Solitaire’s the only game in town
The blog has been all about PES2009 for the past few weeks. Which doesn’t mean that I have abandoned FIFA09. Far from it. I have sneakily been playing a couple of sessions per week of my Atletico Madrid career in Manager Mode. I’ve enjoyed it, as far as it goes. Also, I’ve played a match online—one match. And just lately I have started a Be A Pro career. I still love FIFA09.
The only serious problem I have with FIFA09 is Manager Mode. Unfortunately, that’s one serious problem for me. I play career modes in football games to the exclusion of almost everything else. If a career mode ’sucks’, as they say, then it’s going to affect my relationship with the whole game.
I think Manager Mode in FIFA09 really is a turd in the punchbowl. Back on October 1st, as news was filtering through about FIFA09’s Manager Mode being unchanged, I had this to say:
How true that turned out to be. Manager Mode is almost like something knocked up in somebody’s attic over a weekend. In the 1980s. (Of course, that’s an exaggeration. Rhetorical effect and all that. But it’s not much of an exaggeration…)
In FIFA08, Manager Mode didn’t feel too bad. I thought it was decently playable. But those were different circumstances. At the time, the new-style FIFA was, well, new. And the long-awaited next-gen PES2008 might as well have come with a printed card inside the box that said “Hey you! Go play FIFA!”
But here and now, Manager Mode just isn’t good enough. When I let a few days go by I can convince myself that it’s not so bad. Then I manage to summon the motivation to load it up once more. But I only have to see the first menu and I start sighing and fidgeting.
Maybe I’ll come back to Manager Mode with renewed vigour as the year unfolds, but I doubt it. Manager Mode in FIFA09 is like a rusty old bicycle inside a gleaming new Ferrari. Curse you David Rutter…
—————–
Online gaming is terra incognita for me, and will likely remain so. The other night I played a FIFA09 match online. One match. It was enough for me.
My opponent was called 1337_NOOB_KILLA_U_suXXor. That’s not actually his real name, but it’s close enough. He insta-selected Barcelona for his team.
I hear that 95% or more of online players on both games still do that old ‘Barca move’. It’s almost a mini-game in itself: who can select Barcelona first? So I wasn’t surprised, and I didn’t even particularly mind. Whenever I venture online I never mind when people choose Barca or Man Yoo or whatever. I like to pick someone like Spurs, or Mallorca, someone like that, and try to beat them. The match ended 1-1 and he won on penalties. I waited for a rematch, but he went off in search of other NOOBs to KILL.
That was okay by me. I was glad to get away. I’d been restless and glum even before half-time. I logged off. And that was my online gaming for the month over and done with.
In case it’s not already obvious, I should reiterate here that I’m not an online gamer. Never have been, never will be. Even a great online game is of a lesser quality, for me, than an average offline match. The plain truth is that I’m a sociopath I just dislike online gaming for various reasons.
It might be a generational thing. I’ve been gaming for 30 years now and for most of that period there was no online gaming. Thus, gaming for me is a solitary pursuit. Online gaming is not proper gaming. And it’s far too time-consuming. I feel that I don’t get enough out of it for the time that has to be put in. I also think—probably unfairly—that online gaming is pretty simplistic. The same kinds of stereotypical situations recur again and again. Single-player gaming seems to have more variety.
I had to include the above disclaimer. Often when I mention online gaming—how I don’t like it, and don’t play it, and will never play it—somebody will tell me that there’s nothing like it and I should play it, as if it’s the most obvious and natural belief in the world, and I am being stubborn and unreasonable by refusing to believe it too. So I’m only getting my rebuttal in first.
———————
And so to Be A Pro. Not just ‘Be A Pro Lite’, as it was in FIFA08, but Be A Pro Seasons. If Manager Mode doesn’t attract me and online play doesn’t thrill me, what price the immersion-factor of a full career with a single player?
I made my player. I made him an attacking midfielder, because I’d heard that was best. I made him look vaguely like myself, and started. I quite liked it at first. I scored early on in my first game, and thought: hmmm. Did I really craft that goal, or is it the game shaping events, making things interesting for me? Whatever, the goal was the only goal of that match. I performed pretty well and met all my objectives. But I ended the match feeling hollow.
I’d been thinking about my Master League career on PES2009 all this time. I was also thinking about my two careers (not one, two) on Football Manager 2008 and Championship Manager 01-02 (of which more tomorrow).
