PES Chronicles

So, was I too harsh on FIFA11—and on next-gen FIFA in general—on Friday? Yes and no. There’s still a full game of FIFA11 to come out, of course. If we based everything on shakycam vids and confused reports by guerilla poets on the Gamescom floor, no games would ever come out.

But I stand by my opinion that next-gen FIFA is  heading in slightly the wrong direction—for my personal tastes. FIFA10 has always felt faster than I want it to be, even on its so-called Slow setting. Its pressure/stamina mechanic (or lack of one) is just stupid. Stupid. Much like PES2011′s, really, to judge by what’s emerging from the Master League Online Beta testers.

I won’t go into details (no time; less inclination), but I’m not hearing anything about MLO that’s making me yearn to play the mode. MLO sounds just like Ultimate Team in all but name. Super teams packed with superstars all exerting maximum sprinting pressure for entire matches. No doubt I will try it at some point. I forecast a single session that’ll last about an hour at most.

I played some FIFA10 over the weekend. I am still hip-deep in a very good PES6(360) ML career. But I’ve missed out on the Treble in my current season and I felt that I needed a break before starting to push the rock up the hill again.

Predictably, I loved FIFA10 all over again. Just as predictably, after a while I started to want something substantial to do with all this wonderful gameplay.

FIFA needs a compelling offline answer to PES’s Master League mode. It’s no longer an optional extra that EA can afford to nurture and grow organically over a period of years. It’s got to happen now.

Manager Mode has been a disaster for the series and few will miss it. Career Mode sounds sparse and utilitarian, but as ever I have a wild mad hope that it’ll be good. I’m an optimist when it comes to football games, it’s plain to see…

Below are some goals I scored in my weekend FIFA10 sessions (all using semi-assisted controls). The very first one had me sitting up and punching the air. The match was a tight affair. It doesn’t really come across in the clip, but I gave the right stick the slightest nudge in order to make the space, and then whipped the shot in. It felt very good. The other goals were one of my patented ‘reverse hook’ shots, and a different kind of long-ranger that found the postage stamp corner of the net:

Link:

A lot of people say that goal-scoring in FIFA isn’t varied or satisfying enough. I’ve never really gone along with that view. The three goals above are indeed all a bit samey—but only because I favour goals scored from outside the box when assembling clips for the blog. I’ve always scored plenty of different types of goals in next-gen FIFA, from FIFA08 through to today.

My issue with FIFA is the lack of a meaningful context in which to score the goals. What’s it all about? What’s it all for?

For a football gamer, this time of year feels a lot like the interminable run-up to Christmas. Round about late November, everybody starts gearing up for the Big One, mentally bracing themselves to get through it and into the clear blue waters of January.

From late July until the release of the new football games in late Sep/early Oct, things feel pretty much the same. Uncertainty and confusion and paranoia. I’ve only managed to drop in on the PES forums a few times recently, but there are signs that the beast is rumbling back to life.

This year’s a big one for PES2011. Oh, they’ve all been big, but this year is different, whatever anyone says. I can predict the inevitable backlash against the game when it eventually appears, just as I can predict the over-compensating, lavish welcome that it’ll receive from other parties.

I experienced last year in particular the hazards of over-eulogising a new football game, so you can bet I’m going to be cautious. If I’m lovin’ either of the games, of course I’ll say so, but I won’t be declaring the end of time and the arrival of the perfect football game. And if I hate them I will of course say so too.

Over the weekend just gone, I did a bad thing and got myself hopelessly addicted to a game called Minecraft. (It’s got a decent Mac client, which helps.) I heard about it a few months ago and thought it sounded like my kind of thing. I’ve always yearned to get into Dwarf Fortress, a similar concept, but I didn’t fancy the time commitment required just to learn the basics of that game.

Minecraft seemed as though it would have a much, much shorter learning curve (and it has), but at the time I didn’t want to give up any extra time to anything else at all in my life. But then over the past week a wave of hype has washed over the parts of the Internet that I frequent, and I finally took a look. And… oh… oh dear God no…

You know what people say about World of Warcraft? They call it Warcrack, right? As if it’s a drug?

Minecrack. Do not go there. The graphics alone will put a lot of people off. Also the requirement to spend about twenty minutes reading a newbie guide and implementing its advice.

I’m building an underground lair. That’s the first room of it on the left up there. It’s since got much, much bigger…

I’m also still playing PES6(360). Why have I conceived such a passion for this PES game in particular? It’s a good game in its own right, of course, but also it’s at least partly to do with context. I came to it off the back of what I now see was a pretty torrid time with PES2010′s Become A Legend mode. Even when I was enjoying BaL I was dreading the next instance of having to watch CPU vs CPU action.

And before that, alongside it, I was playing FIFA10, a puzzling sort of game: utterly superb in its core mechanics, but empty. I’ve blamed its lack of decent single-player modes, and I believe I’m correct in that assessment—for me anyway.

Manager Mode in FIFA11 has got to be better, surely? If what I hear is true they’ve changed its name, probably for the same reasons that BP will soon undergo a name-change. The taint of the past is just too strong. Manager Mode in FIFA10 was supposed to be a major imprvement, but somehow it achieved the feat of being the worst version yet. People should have been playing it obsessively all year round and swapping stories and hints—but they’re not. Manager Mode has been a catastrophe for FIFA10.

