Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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51 of 52 people found the following review helpful:
Pretty poor, a real missed opportunity, 10 Jun 2002
By A Customer
A definite missed opportunity. The selection of material is far from comprehensive; most of the highlights material for the World Cups featured across the 4 discs only starts at the quarter-final stage, meaning that great goals such as (for instance) Archie Gemmill's goal for Scotland against Holland in 1978 or Saïd al-Owairan's goal against Belgium in 1994 are omitted from the main section of the action. The "commentary" running over the top of this action takes the form of a bored-sounding voice-over actor reading from a script and is confusing at best, with the script changing tense throughout (tangled up verbiage along the lines of "Could Germany go on to win the World Cup this year?... The West Germans won the cup with this 1-0 victory over Argentina... could Brehme convert the penalty?"). This drains the action of a lot of atmosphere, but at the end of the day the on-screen football is still pretty damn spectacular. Accessing exactly what you want isn't at all easy - the animated menu screens are both poorly-coded and badly designed, and very difficult to navigate. The interface is extremely confusing, offering a baffling array of options with no guide anywhere in the package telling you what might happen from selecting them (choosing "chapter list" takes you to a screen offering three or four different World Cups and an option marked "classic choices", which takes you to another screen offering three or four World Cups and some seemingly unrelated options stating "first round, final round, third place, final" which seems to translate to "random point in the quarter finals of a randomly-chosen World Cup with no explanation whatsoever")... in a week and a half of "exploring" the DVD I've yet to find half of the features listed on the box, and what's actually on the discs seems sometimes to bear no relation at all to those listed features. As an example, the blurb proudly states "The top ten goals from each year are ranked in order and judged to be the best of that World Cup", but choosing "Best Goals" for any given World Cup usually gives you a clip of 2 or 3 highly questionably-chosen goals with no commentary or explanation whatsoever (for USA '94, for instance, we get Wynalda's freekick versus Switzerland and Maradona's mad stare into the camera vs Greece - and then we're taken back to the main menu). As stated, there's nothing to be taken away from the actual action on-screen, but this is a very, very shoddy piece of work, and when its production values are compared to something like "History of Football: The Beautiful Game", it comes off very much second best. DVD should allow FIFA the opportunity to license a "complete" World Cup compendium featuring highlights of all the matches, and I'm sure this could be achieved across 4 discs if most of the animated title screen content was cut out (an animated screen featuring irritating bit of feedback-laden guitar noise, the legend "A JMA Media Production" and the names of the teams you're about to watch pops up between *every single* match highlights clip, meaning that some games' amount of coverage is shorter than the animated title page which preceded them - very annoying!) The World Cup is the perfect subject for a comprehensive and entertaining DVD box set put together by people with more love for the game than love for raking in the dollars. This quite spectacularly badly-made quick cash-in isn't it.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Starts well but....., 1 Jun 2003
This DVD starts really well showing much coverage of the first world cups that I had never seen. Considering how little coverage much be around from the 1930's they have done really well. Unfortunatly, before the end of the second DVD the coverage becomes restricted. It appears that they had to keep the set down to 4 DVD's as it was not possible to cover as much that was needed to do the world cup justice in this number of DVD's. In the earlier world cups there were less games so nearly all of these are used. When you get to the more recent world cups the group games are almost ignored.Could have been amazing but unfortunately falls short of the mark. Would still recommend buying it dispite my complaints.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
WOW a Great world cup DVD, 26 Aug 2004
By A Customer
This is a fabulous DVD the history of the world cup edited just right. You get to see all the great names like Pele, Maradona and Beckenbauer at there very best. I would reccomend this to anyone even if it is 8 hours long. Brilliant.
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