FIFA09 hasn’t really got anything for me at the moment. But perhaps I’ve been too quick to dismiss Be A Pro. I know there is an option to ‘unlock’ the team and play with all the players throughout the matches. (I found it dull just controlling one player.) Maybe I’ll do that next time.
I’ll try to operate over the next few weeks much as I did earlier this year. I’ll set aside at least one day every week to report on my FIFA09 adventures. I predict that in the longer term I will turn back to FIFA09, and I will extract something from at least one of its many modes. At the moment, though, PES2009—or, more exactly, Master League—is the only game in town.
I’ve been reading your blog now for a couple of weeks, and I really enjoy it. I started out playing FIFA 09, and loved it at first, but I had to fight with it too much (adjusting the CPU’s tactics so that it doesn’t chase me like a headless chicken, etc.) I also agree with everyone on here that playing FIFA in manual mode is best; of course, the reason for this, in comparison to PES 2009, is that the assisted mode isn’t very good. In PES, if your player doesn’t have his feet set, or isn’t a gifted passer, the passes will be off target, weak, etc. In FIFA, passes go where you want them most of time regardless in assisted mode. Switching to manual helps, but then, IMO, with manual mode I didn’t notice enough of a difference between players’ abilities. I also thought the manager mode was hollow. So I switched to PES.
The biggest reason I switched, however, was because of everything I’d heard about the Become A Legend mode. This is relevant to your post, because of your experiences with the Be A Pro mode in FIFA. I’ve heard, but not personnally verified, that the Be A Pro mode is substantially weak compared to PES’s version. I heard that it’s only 4 seasons, that player development was too fast, and that it was easy to dominate the game (you call for a pass, they give it to you, regardless). In Become a Legend, it is beautifully frustrating. You start out on the bench of a lousy team, and have to fight for a place in the first team. But the genious of the game is in the game engine itself. Being on a bad team limits your development, because one, you start out playing with idiots who don’t know how to get you the ball, and two, winning gives you more development points, as does playing in cups and big games. So the paradox, and this is what makes this game mode brilliant, is that:
1. You need to play well in order to get to a great team.
2. It’s difficult to play well, because in the beginning, your stats suck.
3. You have to win big games as a team to get more development points, but
4. In the beginning, your teammates suck, so you
5. Transfer to a bettter team, but,
6. Your stats still suck, so you have to fight for a place in the first team from the bench.
This is why everyone is begging you to try this mode. Plus, it’s basically master league, only from the player’s perspective. And the feeling you get when you finally get into a game is fantastic. I’m in my second season. I started at Malaga, but they were terrible, so I transferred to Real Betis. I’m hoping to one day play for Barcelona, so it will be an interesting journey.
toomerk – thanks for your comment, and you’ve made the best case for BaL yet… Having tried FIFA09’s BaP and been unimpressed with it (I doubt I’ll ever go back to that career save) I suppose I should try BaL, at least for symmetry’s sake. But the reasons why I’m reluctant to break off from Master League still apply. I only get a limited amount of time per day to play, and for me it has to be ML. I always find that any time spent not playing Master League (or Manager Mode, when I thought it was good) feels like time wasted. That was certainly the way I felt whilst playing BaP and my 1 online match on FIFA09 the other night.
But your presentation of BaL as a more focused version of ML is intriguing. I always planned to take a look at BaL when ML started to fade for me, as it inevitably will one day. I’m not saying I definitely will, but after my next ML season I might have a look at BaL. Just to see.
I’m suffering from similar feelings of discomfort that you found while playing FIFA09, thinking a lot about the ML, unfortunately for me it’s thinking about playing FM09 and with my laptop out of action the option isn’t there for me to play it, depressing times.
However I am about to throw on PES2009 again, and funnily enough have a crack at BaL mode. I actually don’t mind the odd game of BAP on FIFA09, although I can see it’s an acquired taste, I hated it in FIFA08 but 09 has changed my opinion, although the fact that you can only play 4 seasons detracts from it, therefore I think BaL may actually be worth a shot.
However first things first and I will be booting up my ML, I know I can enjoy it, just got to get through that painful default player period
stinger – I’ve decided definitely to have a go at BaL, but exactly when that will be I don’t know. As for BaP… I really doubt I’ll ever return to the mode, although I might try it again whilst playing with the whole team, not just my created player. At the moment, though, my PES2009 ML career is still going strong, and that’s my main gaming focus.