Soccer is, without question, the number one sport in the world. Konami, without question, is the number one soccer game developer in the world, with titles like Winning Eleven and International Superstar Soccer. However, while the rest of the world gets grade-A soccer games to go with their grade-A football clubs, we here in the good ol’ USA get shafted with an average game, which doesn’t help out soccer’s cause here in the States at all. Still, Extratime is a decent effort.

The game sports a full compliment of MLS players and teams for the 2002 season, including all-star teams and generic international and club teams. That only sums up to about 50 teams in total, which, when put next to EA’s FIFA, is a laughable number. Also included with Extratime are a Season mode, Scenario mode, Training mode, and the five-year MLS mode, which makes up the bulk of the game.

In the MLS mode, you take your favorite MLS team and jump into a theoretical five-year period of its time, where you play in five full seasons (and playoffs, if you can make it), transfer players, replace retiring players with ones from the MLS draft, etc. It’s actually quite enjoyable, even for the people who usually don’t dig that kind of stuff, because it’s mostly out of the way and optional. You can create your own teams and players too, which is always fun.

Regardless of the mode you choose, you’re going to have to hit the field eventually. Control is a bit frustrating at first, but once you nail it, it makes good sense. A passes the ball, B shoots, Y thru-passes, and X crosses. Using the L button in conjunction with these functions gives you new options, like one-two passes and lob shots. On defense, A and B being weak and strong tackles, X, a sliding tackle, and holding Y makes your GK charge the ball. L switches players on the field. It all works together well, once you get used to the shooting and crossing power bars.

There are a few quirks with the control scheme, though. First, the Z button is totally ignored. You can’t even assign it to a function in the options menu. Then, the R button, your Sprint button, never seems to tire out your player, even if you kept it held down the entire game. Then there’s the L button. Part of the gameplay has you set a certain strategic plan to one of the four face buttons. (For example, you could flood the left side of the field, or go for a quick counterattack.) You can activate or deactivate the strategy by clicking L and then pressing the button you assigned that plan to. If you don’t click it, you’ll do something else with the ball (as mentioned above). The instructions make no mention of this, so until you figure it out, you will get frustrated with it a bit.

Of course, you can set these manually before a game. As most good soccer games have, you can fully customize your team’s lineup and strategy before (and sometimes during) a game. You’ll have virtually every single formation in the book at your disposal from the 3-2-4 to the 6-3-1. You can put players anywhere on the field you want, and assign them individually a defensive posture (zone, man-to-man, aggressive, passive). You can even assign who you want to do your free kicks and throw-ins. Lots of customization in here, there’s no doubt about that.

The game becomes a bit of a weakling on the actual field, however, which is the big disappointment in this game. It seems that once you become aware of the control scheme, you can take advantage of some gaping holes in the AI defense. The most common way to score a goal is to fire a ball past the defense from about midfield, run up a forward through the middle, and hope you can win the one-on-one with the keeper. (To the game’s credit, the goalie AI is very good, even on the easier difficulty settings.) Scores of 4+ are not very realistic in the soccer world, but they are in this game. Even with a few oversights in the defense, if you keep trying to push everyone forward, you will be scored upon more than you’d like to, so it seems that Konami thinks the best defense is a good offense.

As for the basics, the game scores average marks with graphics. Although player models aren’t too terribly detailed, you’d know which player you are looking at on the field, because every player looks different. Stadiums and the like have that tell-tale Konami look to them, so there’s really nothing bad to say about them. Weather effects and time-of-day changes are appropriate, but again, average.

The sound is a big letdown. The play-by-play is done in two languages (English and Spanish), which is a nice touch, but the problem with this is that it’s way too repetitive. It sounds good for the first five minutes, but after that, forget it. Once you turn off the announcer, you’re left with bland crowd effects and simple on-field sound effects. So Konami gives us this, instead of ISS? The N64 game was better in this department. Pathetic.

Although Extratime 2002 has its strong points, the rest of the game just can’t hold them up. It is a decent soccer title, though, albeit a below average one, so unless the number of teams available to you is of issue, or you just don’t like EA at all, you can get some enjoyment out of Konami’s game, once you get accustomed to its shortcomings.