So… FIFA09 and its notorious through-ball bug. Ouch—especially for PS3-owners, who seem to have drawn the shortest cross-platform straw (again).

There’s a patch in the offing. It’ll probably arrive in the next few weeks. I’m sure it’ll correct the problem and everything will be rosy. But it grates on me that we ever had to put up with the problem at all. It simply shouldn’t be like this.

What the frack happened in testing? What happened to games being released when they were ready? Let me rephrase that: whatever happened to games developers committing the necessary resources and personnel to a game to get it released BUG-FREE in the time available?

In the era of Internet-connected consoles, downloadable updates and patches, there’s a nasty new trend in the air. Games are pushed onto the shelves laden with the kinds of bugs and glitches that would have caused delays in previous eras. In the old days (not so long ago really) developers had to get it right within a specified timeframe, or they failed. Simple as. And they mostly didn’t fail. Games still appeared with bugs and glitches, of course they did. But nowadays the threshold of what is and isn’t acceptable on release day (Day Zero in developer-speak) is a lot lower. All because of the damn Internet—curse its miserable, virtual hide.

“We are all Beta-testers” has become an online cliche, applied to FIFA09 and to dozens of other games, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

The through-ball bug (also known as the side-shimmy bug, or ‘crab-walking’) in FIFA09 occurs when you play a through-ball to one of your players. (It’s also affected me whilst playing normal passes, but I won’t go there today.) For anyone who needs a refresher on the through-ball bug, here’s a clip of it in action. I’m currently seeing this happen two or three times in every game, often several times per half:

Instead of running smoothly onto the ball, the player inexplicably starts side-shuffling, dancing on the spot, slowing right down. It’s a ball-gathering animation that belongs in another context completely, when a player would be waiting for a slow pass from behind. Here, the player should be running ahead onto a ball in front of him. Hopefully this will be quite easy to fix. I have to say again: how could this have escaped the notice of EA’s playtesters? Perhaps it didn’t escape their attention, but it was too late to fix it so they just went ahead and published anyway, knowing they could rectify things with a patch. We really are just cash cows to the games industry, when it comes right down to it.

Instances of the bug SEEM to be related to the quality of players you choose to play with. Playing with Coventry, I suffer it several times per game; playing with better teams, maybe once per game, or once every other game. Many people report seeing the bug very rarely, or not at all. Xbox360 players seem to be the most fortunate, and I have to say that in my games on the 360 a few weeks ago I rarely saw it either. Some people claim never to see it. It exists, though. Oh yes. It exists.

I don’t think any football game in the history of football games has ever appeared with a bug quite like this one. The nearest comparable bug that springs to mind would be PES5’s ‘auto-stepover’ bug that constantly gave away silly, stupid, infuriating throw-ins. At least that bug never directly affected your goal-scoring efforts.

The FIFA09 through-ball bug penalises your patient build-up play by blowing a fat raspberry in your face. It blatantly robs you of clear goal-scoring opportunities. It smells, and I hate it I hate it I hate it.

I couldn’t blame the bug for my singular lack of progress in my Coventry City Manager Mode career. There are plenty of other ways to craft a goal in this great game (I still think it’s a great game) than the through-ball. My lack of goals is all my own fault. But the through-ball bug seems designed to infuriate struggling players in particlar, who might only create a handful of chances per match.

I’ve played another few games of my career. I managed a draw, but lost three games. A game against Norwich saw the worst-yet manifestation of the through-ball bug. 0-1 down with seconds to go, I somehow fashioned a killer through-ball to set my striker loose for a one-on-one opportunity—but my striker side-shimmied instead of running with the ball, and the defenders got back to smother the chance.

I’m about as resoundingly bottom of the league as it’s possible to be. I’ve had all the warnings from the board. I’ve had the dreaded vote of confidence. I predict that I will be sacked from this career within the next few games.

Back in December 2007, while praising FIFA08 I described it as the Ninja Gaiden of football games. For those unacquainted with Ninja Gaiden, I don’t mean the original, classic NES game(s). I mean the forbiddingly difficult action adventure game on the original Xbox. (NG enjoys cult status because of its eye-wateringly steep learning curve and unforgiving boss fights. The first random enemies on the first levels of that game are as hard as many final boss fights in other, lesser games.)

FIFA09 is also the Ninja Gaiden of football games—perhaps even more so. (It’d be more symmetrical to call it the Ninja Gaiden 2, but the sequel was not a worthy follow-up to the original, in my opinion. Perhaps it’s the Ninja Gaiden Sigma…)

I’ve been playing FIFA09 a lot for almost exactly one month now. A few weeks ago I thought I had it licked. Not literally—that would be both disgusting and pointless. I mean figuratively, in the sense of ‘I know how this game plays now, and my continued playing of it will be just be a variation of everything I have experienced thus far’.

How wrong I was. Of course, if you play FIFA09 as it comes out of the box—or entirely online, as many people do—then no, after a while it won’t have much else to show you.

The tipping point came with the switch to semi-manual and manual controls. That on its own was enough to completely transform the game that comes out of the box. I’ve posted a lot about the satisfying nature of playing with different control settings. But perhaps the ultimate game-changer for FIFA09 comes when you start to play with bad players. Yes. I have begun a new career with Coventry City.

