Not unlike other sports events, the UEFA European Football Championship has its own video games licensed from European football's governing body, UEFA. Four games have been released so far, with the first game released in 1996. Originally held by Gremlin Interactive, like many other licenses it's now held by Electronic Arts in their EA Sports label.
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Euro'96, by Gremlin Interactive was the first game to replicate the European Football Championship, and using all the hype behind the Football is coming home campaigns, the Sheffield company modified some parts in their Actua Soccer title, including the 16 teams present in the final stage with accurate rosters and stadiums, as well as Euro 96 mode, Exhibition Match, Practice Penalties, and Practice game.
It was sold for both Windows, DOS, and the Sega Saturn, which had a well-known bug where crowd blocks flickered or disappeared.
After EA purchased the license, it was expected the game would be as good as World Cup 98, a major hit two years before. Euro 2000 uses a modified version of the FIFA 2000 engine,
One of the major flaws credited to the game was the lack of the official groups: while it had all teams and allowed to play in the qualifying stages, there wasn't a predefined setting to choose one of the teams present in the final competition, and skip the qualifying stage (except the organizing teams, Belgium and the Netherlands). The same flaw (plus uneditable players) was pointed in the classic mode, which provided the semi-finals but playing the actual final relied only on luck. Those bugs made the game to be so short-lived, and forced the gamers around to world to wait for FIFA 2001 to came out. It was better than its UEFA counterpart, but, also, it wasn't perfect. Also, the gameplay was almost the same as in FIFA 2000, but no one complained about that, because it was good at that time. The graphics were decent, and were 3D, an important feature for a game at that time. Paul Oakenfold provided the soundtrack, with the songs:
The game was released on PC, PlayStation 2 and Xbox on May 7, 2004. There was also going to be a version for Nintendo GameCube but it was canceled.
Player can choose from 51 national teams and it includes more game modes then UEFA Euro 2000, such as a fantasy mode, where two teams composed by hand-picked players square-off with each other, leagues and a knock-out "home and away" friendly match and a penalty shoot-out mode, as well as Euro 2004 qualifying, and Euro 2004 itself.
The game was released for PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable, Xbox 360, and PC on April 17, 2008. It featured all 53 teams of Europe.
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