as after having endured barbarians over the course of four Civilization games, it's satisfying to have the shoe on the other foot for a change.

There's a lot of really cool content to go through in Warlords, and you can easily find yourself lost in any one of the scenarios. They'll most likely appeal to Civ veterans looking for a new challenge or a new gameplay experience, though. Even at their easier difficulty levels, the scenarios might be a bit too much for newcomers, who should stick to the regular campaign game for now. We did notice a few bugs, such as great-wonder movies that didn't play, but overall, this expansion is a lot more polished than Civilization IV was at its launch. Of course, it has the benefit of incorporating all the patches that have been made to the core game over the past year, and it also packages the pit-boss multiplayer client that was released separately, as well. Still, if you liked Civ 4, Warlords is a must have expansion.

Minimum System RequirementsSystem:

1.2GHz Intel Pentium 4 or AMD or equivalent

RAM: 256 MB

Video Memory: 64 MB

Hard Drive Space: 1700 MB

Other: Copy of Civilization IV

DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card

64 MB Video Card w/Hardware T&L (GeForce 2/Radeon 7500 or better)

Recommended System Requirements

System: 1.8GHz Intel Pentium 4 or AMD or equivalent

RAM: 512 MB

Video Memory: 128 MB

Hard Drive Space: 1700 MB

Other: Copy of Civilization IV

DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card

128 MD Video Card w/ DirectX 8 support (pixel and vertex shaders)

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Connectivity: Online, Live Aware
Resolution: 480p, 720p, 1080i, Widescreen
Customization: Editing Tools
Offline Modes: Competitive, Cooperative, Team Oriented
Online Modes: Competitive, Cooperative, Team Oriented
Number of Players: 1-4
Number of Online Players: 2 Online

PAM Development delivered a high-quality game of tennis when it originally brought Top Spin 2 to the Xbox 360 a year ago. It wasn't particularly revolutionary, but it offered a flexible character creation system, a playful career mode, first-rate production values, and most importantly, some of the sharpest, most nuanced tennis action to be found anywhere. Aspyr has now brought Top Spin 2 to the PC, and although most of what made the Xbox 360 version great remains applicable here, the passing of time and some sloppiness in the translation make it a less impressive package all around.

First off, you should know that this is a game that simply demands you play it with a gamepad, and unsurprisingly, the Xbox 360 controller proves to be ideal. This necessity is driven by the fact that Top Spin has always offered a slightly more technical game of tennis than Sega's standard-bearing Virtua Tennis franchise, though it's still quite easy to pick up. You've got four basic swings, including the aptly named safe swing, which will never go out of bounds, though the other three shot types require a bit more finesse to keep inside the lines. The slice shot flies low and fast and is great for crossing up your opponent; the topspin shot flies straight and bounces high but moves fast and can slip right past opponents who aren't on their toes; and the lob shot, which should be used sparingly, can be very potent against aggressive opponents apt to ride the net.

While the four basic shot types can be used at any time, eight additional swings require some portion of your momentum meter. Momentum is gained and lost naturally as you score points and are scored on and can be used for either risk shots, which take up big chunks of your momentum, or advanced shots, which eat up a more modest amount of momentum. The advanced shots are high-powered versions of your standard swings. Risk shots are even more powerful, but as the name suggests, they're rather risky, too. Holding down the assigned modifier button before you start a swing will bring up a rising power meter, which you need to stop right at the top. If your timing is off, you'll botch the shot and likely give your opponent the upper hand. If you nail it, the ball moves hard and fast and can be difficult to return.

As potent as they can be, though, risk shots are usually worth taking only during your first serve, when you have a free pass to hit the net. Otherwise, the stakes are too high, and it's prohibitively difficult to keep an eye on the meter and your opponent while also keeping your player in motion in the middle of the match. While the risk shots still don't have an optimal risk-to-reward ratio, they've been refined a bit since the first Top Spin, and they don't have any ill effect on the rest of the gameplay, which is consistently responsive and, thanks to some aggressive and skilled artificial intelligence, regularly quite intense.

Digesting all of the tennis jargon in Top Spin 2 can be a bit much if you don't know the sport, and hopping right into the game's exhibition or tournament modes may give you a bit of a rocky start. It's best, then, that you go into the game's career mode, which does a fine job of casually acclimating you to the nuances of the gameplay as you play. Before you start mastering your smokin'-fast ace serves and humiliating dump shots, though, you'll have to create your own custom tennis pro.