I’m playing on World Class difficulty—but maybe not for much longer. I have so far played 5, lost 4, drew 1. I’ve only scored two goals. I’m playing so badly. It’s not even the end of August yet and I’ve had a warning from the board.

And I’m playing with what for me is a pretty conservative formation. I usually like a nice 4-3-3. Eight years of PES left me all but unable to play with anything else. Here I’m using a modified 4-4-2. I’ve pushed the wide midfielders forward, and dropped one of the central midfielders slightly deeper. Playing with Atletico Madrid in my other, much more successful MM career, it works brilliantly well. Alas, with Coventry City it’s proving a pretty poor formation. I might try a 4-5-1 or something. If that doesn’t bring me any joy I’ll switch to a 4-3-3, or even a 3-4-3. Might as well go out all guns blazing.

I can see myself being sacked soon and having to restart. And I can see this happening not just once or twice, but many, many times. The game is just bloody tough. I cannot emphasise enough how hard it is to play FIFA09 with an average set of players on World Class difficulty using semi-manual and manual controls!

I’m struggling to muster any real joy out of playing any of the games. This is the most worrying thing for me. I think I’m still playing as if my players are world-beaters. I have to slow down and not be so anxious to do spectacular things with the ball. The through-ball bug is really, well, bugging me right now. I’ll have some more to say about that tomorrow. I’ll also post my full First XI and their Overall ratings.

Okay, so I’ve got two main ISSUES with FIFA09 at the moment. The game’s pace, for one. And the extreme ease of regaining possession from the CPU by pressing and holding X+Square together (A+X on the 360).

FIFA09 is just too fast. There, I’ve said it. After being in denial for weeks, I think it really is too fast. I play with the speed setting on Slow, and I still find it too fast. It’s not something I really appreciate after several weeks’ intensive play. At times it’s just like playing PES—possibly something that EA intended, possibly not. No doubt this change from FIFA08 and UEFA2008 was done for commercial reasons—for ‘accessibility’ reasons. In time I’ll learn to live with it (I already have done, really) but I think it’s a cause for regret. FIFA08 had the pace spot-on, in my opinion. They could have at least made that pace the FIFA09 Slow pace. But no, the FIFA09 Slow pace is a lot faster. Very peculiar.

And it’s far, far too easy to regain possession of the ball at almost any time simply by ‘clamping’ the tackle and sprint buttons. This is something we got used to doing for many years on PES, until it became almost second nature. In conjunction with the R1 sprint button (I have sprint mapped to R1 in FIFA09), at times you might just as well be playing PES, several years ago. I really don’t like the way that ‘clamping’ has already become second nature to me in FIFA09. “Well, play it differently, then.” Fine, I’ll try to. My fellow footy game blogger heraldo contends that playing on World Class reduces the effectiveness of clamping. I’ll be trying it out soon.

I’ll be talking more about those two bugbears in the days and weeks to come. Time will tell what impact they (and other, lesser issues) will have on my long-term relationship with FIFA09. Is this the start of my ‘FIFA fatigue’? It might be. It just might be.

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Things are certainly… interesting in my Manager Mode career on FIFA09 just now. I’m playing with Coventry City in the Championship (it’ll always be Division 2 to me and to others of a certain age).

I’m doing appallingly badly. I should be ashamed of myself, and I am. Playing on Professional difficulty, things shouldn’t be like this. I’ve been careless, yes. I’ve neglected to play the ‘new FIFA’ way too often. (Which might explain some of my current dissatisfaction with the game.) I’ve gone full-tilt for quick goals and cheap wins, and been caught out. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve been sucker-punched in the 80th minute and after. Cruising to an easy 1-0 win, only to be pegged back to 1-1. Or holding out for a creditable 0-0 away from home, only to concede a daft goal late on, and lose.

It’s all built up and built up into a perfect storm of anti-form. I’ve freefalled down the table, and there have been consequences—as the following grim trio of screenshots shows:

I’m fifth from bottom with only eight or so games left in the season. There are only two points between me and the bottom team. The way I’ve been playing, relegation is a serious possibility. Given that avoiding relegation was my only target for the season, things are pretty bad on the job security front:

That top JOB SECURITY meter is at 38%, in the red. I nervously hovered there for a game or two, grinding out 0-0s and 1-1s. Then I lost a game, and got this:

It’s a warning. It meant I had a really big game coming up. It was against Doncaster Rovers, and I went behind early on to a really, really tame goal. The rest of the game just sort of fizzled along, never really catching fire, nothing remarkable happening. It seemed I was sleepwalking to my doom. I made chances but failed to convert them. It was my own fault for using semi-manual controls. If I’d had the shooting on Assisted I’d have scored at least four goals. I had all the possession I could have wanted…

In the last minute I won a corner. By now I was more or less resigned to being sacked and starting Manager Mode all over again (which I will probably do anyway, whatever else happens this season).

My keeper came up for the last-minute corner. For all I knew, this was my last kick of the ball in this whole career. I’d never been sacked in FIFA before. I swung the corner over, my keeper watched it sail past him—and one of my strikers was standing on the corner of the six-yard box to nod the ball into the net. Hmmm, I thought. How timely…

Cynicism aside,  I was happy with the goal, and with the job-saving draw. And I lived to fight another day.