Going back to my roots
I have kind of settled back into Manager Mode now, and I have started kind of enjoying it again… As far as it goes. I’ve whined about mentioned my persistent misgivings over Manager Mode several times, before and after FIFA09’s release. This isn’t something that’s just blown up recently.
There’s an abiding emptiness about Manager Mode. The emptiness is just not going away. I just cannot get past this. I cannot—I will not—force myself to play Manager Mode when I don’t really want to. Over this past week, I’ve come to realise something. For me the ‘battle of the football games’ (if there be such a thing) isn’t FIFA09 vs PES2009 as such. It’s Manager Mode vs Master League. And there’s only one winner of that contest.
And so I’ve made a decision. I’m going back to play Master League—to play PES2009—full time. I’ll play FIFA09 and Manager Mode for maybe one or two days per week. (Or, if that proves too tormenting for my delicate nerves, I might even play Be A Pro, or even online.) But my main pursuit will be Master League. Which means my main game will be PES2009.
Yes, that’s exactly how it was this time last year. Things certainly didn’t turn out too well for me and PES2008. If and when I eventually ‘crack’ PES2009 and it falls apart in my hands just as PES2008 did, then I’ll no doubt come crawling back to Manager Mode… but at the moment that just isn’t happening.
I was reluctant to make this decision. I’ve actually found myself fretting over it. I hailed FIFA09 as the greatest football game ever made. I’d still mostly stand by that, actually. But alas, Manager Mode is arguably the worst career mode in a modern sports game—certainly in any current EA Sports game.
Master League redeems PES2009 for me, and makes it the essential game right now. I can find things to like about playing Manager Mode, but Master League is the game I really want to play at the moment. I can play 5 matches in Manager Mode, and feel slightly restless and fidgety, and don’t want to play any more. I can play 5 matches in Master League, however, and I feel totally absorbed, and want to play another 5 matches, or another 10 matches. So I’m going to go ahead and play it. I only get a limited time every day to play games and I can’t waste any of it. Playing Manager Mode feels like a waste of time.
Welcome home!
Like you said though, if it all goes PES2008 on you then you’ve got a better back up than last year. It’s actually a winning situation – 2 good games to decide from rather than being forced into one.
Have you gone through the pre-season transfers then?
Liam – I’ll be picking up tomorrow from where I left off last Saturday, when I’d just got promotion to D1. So tomorrow’s post will be all about pre-season.
I might actually give FIFA09’s Be A Pro a good go now, or even online. I just can’t take any more Manager Mode for now.
i see what you mean man,MM is pretty soulless.
i think i must be going through fifa fatigue,maybe even console football fatigue.
im getting really fed up with seeing the same passages of play over and over again.
i dont know why, but i just cant seem to find my sweetspot on the cameras,half the time when it comes to tussling over the ball,i cant tell if i got the damn thing or not!!
also another gripe is not being able to win a match ,and then getting asked one of them random questions with the 3 answers straight after,which makes me think whether i actually could ever win that match or not.
im, pissed off with shit first touch,regarding my strikers and not being able to hold the ball up.im not happy with defenders watching the opposition glide past them.
im pissed off with the 1 second delay in everything i do.cant even blame lag on this on,cos im not online.
it seems to me that everynight i play fifa and every night i feel dissapointed, with how ive played.
playing the MM with bristol rovers, seems just the same as playing with bournemouth.when things go wrong on the pitch i never know if i made the mistake,my controller let me down,my players are just plain rubbish,or the game decided to stitch me.
yet around 6 o’clock i sit there after watching some sort of football on tele,thin king hey i could try that,or try this…
ugh!
so leave it you may say…??
i cant, i want to be good at it.
as for tactics…
what a load of rubbish all these sliders make no difference i put them on 1, i put them on a 100, the defense always push all the way up the field, turning the game into a midfield slog.
annoying.
i love football games .always have, always will,but not being able to play the game efficently is doing my nut.
i would get pro but that feels prehistoric,and ML is just about getting young players on the cheap and building them up.
i do miss the tactics side though,theres no denying that.at least it does as its told.
fight night round 4 out soon thank god,doubt i’ll play fifa when that arrives.
rant over, i feel better now…well ,till tonight anyway.
damn you ea! you swines!
