PES Chronicles

I finished my first Manager Mode season in 12th place. The big bugs left me alone. I didn’t lose any players (if that does happen to me, I’ll just stop playing FIFA10). It was the little bugs that attacked me. Whenever I sold a player, my entire first team would be rearranged, requiring several minutes to put it all right again. I got heartily sick and tired of playing three-quarters of my matches at night and in the rain. And when I finished the season my goalkeeper was placed second in the assists table. Way to go, Keiren!

The gameplay is still great, but doesn’t feel as wonderful as it did last week. That was inevitable. Over time every football game has to settle and become part of the furniture. What sustains it in the long run—for a year or more—is its ability constantly to challenge and surprise and engross you. It’s too early to say if FIFA10 will have that ability. I think it could always challenge and surprise, but engross? I await that patch for Manager Mode. I think it’ll have to be a good ‘un.

I’m following the various forum discussions with interest. I’ve detected a raised level of disgruntlement with FIFA10’s gameplay, but generally it’s still admired and liked. That’s pretty much my position. It’s also interesting to note the PES forums settling on the same formula to dismiss FIFA10 that was used last year and the year before. Essentially the argument boils down to: it’s the same old FIFA, just a game for kids, et cetera. In too many cases, they literally don’t know what they’re talking about.

I’m really getting a buzz out of playing with my Virtual Pro in FIFA10. He’s still my team’s best player, but only just. I picked up another great young midfielder called Tormeda.

They play together in the centre of midfield and I always feel unbeatable with them in the team. Sometimes I have to play without one or the other, and sometimes I have to play without both of them. I’ve got my fitness coach up to level 9, but Manager Mode’s fitness modelling is (thankfully) different this year. It’s now more akin to Master League’s. Sometimes you just have to rest players. It’s required. When my VP and Tormeda are absent, I tend to feel overwhelmed in midfield. They both make things happen,and I struggle to make things happen with my lesser players. Again, time will tell, but for now it seems player and team individuality is improved in FIFA10.

I got this nice little 25-yarder with my VP the other day:

Link:

Tormeda gets his fair share of goals too. I’ve started the second season, and started it quite well. I’m hovering in mid-table after several matches, just a few wins outside the top 6. Unfortunately I’m the very model of inconsistency. Solid wins are followed by puzzling defeats and indifferent draws. I concede an awful lot of 90th minute equalisers when I’m 1-0 up. I’m starting to get paranoid, but FIFA10 is a deep game (it really is). I think all I need is more practice.

Sensational week. Wednesday’s fairly negative post was out of date before it even appeared, as its comments thread shows. By midday on Wednesday I was back in love with FIFA10, and I still am.

FIFA10’s arrival 7 days ago totally wowed me. It’s been a peculiar week since, with a few sharp downs to go with the ups. My major problem was always with Manager Mode. It’s in a terrible state, completely riddled with bugs. I had very few quibbles with FIFA10’s gameplay. But I kept plugging away, and—here’s the thing—the gameplay of FIFA10 is so moreish that even Manager Mode eventually came to seem okay. (At least my game doesn’t mysteriously lose transferred-in players, as many others report happening to them.)

The state of Manager Mode in FIFA10 is a massive scandal. I fail to see how EA could be unaware of its issues before release. In fact, it is inconceivable that they were unaware. Their feigned surprise now is a little hard to stomach, I have to say.

Fortunately for them, the time and resources that were evidently put into refining the core gameplay has paid off. FIFA10 is a new departure point for football games. (Yes, I know: let’s see if I still think that in January, or even next week…)

Putting my finger squarely on it, the 360-movement makes a massive difference. I don’t feel it so much in dribbling. I dribble very little compared to other football gamers. I’m a pass-and-move, give-and-go kind of player. For me, the 360-movement is a revelation in terms of passing. You can move the ball around in a way that’s unprecedented in any FIFA (or PES). You can thread the eye of a needle with a pass now, splitting defences, opening up space that you had no right to open up. It’s crazily addictive. Just testing it all out with 11 players on the empty practice pitch is crazily addictive.

