FIFA 13

By autumn 2012 the PlayStation 2 had been out of production in most territories for over a year, and yet here was another EA Sports football disc on the shelf. The catch, well known to anyone who had bought the last three, is that this is not the same game that shipped on Xbox 360 and PS3. The headline systems of that year's release, the first-touch control that made trapping a ball an act of skill and the collision engine that scrambled bodies in the box, never came near this version. What you get instead is the mature PS2 football build, carried forward, re-badged, and given a current squad list.

That sounds like a complaint and it is only half of one. The engine being recycled here had been refined across several years on the hardware, and it plays cleanly: quick to pick up, responsive on the pass, generous with through balls, and far less fussy about body position than its current-gen cousin. Defending is still largely a matter of standing your man up and timing a tackle, which makes matches faster and more open than the real sport. Shooting rewards aiming for the corners rather than reading a power bar. Nobody would call it a simulation in 2012 terms. As an arcade-leaning football game it holds together better than most.

The content side is where the legacy build shows its age most plainly. Manager mode is the serviceable older version rather than the Career overhaul, Ultimate Team is absent, and presentation is a handful of camera angles and commentary lines you will have memorised by the second season. Stadiums are sparse, crowds are flat colour, and player likenesses extend to the ten or twelve men at each club you would actually recognise.

What gives it value now is context. This was one of the final licensed sports releases on the console, aimed squarely at the markets, India and parts of Latin America and Eastern Europe among them, where the PS2 was still the household machine long after the West had moved on. It exists because millions of people were still playing football games on hardware from 2000, and EA knew it.

Taken on those terms it does its job. Two players on a sofa, five-minute halves, a squad list that was briefly accurate. The ball still moves well, and that is more than can be said for a lot of games that were chasing the next generation while this one quietly served the old one.