That’s another finesse you’ve gotten me into
Posted by: not-Greg in FIFA08, FIFA09, goal replay, manager mode, tags: FIFA08, FIFA09, goal replay, manager mode
It’s OFG Sunday again. Yes, the special weekly feature formerly known—rather clumsily—as Other Football Game Sunday (OFG Sunday for short) is back. Albeit with an ominous new name: FIFA Sunday. It’ll do exactly what is says on the tin. And, yet again, I find myself wanting to explain just why I’m devoting time and space to another football game—especially to that football game—on what is ostensibly a PES-oriented blog.
Every time I’ve written about FIFA08, I’ve struck a few key notes: embarrassment, apology, and defiance. It’s time for all of that to end. I don’t think PES fans on the whole are out to get everybody who expresses an interest in FIFA, especially not this year’s all-new version of the franchise. The PES community really is maturer than that. After today I won’t be explaining why I talk so much about FIFA08 on a PES blog, or almost apologising for it at times.
Next-gen FIFA08’s swashbuckling rise from the franchise’s stinking depths is an established fact. By now all PES fans have either heard the news and accepted it, or rejected it accordingly. (Indeed, there are many PES fans for whom the new FIFA is a stiff, creaky monstrosity of a football game that’s just as bad, or worse, than the old arcadey FIFA—to which I say: fair enough. At least they’ve tried it.)
But something else is happening out there. Unprecedented numbers of PES fans have found that next-gen FIFA08 (and/or its mid-season companion, UEFA2008) satisfies more of their gaming needs this year than PES does. I wouldn’t go that far, personally, but I wouldn’t stop far short either. Last-gen PES2008 has really saved my PES year. If it wasn’t for that faithful old PSP/PS2 version, I’d have been playing FIFA08 full time at least since the turn of the year.
As it is, inevitably, I’ve resumed playing FIFA08 regularly. And I’ll go on playing FIFA08 and talking about it on the blog, at least every Sunday. There’s a lot of unfinished business between it and me.
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My second Manager Mode career on FIFA08 is with Dagenham and Redbridge. Who? Dag & Red (as they’re known in-game) are a pretty much unknown team from the lower reaches of the English League 2. Why them? Because I already have an ongoing and successful career going with my regular club, Coventry City, where I pretty quickly swept to a Quadruple. I wanted to start another English league career with a weak team, the weakest possible, and I read on the FIFA forums that Dag & Red are the weakest.
I’m in season 2008, my second of the career. I’m still playing on Professional difficulty, the middle of five levels. I’m still not good enough at FIFA08 to play on anything higher and I’m not ready to start trying to move up yet. I tried a few games on World Class in my Coventry City career, and came a cropper. FIFA08 is a hard, hard game.
I easily won promotion from League 2 in my first season. I was able to start getting great players—some of them Premier-class players—in the 2008 January transfer window. This is not FIFA08’s greatest feature. Any club can pretty much buy any player as long as it has enough money. R Drenthe from Real Madrid to Dagenham & Redbridge?! Tom Huddlestone?! Dear oh dear. Yes, I could stop myself bidding for these kinds of players, but I shouldn’t have to. I hope EA are working on a realistic transfer market for FIFA09.
My Dag & Red First XI is more or less the same from game to game. Most of my squad players are still the no-hopers I started with last season, the kind of players who make the PES Default squad look like Brazil 1970. I upgraded my fitness coach as soon as possible, which means low fitness is rarely a factor for my First XI, so they play nearly every game.
I’ll cover my current League 1 campaign in more detail next Sunday. I’m in 3rd place and just about to enter the January 2009 transfer window. For now, I want to show off a goal that I just loved scoring the other day.
FIFA08 has its own version of PES’s R2 finesse shot. It’s done with the R1 button. Perhaps predictably, I rarely use it. FIFA08 has a loading screen—called The Arena— where you can practice one-on-ones with a goalkeeper, and I’m pretty good at finesse-shooting in that environment. But I’ve never reproduced it in an actual match. Until now. The replay shows me playing a long cross-field circle-pass to Huddlestone out wide on the right. I saw the defender about to close me down so I squeezed R1, pressed Square, and tried to tweak the analogue stick just so…
As ever, the crummy mobile phone footage and the angle don’t really do it justice. Not for the first time I was cursing EA for not enabling replay saves to the console hard drive. Instead, you have to upload replays to EA’s own Sportsworld servers. If the uploading service doesn’t work for you then you don’t have any saved replays—and it has never worked for me. I find it particularly frustrating because the FIFA08 replays are saved in exquisite Flash video—they really do look amazing online. One of my biggest wishes for FIFA09 is for this peculiar situation to be rectified.
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I really want this game after playing UEFA so much! I still found Euro a tad too fast as well so looking forward to the even slower football. Niee goal, I am always using R2 shots in PES.
Remember in PES 4 the R1 low chip shot? They took it out for future games and no wonder- it broke the game for me. I used to win every game on 6 stars by about 8-4 (the computer always got it’s auto goals). Every 1 on 1 was instant goal, those were the days..
Quality goal there, really nice technique in the shot. You should play UEFA Euro 2008, provided you have it, as I find it’s a step up from Fifa 08. Everything seems to be a little better, the game is a little faster and you have more control over certain aspects. In terms of keeping it realistic as well the keepers make some absolute howlers at times, ‘Calamity James’ never suited him more than when he came charging out from his goal even when I hadn’t touched triangle to get rounded by some unknown Swiss player, (may have been Vonlanthen, not so unknown really).
Anywho, nice goal!
Not Given - You can pick up FIFA08 pretty cheap right now, and in a month or two I reckon you’ll see it for 10 or 15 quid Preowned. You don’t have to worry about being locked out of online play - it’s not like PES2008, there’s no registration code or anything.
I do indeed remember PES4’s chip shots. I was also great at them, which says a lot about how easy they were. That was an easy PES overall, I thought, for that and other reasons. It was one of the only PESes where I restarted Master League and—get this—used a different formation from my 4-3-3! I used a narrow 4-2-2-2 formation that worked pretty well. I managed to cope with just having two strikers because I had two wide AMFs and two strong DMFs pushing up from deep. In the seasons still to come on PES2008 I might try that one again.
Chattaway8 - funny you should mention Vonlanthen. I have him in FIFA08, in my English League 1 squad for Dagenham & Redbridge… I actually bought him while I was still in the lowest division, League 2. Yes, the transfer market in FIFA08 really is that bad. I think the only way to make it better would be to use House Rules and stop yourself buying players you know would never sign for your team. It’s a shame, as I also played FIFA07 quite a bit last year and the transfer market in that game was hyper-realistic. I could hardly sign anyone for my Coventry team even in the Premiership. I hope FIFA09 sees a return to that kind of realism.