FIFA: Road to World Cup 98

The ball slides across the pitch in that peculiar way only SNES graphics can pull off—not quite round, more like a bumpy ellipse with attitude. FIFA: Road to World Cup 98 is EA Vancouver's stab at capturing the '98 tournament fever, and it lands somewhere between ambitious and janky, which is exactly where most sports games from 1997 lived.

You're building a squad, qualifying through matches, aiming for glory in France. The mode lets you pick a national team and slog through qualifiers if you want the full road, or jump straight to the tournament itself. It's a straightforward premise—pick your eleven, set formation, play the match. EA's early FIFA games on SNES had this scrappy, direct approach that newer versions buried under seventeen menu layers.

The actual play feels stiff by today's standards, maybe stiff by 1997 standards too. Your players respond like they're thinking about whether they want to run that direction. Passing is functional; shooting is a lottery. Defending is a mess of pressing buttons and hoping the AI cooperates. The camera sits high and isometric, which gives you the full pitch but strips away any sense of precision. You're largely reacting to what the game decides to show you, not controlling a crisp play. That said, there's something oddly compelling about how direct it all is—no skill moves, no complex tactics, just eleven guys doing their best.

What sticks is the roster and the 1998 moment itself. Seeing those squad lists, the strips, the national pride in low-res polygons—it taps into something specific. This was the game you played before the tournament started, pumping yourself up for Zidane's headbutt and Ronaldo's mystery haircut. It's not great; it's period-authentic and occasionally fun, which for a sports sim two decades old is honest work.

If you're after a walk through late-nineties football nostalgia or curious how FIFA played before it became a casino with a pitch, the SNES version holds up as a curiosity. It's rough, but it's got character—the kind of scrappy charm modern franchises traded for polish and microtransactions. Worth an hour in a browser emulator, especially if you remember when a football game was just a game.