“FIFA Soccer 10″
Genre: Sports
Developer: EA Canada
Publisher: EA Sports
Platforms: PlayStations 2 and 3, PlayStation Portable, Xbox 360, Nintendo’s Wii and DS, PC; Apple’s iPhone, Nokia’s N-Gage and other mobile phones
Number of players: 1-20
ESRB rating: “E” for Everyone
Price: $59.99
Grade: A-

Developer EA Canada had just one goal this year with “FIFA Soccer 10,” and if Game Guy’s wife constitutes a market indicator, that goal hit net.

While he was testing “FIFA 10″ (Electronic Arts added the word “Soccer” to the North American title) trying to blunt yet another withering Bayern Munich attack, she was passing by and stopped a moment to watch the action.

“I swear, I thought that was a real game there for a moment,” she said mildly.

And she’s not prone to making game-related comments like that.

Yet you’ll see her point the first time “FIFA 10″ loads, thanks of course to the comprehensive detail afforded in-game characters and venues, which EA tweaks every year anyway, but also in large part to significant improvement in character mechanics for smoothness and fluidity to ball control.

This upgrade, referred to as a new “360-degree dribbling system,” lessens the appearance of characters playing only on an axis — made obvious by robotic gestures and impossible 90-degree turns — and increases flexibility to such tasks as passing and trapping. The greater fluidity seems to open up offenses, enable more pressure on defenses, make characters play in proportion to their sizes, and in general give “FIFA 10″ a noticeable boost in realism over last year’s edition.

Other upgrades include a “Virtual Pro” who can move through all the game modes with ease and wear whatever face players want to paste on them; and a revamped “Manager Mode” that includes a character “growth” system based primarily on in-game performance, an “assistant manager” who works with team lineups, more tools to edit a team’s look, and fictional player names better suited to the regions where the players originated.

You can even carry a Virtual Pro over to online play, team up with eight others and kick around in monthly tournaments EA has on its calendar to spur more interest in networking with “FIFA.”

The fun part for Game Guy though was creating “set pieces” — attacking plays that unfold upon in-bounding the ball — that he could devise, record, adjust and re-record during matches, and then use again in later matches. This new feature does more to heighten awareness of strategy than anything else in “FIFA” and helps make other action in the matches easier to understand and execute — and this is coming from someone who actually played team soccer for a time.

“FIFA” still has a few wrinkles that need ironing. The tools for pasting a player’s own face on a character are a bit too complicated, the menu system overall is cluttered and difficult to navigate quickly. And just as last year, match commentators Andy Gray and Clive Tilsley tend to be either slow or just flat inaccurate when the action unfolds quickly.

On the whole however, “FIFA 10″ is a remarkable step forward for this franchise and a worthwhile addition to anyone’s sports-game collection.