OFG Sunday#1
Posted by: Greg Downs in FIFA08, FM2008, Sensible Soccer, scripting, tags: FIFA08, Football Manager, LMA Manager, scripting, Sensible SoccerFrom today, every Sunday on PES Chronicles will be Other Football Game Sunday, or OFG Sunday for short. I wish I’d thought up a snappier name for it, but I wish for lots of things that don’t come true.
Over the past few months I have interrupted my PES posts with lots of side-quests involving the likes of next-gen FIFA08. These posts about other games have cropped up more or less randomly. Sometimes they’ve persisted for several days in a row. And then I’ve switched back to PES2008 for a while. And then I’ve gone off and… I dunno, played Subbuteo or something for a couple of posts after that…
Now that I’m back playing PES2008 with some regularity, the question arises of where those other football games fit in around here.
I won’t be abandoning those other football games. Some of them are just too good to abandon. Others are middling-good, and worthy of repeated revisits from time to time.
Next-gen FIFA08 will see some action on this blog on a regular basis. I’ll be talking about EA’s flawed masterpiece with shocking regularity for those PES fans of a nervous disposition who (like me) just cannot quite accept that there’s a FIFA game with actual merit.
In addition to FIFA08, OFG Sundays in the future will also feature Sensible Soccer, LMA Manager, Football Manager 2008, and any other football-related game that might attract my interest. I picked up a pre-owned copy of FM2008 last week but haven’t yet had time to test it out on my notoriously unreliable PC. Ideally I’d really like a new PC to play it on, but my purchase of an Xbox360 has put back that particular plan by a few months.
If Football Manager Live turns out to be any good, it’ll be mentioned here too. We’re only a few months away from its launch. If it’s half as good as it looks like it could be, it’ll be a great game. I’m quite unreasonably excited about FM Live, but I’m not much of an online gamer. So I’ll have to see.
Occasionally, if there’s a lot to discuss, I’ll expand OFG Sunday to include Saturday as well (making it an OFG Weekend) - but this would be a rarity. It would definitely not spread out to the rest of the week. Monday-Friday is guaranteed PES chitchat. Most Saturdays too. Only Sundays will be devoted permanently to Other Football Games.
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I’ll start the ball rolling with the latest on my next-gen FIFA08 progress.
After winning the Quadruple (League, Cup, League Cup, European Cup) with my Coventry City megastars on Professional difficulty, I briefly made the move up to the very top difficulty - Legendary.
I found it weirdly easy at first. I thumped Atletico Madrid 5-0 in the Supercup match. However, this honeymoon phase did not last long. Pretty soon I discovered the massive drawback to playing on Legendary: when the CPU decides it wants to keep the ball, it keeps the ball and it seems there’s little you can do about it. Little I could do about it, anyway. After several torrid games where I was frustrated to within an inch of my football gaming life, I acknowledged temporary defeat. I’ve put the difficulty down a notch to World Class. I’m not proud.
Even World Class is still super-hard. Next-gen FIFA08 is a hard, hard game. I don’t know if that’s been mentioned before…
In my current season - my seventh in Manager Mode - I was eliminated from the League Cup in the second round by Birmingham City. I crashed out of the European Cup in the group stages - bottom of the group (a miserable effort).
Now, in February 2014, I’m 5th in the League. I have a team of galacticos worth over £150m. Cristiano Ronaldo is one of my attacking midfielders, and he’s not even my best player.
I’m 9 points behind the leaders, Chelsea. All the signs are that I’ve got too much ground to make up, but you never know. I’ll keep plugging away. FIFA08 has a peculiar (and quite disappointing) feature that allows you to overtake teams a long way ahead of you in the leagues. The other team(s) lose and draw just enough to allow you to catch up, usually leading to a decisive last few games. I really don’t like it, although I have benefited from it in FIFA08 more than once.
I’ll talk in-depth about FIFA08’s version of scripting in the future. The good news is that there is little or none of the PES-style scripting that drives me mad from time to time. Loose balls do not always fall to CPU players in next-gen FIFA08. You can take a corner and - amazingly, for a PES player - any clearance will fall to one of your players outside the box as often as it will fall to an opponent.
But FIFA08 has other knavish tricks up its sleeve - tricks which are just as annoying and, in my opinion, totally out of place in a 21st Century football game.
For example, a CPU player in possession of the ball on the wings near your corner flag will enjoy a preposterous skill/strength bonus. Their cross is coming into your box, and there’s almost nothing you can do to stop it. I’ve got better at bringing across covering defenders to support the full-back, but mostly the CPU will squirm its way into space regardless of counter-measures.
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Here’s my next-gen FIFA08 goal of the week.
Babel applies the finish. Yes, a fairly straightforward goal in PES terms, but in next-gen FIFA08 terms it’s a tough one to pull off. For me it is, anyway. In 400+ games I’ve only scored a relative handful like this. Most of those shots - from that angle, with the players and the ball moving at those speeds - end up rocketing into the stands, or go straight at the keeper.
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On the side, I’ve started a new FIFA08 manager mode career with Dagenham & Redbridge in the Coca Cola League 2.
I picked Dag & Red (as they’re known in-game) because I read on the official EA forum that they’re the hardest team to take from the bottom to the very top.
It certainly is hard. The first few games with the official squad were as tough in their own way as starting out in a PES Master League with the Default players.
But the FIFA08 transfer market offers plentiful opportunities to get great players very quickly. Would a club like Dagenham & Redbridge really be able to sign Darren Huckerby and Bianchi on free transfers? I think not. Players like that shouldn’t even listen to offers, never mind accept them without a murmur. It’s something that has got to change for FIFA09 if EA wants to build on its head-start in the next generation.
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Next Sunday I’ll talk about my latest adventures in Sensible Soccer. I’ll also take a look at next-gen FIFA08’s internet forums… they’re not pretty. PESfan has got nothing to worry about.
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