I still haven’t scored a proper ‘Hollywood’ goal. This is mainly due to playing with the Coventry City players. They’re all rated in the 60s. My Virtual Pro is the highest-rated at 70. During my 4-hour session on Wednesday morning I scored this decent close-range volley from a typical FIFA10 swirling cross:

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I have to say that Manager Mode, for me, is ticking over. But I am heartily sick of playing at night in the rain. That’s one of the bugs: 90% of matches are at night, in the rain. A rainy match alters all the parameters for passing, so when you do get a rare dry match you have to adapt to what should be normal conditions. Crazy, and I’ve stuck another pin in my David Rutter doll for that one.

All week I’ve been awarding FIFA10 a daily mark out of 10, and calculating its running average score. On Wednesday this average slipped to 7.9/10 thanks to my Manager Mode-related unhappiness. Things are different now…

Wednesday: 9.5/10—Is it Friday again? Extraordinary session this morning. I sat down at 9.15 intending to get thrugh a few Manager Mode matches and then toddle off to see if I could maybe get into a Cup or League. 4 hours later, at 13.25, I got up, exhausted and drained after an amazing session of football gaming. I played Manager Mode for 3 of those hours. I spent the other hour on the practice pitch, seeing if I could take to manual passing. FIFA10 demands manual passing, it seems to me.

Thursday: 9/10—This could have been another 9.5/10 day, but I’ve got to settle on a 9. The game seemed a little fast at times today. What I want is more time on the ball, but that’s the challenge. I need to get into the game some more, learn its little ways. I also hate something I now see many times every match: my player makes a perfect slide tackle and then gets up and runs away from the ball. The CPU collects and continues. But these instances are, what, 1% of the total gameplay experience? Probably less. They don’t define FIFA10, no matter how much a PES zealot would like them to. The past two days have been amazing, and easily the best times I’ve spent with next-gen FIFA, period.

Running average over 7 days: 8.42/10

So my overall average score for the week is ‘only’ 8.42. That’s a fair reflection of the game as it is out of the box. The Manager Mode issues are unforgivable in my opinion. Every review of FIFA10 should have had at least 1 point (or 10%) deducted from the final score. But how many reviews did more than even mention Manager Mode in passing? Print and online games reviewers need to take a good hard look at themselves and start asking some serious questions.

Here’s a scientific graph that illustrates the week’s progress in, er, graph form:

Can it last? What will PES2010 do when it arrives? I’ve been playing the PES2010 demo and I still love it.

I’ve even played PES2009(PS3). I found myself drawn into a Champions League tournament by the pleasantly heavy feeling of the players. FIFA’s players (and the ball) often feel as if they’re made of air by comparison. The next few weeks are going to be interesting.

Monday’s post will be all about those snatched PES sessions I’ve been having this week. The fact that they happened (and are still happening) is very significant for me. I said a few weeks ago that I think I’m heading back to PES. I still think that. It’s against all rationality, especially with FIFA10 snuggled up beside me. But I still think I’m heading back to PES—perhaps not to play exclusively for a whole year as I used to do in the past, but certainly more than over the past two years. I don’t know why either. Perhaps I’ve seen something in PES2010 that has triggered a long-dormant instinct…

What a strange few days—some of the oddest few days I’ve had with a football game. On Day 1 I loved FIFA10, then I went slightly cool on it, but I still liked it.

On Monday the reality of Manager Mode hit home. Bit of a delayed reaction, but it finally hit home.

I’m playing Manager Mode as Coventry City. My Virtual Pro is a key member of the team already. Now that is a good feature. I already feel more attached to him than to my created player in FIFA09, who was also in my Manager Mode teams. A lot of the almost incidental enjoyment I’m squeezing out of FIFA10’s Manager Mode is coming from nursing my Virtual Pro through the games and trying to boost his stats.

For the uninitiated, Manager Mode in FIFA10 is riddled with bugs and glitches. None of them are literal showstoppers, but all combine to make it the most disappointing Manager Mode of any next-gen FIFA. After two previous years of disappointment that’s quite an achievement in its own right. Well done, lads. Well done.

