FIFA Street

The FIFA Street series is EA BIG's "street" take on football, or soccer. The term "street" implies that a sport is taken and then turned into an over-the-top version of that sports that's heavy on superhuman tricks and light on realism.

The idea for FIFA Street probably came from street visions in cities such as Rio de Janeiro, where the poor kids have little else to do beside playing football. A football is often constructed with garbage found lying around in the street, but those kids don't mind. There is little space in the streets, especially in huge cities like Rio, so the kids don't have the room to play with passes and long balls. However, some of them start to build exceptional technique with the ball, and they think up tricks that will make an opponent think they are going to take the ball somewhere else than it'll go. They may also get really good at juggling tricks, which is a freestyle term for keeping the ball in the air.

It's from these scenes that the idea behind FIFA Street, and maybe Street games in general may have been born.

Gameplay

The gameplay in the Fifa Street series is quite simple, you have a keeper and either three (in the first two games) or four (in the third game) field players, in a small arena that allows you to freely use the walls to pass and do tricks. The object is, just like in real football to score goals. By doing tricks, you can build up a gamebreaker, which will allow you to perform a superpowered shot. The gamebreaker got refined in Fifa Street 2 and 3 to give it some extra qualities. A good thing about the gameplay is that as usual EA sports has put EA trax in the background that's very catchy.

Graphical Style

The first two Fifa Street games had a pretty realistic style, but EA felt that the gameplay was very over-the-top, so they redesigned the graphics in the third game to fit more with the ridiculous gameplay. The result was a very cartoony style where all the features of individual players were accentuated and exaggerated. The result is that players like Wayne Rooney are humongous, while a tiny player like Robinho is tiny in the game. The pictures below illustrate this fact.