Rugby '08

But of all the positive changes, the most notable goes to the computer AI, which really pulls its socks up this year. The dark days of fish-like shoals of running drones are long gone, with defensive lines that react intelligently to your set-plays. Even better is the way defences now organise themselves when pushed back to their own try line. Forcing the ball down the last five meters of the field for a try has always been the hardest thing to do in rugby, simply because you're working against a defence packed into a smaller and smaller space, and so it is in Rugby 08. Some of the best moments can be had pulling off Herculean defence efforts on your own try line against phase after phase of concerted attack. It's like Rugby 08 finally cracks that thorny issue of making defence feels just as fun and dynamic to play as attack.

Not all the changes are quite so good, admittedly. The loss of the constant offside decisions is great, but it's been replaced by endless high tackles (in this case, performed by the computer). Being able to rotate mauls and scrums now also seems great in principle, but in all honesty, adds very little to the game tactically. And the decision to change the previously ineffective line-out system of timed button presses to a choice of simple or pro methods, the latter requiring you to mimic your arm swinging movement on the touchline with the analogue stick, is more actually a choice between overly-simple and overly-complicated. Then again, going by previous EA Rugby games, these are the sort of minor issues that will no doubt be fixed by the time the next game comes out.

So, any major problems then? Well, as the official World Cup game, Rugby 08 understandably concentrates on pushing the national side of the game. It still boasts all the licensed club squads and competitions of previous years, but the promising career mode introduced into Rugby 06 has been jettisoned in favour of a simulation of the six-week World Cup tournament (which, by its very nature, lacks any kind of transfer market), along with a brand new Challenge mode where players must replay classic moments from World Cup history.

Frankly, it's a rubbish decision - it's like PES forgetting to put the Master League in. To be fair, the Challenge mode has a fair amount of weight to it, with plenty of matches to plough through and numerous tasks in each ("score three trys with the same person", "run around behind the try line for ten seconds without being tackled before putting the ball down" and so on), but it's not really the same - or as good - as taking your own team from bottom-feeders to European champions, especially when the only reward is World Cup video highlights that could just as easily be found via a ten second search on YouTube.

Instead, Rugby 08 tries to inject a bit of campaign continuity to proceedings with its concept of Form and Morale. Essentially, each player now has a Form and Morale rating, both of which can go up and down depending on whether they're picked to play or not, how they play, what injuries they sustain, disciplinary record in a match and so on. Clearly, the idea is to keep these as high as possible, which requires a canny amount of team rotation on the manager's part, and as a system it works well, once you get your head round it, but it's still not the proper career mode it should be.

But even more bizarre is EA's decision to make the PS2 Rugby08's sole console platform. We understand that the game's essentially been built around the shell of the much older Rugby 06, which was a PS2 (and old Xbox) release, but with a PC version of Rugby 08 also out, surely an Xbox 360 version can't have been beyond the realms of possibility? Perhaps it has something to do with Rugby 08's continuing (and in this day and age) unacceptable lack of online play?