That’s my rambling for today done. My mining, however, has not yet begun.

It’s a weird time of year for me and football gaming. I should have just kept going with my epic Master League career in PES2010. Instead, a month or two ago now, I hopped over to FIFA10.

It didn’t work out—I was too PESsed up—and I ended up dabbling with Be A Pro. Lately I’ve also dabbled in Become A Legend, back in PES2010, but that’s not caught fire yet either. Currently during my regular morning sessions, I’m idly twictching my way through several Manager Mode matches at a time.

To be brutally honest, the demos for PES2011 and FIFA11 cannot come soon enough. The football gaming year 2009-2010 has been a classic one for me so far—the Master League career on its own dictates that. But now for one reason and another, it has stuttered to a virtual halt. Become A Legend may yet take flight. I may yet return to Master League, in PES2010 or in PES6(360). For the moment, though, yes, Manager Mode…

I won promotion from the Championship. Last time, it was 0-1 to Middlesbrough in our playoff semi-final. I won the return match at their ground: 0-2 to me was the final score there. In the final I played Nottingham Forest, but could only manage a 1-1 draw, even after extra time. The penalties went to sudden death, as next-gen FIFA penalties so often do. I think I won it 9-8 in the end. And that was that: I was in the Premier League.

At the equivalent stage in my Master League 2010 career, promoted from Division 2 to Division 1, I spent hours putting together a celebratory movie to mark the occasion. Here, now, in Manager Mode? It barely registered. The opponents would be wearing slightly different kits. I might get to play in a few different cups. That, alas, is about it for the career mode in FIFA10.

I got myself tooled up with a few more identikit midfielders, a decent striker, and a strong centre-back—all off the Free Agent list. I cannot recall any of their names. FIFA10′s gameplay is what’s driving Manager Mode forward for me, rather than any intrinsic properties of the mode itself. I remain fascinated, as I have been all year, by the game’s passing mechanic. I find it pleasantly intricate and highly satisfying to play with, even if so many of the players are essentially the same.

Many PES veterans are worried that PES2011 is copying next-gen FIFA’s passing. IMO they should worry about PES2011 not copying it. Chuck in the PES player individuality and we will have ourselves a football game. But which of the two games will pull that particular sword from the stone? (What if it’s both?)

I got through the pre-season friendlies and played game 1 of my first season in the top flight. It was against Fulham, and I won it 2-0. One of my goals was a traditional next-gen FIFA goal, for me at least—a ‘floater’ over the keeper’s head from distance:

Link:

With my PES2010 BaL progress hanging in the balance, I’ve been playing FIFA10. Not only that, I’ve been playing Manager Mode. (Never say never again.) EA’s decidedly uncelebrated career mode is just as clunky and uninvolving and ugly and buggy and plain old shit as ever, but FIFA10′s gameplay almost makes up for it.

I’m playing the Coventry City career I started a while back. It’s not the one I started in October—it’s the one I started only a month or two ago after deciding to jump over from Master League.

(Incidentally, it strikes me now that that might have been a bad decision. Stopping playing PES2010 Master League, I mean. It’s as if I broke the spell, and couldn’t get the magic back. With a bit of shrewd transfer dealing, House Rules etc., I could have played ML literally all year. Why didn’t I do that? What did I feel I owed to FIFA10? Was I paying back a debt I felt I’d incurred with my rapturous reception of FIFA10 back in October? Possibly, possibly.)

In my second season I’ve assembled a team that’s fairly decent. I’ve upgraded the Fitness Coach to 9, and the various other departments of gameplay—Goalkeeping, Defence, Midfield, Attack—to 6 or 7. Beyond that I couldn’t afford more, as I also wanted a few new players.

It does make a difference getting new players for your team  in FIFA10. The word on the football gaming street is that every FIFA player is the same as every other.

That’s as false as it’s true. There’s a load of difference between a team of players rated an average of 80-85 and a team rated an average of 60-65, as mine is. What FIFA critics are talking about when they talk about a lack of player differentiation is that there’s little or no difference between players of the same level.

For example: my FIFA10 Freddy Eastwood (a 67) is pretty much the same player as my FIFA10 Leo McKenzie (a 64). In PES, despite the same rating, they’d still be different: one would be a Gutierrez type, and the other would be a Huylens type, or whatever, and you’d know exactly which one you were playing with without having to look down at the nameplate.

Next-gen FIFA hasn’t even come close to nailing this, although it has got slightly better over the three versions. I await news of FIFA11 with interest.

I’m enjoying Manager Mode probably as much as I’m able to. I crept my way up the Championship table and sneaked into 5th place with 1 match to go. I just had to avoid defeat to finish in the playoff places, and that’s what I did.

My semi-final opponents were Middlesbrough. I lost the first leg 0-1, at home—and that’s where I had to stop playing for the session. I’ll reveal all on Wednesday.

The blog’s been very ‘bitty’ lately, I know. But it’s doing what it’s meant to: reflecting my daily football gaming experiences, whatever they may be. Am I just treading water here until the first demo hits in August/September? No! I’m still gaming with my eyes firmly on the here and now. As I say above, though, it does increasingly strike me that I was premature in leaving Master League 2010 behind. It was a mistake—but one I had to make to find that out.