Fifamania Serie A Superpatch
The Serie A king will reign for but a short time…

Serie A, in my opinion, is the most exciting, fast-paced, intense and passionate football league in the world as we know it. Upon the release of Sweetpatch, it seems that the first wave of league patches are invading the community, and when I heard that the patchmakers of the Fifamania team released their latest Italian Super Patch, I jumped at the opportunity. While this patch is a great entry contender, its reign will be short upon the arrival of Fifa Online Super Patch.

The first thing you'll notice as you enter the patch, the initialization screen is changed and sports a typical Fifamania look and the credits can be seen here. Seeing as to who made it, I couldn't wait to get my hands on it and start me a heated and typical Serie A team.

One of the first great features of the patch is that all rosters are updated. All the transactions are taken into account, and any errors that came packaged with the original FIFA 2001 .dbi files are fixed, so the rosters are fresh and consistent with what's going on in reality. Entering into the match you see a fair bit of new features in the environment.

An in-game screenshot of the Milan Derby in San Siro. Notice the long sleeves and the AC Milan and Inter Milan flags waving in the Grand stands.		An in-game screen of Fiorentina and Parma in heated Serie A battle.

The patch juices up your resolution settings to top notch, so the frame-rate will suffer a bit as you will notice when you kick off a match. If you don't have a 3d accelerator that can run frame rates smoothly at the top- notch resolution, then you should go in and lower the resolution. No big deal. The Italian adboards also give you more of a Serie A match environment, as do the updated and nicely edited flags waving in the stands. It seems like a good start from here, but things go downhill just a little bit.

The patch as informed by Fifamania is not yet officially MRA compliant because if you install the patch into the MRA Patches directory, when you use the Sweetpatch, the kits aren't installed and therefore not visible. This took me a bit to figure out, but I finally got the patch to run them by transferring them into the kits.big directory. The kits are well done, yet not incredibly lush. To me they look like replicas, just not ones that look real enough to touch. All the Serie A teams are supplied with kits. Again, one other minus is the frame rate that may lag on people who are ignorant of the fact that the resolution is goosed up to the max to give it a smoother look, and they accomplish that, but at the expense of smooth frame-rates on slower computers.

One other bug, sometimes when using Sweetpatch MRA to install the patch, all the menu text will read no data. This is very annoying and is somewhat a major detail that cost it some points. You can't change the difficulty or anything else because of the no data bug. This is due to the fact that the patch was developed for the Italian version of Fifa 2001 and it seems that the Fifamania crew are on the case as we speak.

The updated kits that are supplied to every team is a plus, and the kits are nicely done while not exceptional. Also, the updated flags and adboards for the Serie A give everything a nice plus. All in all, a solid contender which should belong on everyone's hard drive who is a fan of
Serie A. If you're not a fan of the league but want a good playing experience, then give this one a test drive. The no data bug is an EA Sports problem and one the Fifamania team can't fix.

Grade: 89 B+

Ramon Vargas
21/12/2000

Any comments on my review? Praises? Death threats due to disagreement? Send them to MexReaper7@aol.com

Download:
1. Get the latest Sweetpatch MRA
2. Head over to www.fifamania.it and download Fifamania Super Patch 1.0
3. Run the executable and install into your MRA Patches directory.
4. Move the kits into the .../FIFA 2001/MRA Patches/Patch Name/data/player/kits.big directory and delete the gfxpak and .exe file from the /player directory
5. Run Sweetpatch and patch your FIFA 2001 game.