I Heart Huckerby Comments Off
It’s Sunday on PES Chronicles, which means it’s time for a look at some other football games.
This week, it’s just one other football game: next-gen FIFA08. (I have played a bit more of my PSP PES6 Master League career with Barcelona, but nothing’s happened that’s worth reporting. I’m just marking time until the arrival of PES2008 on the PSP—sometime in March, apparently.)
In my next-gen FIFA08 Manager Mode career with Dagenham & Redbridge in Coca Cola League 2, I’m currently in February 2008—almost parallel with realtime—and I’m second in the table.
I was able to bring in a ridiculous array of talent in the January transfer window. EA might have the football game licenses sewn up, but those areas where next-gen FIFA08 was rushed are all too plain: I was allowed to sign Drenthe from Real Madrid for £300,000; I was able to sign Baiano on a free; I already had Huckerby and Bianchi. Sigh.
None of those players should even have listened to offers, never mind enthusiastically accepted them. But it gets worse. Baiano held a press conference where he affirmed his lifelong support of Dagenham & Redbridge…
This kind of thing is just utterly dreadful and I hate it more than I have words to say. It was bad enough when I signed Michael Owen for my Coventry City team in my other manager career, and he held the same press conference, saying the same thing: that he, Michael Owen, was delighted to sign for Coventry City, the team he had supported ever since he was a boy.
For the love of God, no. No, no, no, no, no. You can’t help but cringe and feel embarrassed for everyone connected with the game, not least the poor old end user, namely me, a grown man, who has to put up with it.
Never mind. It is only a game. And I’m on record as being very impressed with the gameplay of next-gen FIFA08, in common with a great many other PES players this year. The debate continues to rage over on PESfan and elsewhere. And yes, people who have never played next-gen FIFA08 continue to embarrass themselves with generic remarks about FIFA08 on the PS2, a wholly different game from the PS3 version.
The current star of my Dagenham & Redbridge manager mode team is undoubtedly Huckerby. I play him in the middle up front (in a 4-3-3, naturally). Here’s a sample of his skillz:
If all else fails, there’s always the old aerial through-ball over the top of the defence for your striker to run onto. In the above clip, I score a lovely first-time volley with Huckerby, one that had to be angled low and away from the keeper. Like many other FIFA08 goals I have posted on this blog, this goal is the first (and so far the only) goal of its kind that I have scored in almost 500 games now.
This next one is more of a novelty: Huckerby again (I heart him). This time he’s free on the edge of the box—a rare liberty in FIFA08—and lets loose a shot that rebounds from the crossbar. And then the keeper helpfully hooks it back into the net for me. Thanks, keeper.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXD-I3J-EOM&rel=1]
One of the criticisms some people have about next-gen FIFA08 is that it’s too difficult to score a wide range of goals, and too easy just to stick with one or two methods of creating chances.
There’s some truth to this. Like most other players of next-gen FIFA08, I’ll often try to get down either wing and send in a cross—a double-tap cross is my favourite—that one of my attackers is frequently in prime position to volley spectacularly into the net. Corners can also be delivered into the box using the same double-tap method, often for an easy goal. (This double-tap corner is known as ‘the cheat corner’ by many posters on EA’s official FIFA08 forums. Of course it’s not a cheat, but a gameplay exploit.)
But no scoring method in FIFA08 can be relied upon. I can’t rely on them, anyway. Sooner or later I’m not going to be able to get down the wing, or the crosses aren’t going to find my strikers, and I’ll need to try other methods of scoring.
That’s when I’ll really discover (or rediscover) the true joy of next-gen FIFA08’s gameplay. Passing it around, passing it back, passing it from side to side, for ages, looking for an opening in the defence, trying to pull defenders away from their positions, trying one-twos, trying aerial through-balls, trying long shots, starting again….
It can be slow and it can be frustrating. I like it, and so do many other former FIFA-phobes, but plenty don’t like it. You can’t pass-pass-shoot-goal! your way to success as in most previous FIFAs (and, dare I say it, as in next-gen PES2008). The debate will run and run all the way until September/October. And then it’ll most likely start again.