Fair enough, we all know the appeal of ML, especially in previous versions.
For me I came to the opposite conclusion, the strength of FIFA’s game play over rules the fact that at times it doesn’t feel to have much involment besides playing lots of matches. I don’t get the frustrating that comes with playing PES with the many faults so I’m happy to stick by FIFA.
The pace of the game and the goal keeping is woeful and I don’t think I can get over that hurdle..
yehmate - I think the problem with Manager Mode is that it isn’t suited for intense daily play. (It’s not suited for me, anyway.)
As for FIFA09 in general, a lot of what you say could be related to individual gameplay style. E.g. if you’re still unconsciously trying to apply PES rules to FIFA, you’re probably doing a lot of ‘clamping’ (squeezing R1+Square+X without the ball) and then trying to play direct when you retrieve it. I still do this!
But aside from the individual gameplay styles, it’s undeniable that there is a downside to FIFA09, there is substance to FIFA fatigue, and while it’s a great game it’s not the Messiah of football gaming on the next-gen consoles. We’re still waiting for that one.
Paww - yes, as I said in the post, it is all about Master League for me at the moment. Who knows what I’ll be thinking and playing in a month, two months, six months from now? The same applies to all of us. We all seek absolutes in gaming—”This is the best game ever and I will play it and no other, forever!”—but we’re never going to get them.
just one question, how can you be playing 5 matches with fifa and feel the way you feel and still claim it has the superior gameplay? forget about PES, fifa once you get the grip to it, and once you get used to its great achivements (it has a lot of them), the gameplay is repetitive, you know there´s no danger once you start defending well, and when they score you just asume the cpu decided it to happen and there was not much you could do against that. Depend on if you are playing assisted or manual you would have a different feeling of achivement once you get to score but after a while you find yourself building your attack in two or three different ways(taking the ball from the defence or midfielders, chipping the ball above the defence or looking for one-one situation and also trying to get a decent center one side of penalty area, not much more) so five game would make you feel like a long and repetitive exercise and every team seems pretty much the same. And that´s gameplay too, i don´t buy it´s just the game mode what it´s behind the preference for PES at this moment. If you could play 5 consecutive games in fifa where every one of the felt different, where you could get a 0-0 draw and then a 4-3 win away and 2-1 and get the feel that anything could happen the next game, then you wouldn´t care about signing new players, stamina, and anything, or at least would not make you to go back to “a much inferior” gameplay as PES offers.
Im not deffending PES here, its just that FIFA disapoints in too many factors after the first amazing impressions and fails as a long term football game. But as a short season against friends playing manual is actually one of the best, if not the best ever. I just hope they coud work harder in the one player mode to make it not so previsible next year and i think that just a rebuild of the Manager Mode wouldn´t fix that as the problem is still on the pitch.
not thinking in going back to PES for now, that´s the trick, FIFA took me away from the arcadey PES, and now he is throwing me out of the window with no football game i can grip to. Thinking in buying Little Big Planet here.
by the way, congratulation for this awesome blog. The new wenb fifa blog its just not for me.
sorry, i was writting that before a read all those commentaries much better than mine and hitting in the right point, once more i should have listen more and speak out loud less.
fjmarlop - it’s always okay to write as much as you like!
Manager Mode, for me, is not conducive to daily play, whereas Master League is. But FIFA09 has superior gameplay to PES. The problem for me is that the gameplay doesn’t mean anything to me in Manager Mode.
I find myself (at the moment) reluctantly agreeing with the widely-held view that FIFA09 might have the superior technical accomplishment, but scruffy old PES (in particular Master League) is the better game to play.
I know, it’s an awful cliche of the past 12 months, and one I’ve scoffed at in the past. But I have to be truthful about what’s going through my head in the here-and-now, and this is.