In addition to offering basics like gender, age, and nationality, the character creation system in Top Spin 2 gives you rather impressive control over the facial features and physical build of your player and is almost comparable to the character creation system found in 2K Games' The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion--though, as far as we could tell, there's no option to create a crazy magic-adept lizard-man tennis pro in Top Spin 2. Maybe next year! There's kind of an "uncanny valley" thing going on with the facial features. The skin tones often have flat, mannequinlike sheens to them, but the player models still feature a good amount of realistic detail. Despite the support of higher screen resolutions, it can be tougher to make the tennis pro you want in the PC version, as the work-in-progress model you're shown during the creation process is blurry and indistinct, making some of the finer details hard to make out. It's odd, because once you're actually in the game everything is crisp and clear. The animation has also suffered in the translation. There's still some nice subtlety to the players' movements, but the smoothness of the Xbox 360 version has been replaced by erratic choppiness. This isn't just a minor aesthetic problem, as it can affect the timing of the gameplay as well.

Minimum System Requirements
System: Intel Pentium 4 2.0 GHz or AMD Athlon 64 3200+ or equivalent
RAM: 512 MB
Video Memory: 128 MB
Hard Drive Space: 4500 MB
Other: 3D Hardware Accelerator Card Required - 100% DirectX 9.0c compatible

Recommended System Requirements
System: Intel Pentium 4 2.0 GHz or AMD Athlon 64 3200+ or equivalent
RAM: 1024 MB
Video Memory: 256 MB
Other: Geforce 6600 or Radeon X800

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It may have official FIFA PC licensing; it may have dominated the genre for the better part of a decade; and it may have climbed to such a lofty position of strength that it's driven away virtually every contender. However, Electronic Arts' celebrated FIFA Soccer series may not have the PC footie market cornered after all. Fresh off its 2004 revision, in which the game's producers have once again shown a disturbing recent penchant for sitting idly upon the throne, the FIFA series is also now in the midst of taking a full-on broadside from an exciting newcomer. With World Soccer Winning Eleven 7 International, Konami brings its console soccer hit to the PC for the first time and, in the process, proves that EA's reign is suddenly as shaky as the San Andreas Fault. Whether it's superior overall to the durable EA franchise is open to interpretation, but one thing is clear: Winning Eleven 7 is a superb game that sounds great, looks impressive, and gets the most important element--playability--just right. No true PC soccer fan should buy into the EA FIFA machine this year without first investigating Konami's superb alternative.

As the title suggests ("Winning Eleven" stands for the number of players on a soccer side and "7" stands for the number of annual revisions in the game's history), Winning Eleven 7 is far from a brand-new series. In fact, it has existed in the console realm since 1996. Granted, North America didn't get its first taste of the game until 2003's Winning Eleven 6, when Konami released it for the PlayStation 2 crowd. But this is the first time we've seen it in PC form, and it's not a moment too soon.

When EA's FIFA Soccer rose to prominence in the latter part of the last decade, it did so with a solid combination of presentation and user immersion. Featuring full FIFA licensing--which allowed EA to use all the real-world players, teams, and stadiums--and EA's masterful 3D graphics and animation technology, FIFA's visuals simply blew its competitors away. Its lengthy roster of user options certainly didn't hurt, nor did its gameplay experience, which represented a clever balance of detailed team management and coaching decisions, as well as an ever-growing inventory of player actions and moves. Still, recent editions have not exactly been filled with innovations, especially in terms of the product on the pitch. What had once seemed like amazing gameplay back in the late '90s began to feel arcadelike and fanciful. Could real-life players pull off the moves you'd see on a FIFA Soccer pitch? No. Could one real-life team completely dominate another in every facet of the game and outshoot and out-chance them by the widest of margins, only to ultimately lose because some unseen force wanted it that way? No. Did an EA game really feel like the pass-happy, calculated, and sometimes plodding experience of a real-world FIFA game? Not usually.

Conversely, Winning Eleven 7 plays very realistically indeed. In all truth, very casual PC soccer players may not notice much of a difference between the two approaches. Moreover, those who prefer a fast and more-whimsical game that often keeps things interesting by maintaining an undeserved tight score may even prefer the EA game. Nonetheless, Konami's latest soccer extravaganza will most likely satisfy those serious soccer students who've grown somewhat disenchanted with the EA methodology.

Minimum System Requirements
System: Intel Pentium III 800MHz or equivalent (Athlon/Duron/Celeron) or equivalent
RAM: 128 MB
Hard Drive Space: 640 MB
Other: Nvidia GeForce 3 or ATI Radeon 8500 video card;

DirectX 8.1-compatible sound card

Recommended System Requirements
System: ; Intel Pentium IV 1.4GHz processor or equivalent
RAM: 256 MB
Hard Drive Space: 1200 MB
Other: Nvidia GeForce 4 Ti, ATI Radeon 9600 or higher video card;

DirectX 8.1-compatible sound card

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