It was all pretty decent to start with. I managed to sign a couple of midfielders. Tellingly, I can’t remember their names despite playing nearly a full season with them by now. I think one of them is called Allu. He’s an LM and he’s got a decent left foot. It’s a shame the Manager Mode problems have overshadowed FIFA10’s maiden week for me. I think I could now argue that player individuality in FIFA is a reality. Only for some players, so it’s still not great, and its still very sketchy, but it’s getting there. But no—I want to whine about Manager Mode, and I’m damn well going to.

My first few games of the season were spread out across many different times of day and weather conditions. Hah, I thought. I’ve mysteriously evaded the constant night-time & rain bug that everyone else is suffering from!

Then the rainy night-time matches started, and they’ve not stopped. I’ve only had one match in the daytime in the past 20 matches. And even then it was raining.

I’ve also had the infamous snowy pitch, although at least that isn’t an issue for me. Back when I used to record clips for the blog with my mobile phone, I used a yellow hi-visibility ball because it showed up a lot better. I got used to using the yellow ball and now I always use a yellow ball. So the snowy pitches hold no fear for me. The ball’s quite easy to see. Must be hell if your ball is white though.

When was the last time a professional football match took place on a snow-covered pitch anyway? It just wouldn’t happen today. If the undersoil heating failed, the match would just be postponed. What is this snowy pitch doing in FIFA10? In my stadium, you can often see snow piled up at the edge of the pitch all year round. I hear some people are getting snowy matches—like the one in the picture—in the summer.

At one point I grew so disenchanted with things that I bumped the difficulty level down to Semi-Pro for a few matches, and decided to test out FIFA10’s long-shot mechanic. I got my Virtual Pro’s long-shot Accomplishment. And I have to say, when the goal went in I did have to smile. I enjoyed it.

Link:

Gameplay will save FIFA10 in the long run, I predict. Sheer gameplay. It’s still pretty good, you know. At some point a patch for Manager Mode will come out. The patch won’t fix everything, but it’ll fix just enough things to make me grudgingly forgive the game. This is kind of happening already. As much as I’ve ranted about Manager Mode (and will continue ranting) I still find myself playing it.

FIFA10’s gameplay is bringing me back for more—for now. The 360-degree movement has opened up a new world of passing that it’s totally fascinating trying to get to grip with.

Since Friday, I’ve been giving FIFA10 a daily mark out of 10, and keeping a running tally of the average.

Monday: 6.5/10–-Hulk SMASH… Today’s the day I lost all patience with FIFA10. After my tenth night-time, rainy match in a row, I turned off the game and played some PES6(360) instead. Now there’s another game that was criticised for being unfinished. Compared to FIFA10’s career mode, PES6(360)’s career mode is a streamlined masterpiece. Possibly I have to face, and embrace, a slightly uncomfortable truth: FIFA will always find a way to disappoint me, but PES will always find a way to please me.

Tuesday: 8/10—had a morning session that just confirmed what I thought last night: FIFA10, when you get right down to it, is over-hyped, over-rated, and all but OVER, here. Today even the gameplay, which I was so hot for last Friday, seems shallow and empty. The ball is made out of air, completely weightless. I had a few comparison matches on the PS3 version of PES2009—do you see, FIFA10, what you are driving me to?—and the weightiness of the ball, at least, is an absolute joy. I went away for a long day and calmed down. An evening session on Manager Mode went a lot better. A night session went very well indeed. The game saw fit to let me play in a dry stadium a few times (still all at night though). Passing this ball around is like nothing we’ve ever seen in football games. Manager Mode still has something, even if it’s a whole lot less than I was led to believe.

Running average over 5 days: 7.9/10

Whatever FIFA does, it may never be loved. Liked, yes, admired, yes, enjoyed, yes, but loved? Unlikely. Not in the way that PES is still loved today. Perhaps that is the beginning, middle, and end of the matter.