I think I need to play other modes on FIFA09—particularly Be A Pro. And online. I might fancy a few games online over the coming weekend.
I think the past month for me and the two football games has been a graphic illustration of the phrase “No man can serve two masters”…
good luck with online game, and don´t forget to switch back to fully assisted. For me online was i painfull experience as there´s no interest in any other think that raving an straight forward play and showing off annoing and useless combos. i tried playing manual, then switch to assisted and then switched the console off.
of course fifa has a superior gameplay than pes, that´s why i don´t feel like coming back to pes and will play fifa now and then, but in the end all long term players that look for a long term game mode were starting to feel that the fifa gameplay, let aside the game mode, is not engaging enough and 2009 could be a failure for football games after all the hype and expectations.
fjmarlop1 i found your comments intresting and a good read, and pretty much hit the nail on the head.
yeahmate, we have been through the same lately i´m afraid. I´ll have my next cold pint on your honor and the hope for a engaging football game waiting for us somewhere in the future. cheers my friend.
Agree wholeheartedly that FIFA’s MM is basically 38 matches in a row, theres no deep involvement, the board satisfaction, fan appreciation and other bits try to make you feel deeply involved but doesnt really do the job.
However, IMO its still a MUCH better game to play than PES, PES just infuriates the hell out of me in so many ways!! from the scripting of games through to High Stat CF’s flapping at the ball; and skying one into row z from the 6yd box with an empty net,through to the players inability to move in any more than 8 directions.
I find myself playing 5 games on PES and turning off the console, agitated, angry and hard done by – I dont play games for that feeling, if I wanted all those emotions id stay at work all night!!
So personally will carry on with FIFA’s hollow modes but superior gameplay rather than trudge through what feels like a dated un-finished game.
I’d be interested to read how Be a Pro rates – I’ve not played the mode on Fifa so don’t know much about it. Become a Legend on Pro is basically the Master League (Camacho is now at Liverpool on mine) but where you’re not manager and obviously only control the one player.
Well, well, well, here I am. Back at the addiction (that includes playing PES and reading not-Greg’s blog on a daily basis).
I must say that, even though I’m enjoying PES2009 on the PS2, I have to admit that it’s a much easier game than PES2008 for me. I started a Master League (with the original donkeys) on Top Player, just like I did last year, but this time I got promoted on my second season.
I didn’t even end the first season bottom of the table.
Maybe I’m playing much better now, I don’t know. Or maybe it was the fact that I got lucky and managed to sign the likes of Yamada, Khumalo, Komol, Onuoha, Bosigngwa and Berger in the middle of my first season.
But in my first season on first division I’m firmly at the top of the table against the likes of Man U, Chelsea, Barcelona, R. Madrid, Inter, Milan, all the best teams in the game.
Anyway, it may sound like I’m bragging, but I’m not. Though I’m still enjoying the game, and it seems the scripting (my biggest qualms with the whole franchise) has been toned down a bit, I wonder what it will be like when my players are at the top of their development.
fjmarlop1 – I’m thinking more and more that I’ve actually done FIFA09 a disservice by insisting on trying to play Manager Mode and nothing else when my heart isn’t in Manager Mode! Be A Pro, online, all those tournaments and leagues…. I think a new beginning is called for.
Paul – As I say above, I think I’ve been misusing FIFA09 trying to play its career mode. I’m actually looking forward to trying out the other sides of the game. Hopefully FIFA2010 can bring a proper career mode.
And there really is more to PES2009 than the (admittedly horrific) impression gathered from playing it and comparing it directly with FIFA09’s gameplay. I actually find the scripting tolerable this year. (Although I reserve the right to start moaning about it on any post at a moment’s notice.)
Liam – BaL will have to wait until I’m fully exhausted with ML, whenever that is—in a week, in a month, in a few months, who knows. BaP, on the other hand, I wll probably start this weekend, and devote at least a day a week to it.
Adriano – greetings once more! Good to hear from you again. As you might have seen, I’ve picked up Kim Cyun Hi again for my PES2009 team. Did you see his early screamer of a goal? It’s still my best goal in PES2009 so far. However… I still find him curiously ordinary for me, despite his undoubted skills. But he’s still only 19 or so.