Friday’s session with FIFA10 was a superb experience. It was one of those gaming sessions that just goes on and on and gets better and better. I walked around afterwards turning on lights. It had got dark while I was playing. I was just so engrossed, sitting in a dark room, with only the light from the TV.

FIFA10 is a great game—I stand by that. There are passages of play that are simply astonishing. I see in it the kinds of things that I always believed PES should have been doing by now in Space Year 2009. I love to pass the ball around, recycling it across my whole team, for ages, probing and looking for openings. The 360-degree dribbling, for me, has its main effect in passing. You can thread needles with that football now (even on semi-assisted). It’s very addictive and satisfying.

But: I’ve been playing Manager Mode for a few days now. It’s just another functional year for Manager Mode, I’m afraid. It does what it does, take it or leave it. They added some new features, yes, but they either don’t work at all or work so badly that the mode would be better off without them.

An impressive range of bugs and glitches and petty annoyances await the would-be player of Manager Mode in FIFA10. Crazily, the Manager Modes in FIFA09 and FIFA08 were arguably more playable. At least the things they set out to do worked, even if they were underwhelming.

Take the new Assistant Manager feature. (Go on, take it.) The idea is sound. The game will rotate your squad for you according to form and fitness. No more fiddling around before every match, swapping players. Great, except I don’t want to use it. I like messing around with my lineup before every match. It’s one of the joys of football gaming for me.

That’s fine. You can turn off the Assistant Manager.

Except you can’t. The Assistant Manager goes on assistant-managing even when it’s set to OFF.

Weather seems to be another complaint. Manager Mode has gone from having no weather to having a riotous superabundance of weather. It’s always night-time and raining for some people. I’m not seeing these constant night/wet matches. I’m getting a decent, realistic spread of day/night and wet/dry matches. I’ve no complaints there. and it feels great, properly atmospheric.

There’s more. Check any FIFA forum. I’d need a whole new post to get into the form and stats debacle. Contracts. Transfers. One of the fundamental underpinnings of a career mode—the fluctuations of your team’s form and morale over time—seems badly broken. Oh, and perhaps this is the doozy: it seems that every team apart from the top teams is set to play in exactly the same way. Their Custom Tactics sliders are all on 70, across the board. Who play-tested this thing? Did anyone?

It’s not all doom and gloom with Manager Mode. To be fair, it never has been all doom and gloom with Manager Mode. It’s always done just enough to pass muster, to provide some idle amusement. And that’s what it does again. All the glitches and bugs are annoying and they shouldn’t be there, but the mode ticks along regardless. I’m still playing it and will go on playing it—at least until PES2010 gets here. I’ve got my Virtual Pro in the team. There is enjoyment to be had in lots of ways. I’ll talk about it some more in the next few posts.

I gave FIFA10’s first session a stonking 9.5/10—a review-style score that some readers thought I was giving to the game as my total, final review score. I definitely wasn’t doing that. I’ll give FIFA10 my final review score in September 2010.

What I was doing was setting up this year’s version of last year’s ’scientific graphs’ that charted my ups and downs with FIFA09 (example pictured right, from October 13th 2008). This year I’ll score all my FIFA10 days with a mark out of 10. I’ll tally them up week by week, and see what the average is after a few weeks. (When PES2010 arrives I’ll do the same thing.)

Saturday: 8/10—the Manager Mode bugs really take the shine off yesterday’s extraordinary gaming experience. Boo. I can’t hide the truth from myself, as much as I’d like to: this sucks. And where has this suddenly faster speed out on the pitch suddenly come from? It’s probably all Coventry City’s fault. As usual.

Sunday: 8.5/10–-Now that’s what I’m talking about. I took a break from the glitchiness of Manager Mode, and played a wonderful International tournament. FIFA10 can play like a football simulation from heaven. I’m still hurtin’ about Manager Mode, but could it be time for me to shake off this fixation with career modes? Why not jus accept that FIFA doesn’t DO career modes, and move on? Why not take a look at the Leagues? Create my own Custom league? Hmmm.

Running average over 3 days: 8.66/10