I hope I’m right in saying that there should be no need for me to get the PS2 version this year (or the PSP version). The PS3 version and the PS2/PSP versions are very different, though, so hopefully I won’t find the same ease in the game after a while that you’ve found. If I am going to start finding it too easy, I think the next few weeks will be critical.
And I think the scripting has been toned down a bit too. However, that’s how it is with a new PES—you only notice it being really bad after several weeks and hundreds of games.
I haven’t seen Kim yet, though I got BRADLEY, Shaw, Park Jiun Hi, Nascimento, Nijkamp, Doesburg and Koeman.
Unlike you, I noticed a lot more scripting early on when my team was much weaker.
I played BAL mode for a while, and loved it. I missed ML, though, so I started a super master league. I’ll probably go back to my BAL career when I get a bit tired of this current master league.
Adriano – I got Park Jyun Hi a few negotiations ago but have found him disappointing so far. What I haven’t done yet this year is post a squad list/formation diagram in the sidebar. I’ll rectify that after the weekend now.
I hear nothing but good things about this BaL mode (and BaP on FIFA09). No doubt one day I’ll run out of steam on ML (it does always happen eventually) and feel like devoting some quality time to BaL.
There is absolutely no doubting that MM is well and truly inferior if you compare it to the ML. Thankfully for me I’ve gone away from my usual way of playing nothing but football games (read PES up until last year) all year with just the odd move into another game and this year football games are lower on my list and only get play 1-2 times a week, therefore meaning I am able to enjoy the gameplay every time I get on it and overlook the shortcomings.
I also have a very enjoyable BAP career going which I drop in on occasionally, although again I don’t think I could play it day in-day out because it does still have quite a few problems, most notably it being a rare occurance when your team actually scores a goal that you aare not involved in (either scoring yourself, providing an assist or being a key part of the build up)
I think I’m enjoying FIFA still because I haven’t played it exclusively. Plenty of game time on Fallout 3 and now FM2009 seeme using FIFA fairly limitedly.
I have finally had a go at FM2009 and I must say I really am enjoying it as much as any other. As I’ve said the 3D engine really doesn’t bother me, sure it’s the major new feature but there is plenty of other things they have added. There hasn’t been a major new feature like this since the 2D engine was introduced but I’ve still played and enjoyed it every year.
As I’ve tried to point out, but many people have been to stupid to understand on the SI Games forums the 3D engine does not affect the game in anyway, you are not more likely to win/lose using it and you don’t need different tactics because you are using the 3D. The 3D is just a visual representation of the calculations being done behind the scenes so to speak, the same things that has been going on for years to decide the outcome of the match. Many people seem to think that the 2D/3D engines are totally seperate
stinger - Many times over the past 14 months I’ve wondered why I had to choose this gaming era of all gaming eras to start my long-imagined PES blog. My timing was impeccable—just when PES was starting a sharp decline…
PES2008 was dire—that was hard to take. PES2009 seems to be okay right now, but there are so many other games calling for my attention. FIFA09, FM2008, Fallout3, Mirror’s Edge, Mass Effect, and half a dozen others on 360, PSP and DS.
I’ll be using my gaming time to play different games over the next few months, otherwise I’ll bnever play them. I do find though that it’s so easy to just play PES (or FIFA). It always seems as if I’m making a greater time commitment with another type of game.
Re. FM2009, the only reason I’d ever get it above FM2008 right now (which is only now receiving its first play-time) woudl be the luxury of watching the games in 3D, which my PC won’t handle properly. I do love the 2D engine and get involved (amazing really that it can get you so involved), but I think it was high time FM grew up and moved to a 3D engine. If done right it’d bring so much more understanding of how the tactics are working. Roll on the spring.
Your dead right. I wouldn’t reccommend you going out and grabbing FM09, especially having not really gotten much play out of FM2008 over the past year. No point forking out for the new game when there is so much to be gained from the previous version still