Pro Evolution Soccer Chronicles

I’ve started two separate Manager Mode careers on FIFA09. One on the PS3, with my traditional Coventry City. The other on the Xbox360, with Atletico Madrid, a team I played with online the other night and absolutely loved.

It’s unusual for me to play two careers. I love the immersion factor when it comes to a football game’s career mode. Spreading that attention across two careers means less focus and less immersion. But there’s a good reason for my apparent recklessness right now.

A week tomorrow, PES2009 should land on my doorstep (GAME willing). If it turns out to be any good, I know I’ll want to play it, and I’ll want to play Master League most of all. I doubt the new PES will displace FIFA09 in my affections now. There is just too much water under the bridge for PES—in its current arcadey form—ever to occupy the place it once did in my affections. It still pains me to say that, and I know what to blame. PES2008 on the PS3 represented a massive betrayal of one of the richest heritages in computer gaming.

But if the PES2009 demo is anything to go by, at least this year’s game might be playable for more than a few weeks. Certainly it’ll do me no harm—and a lot of good—to have a lighter alternative to FIFA09.

Which would mean less attention for those two Manager Mode careers I was talking about. But that’d be fine. I’ll always come back to them. And in the meantime I can have—buzzword coming up—fun playing them while I wait for PES2009 to land.

The career as Coventry City started with a win and a few draws. But then I encountered that through-ball bug towards the end of a crucial game. Which slightly soured me on FIFA09 for a day or two. At the moment I’m mid-table, having lost the last two fixtures in league and cup. I’m in no danger of being sacked. The goal for the season is to avoid relegation from the Coca Cola Championship. I’ll do that.

Atletico Madrid, on the other hand… In this career the board only wants me to win the Spanish title. Gulp. This is actually my first experience of starting Manager Mode with a top club, and I hope I don’t get sacked for my trouble. So far I’ve played just the one game and it ended 0-0. And who is that midfielder wearing the number 24 shirt…?

Yep, that’s the one and only Camacho, in his real-life guise of reserve central defensive midfielder at Atletico Madrid. I spent so many seasons playing with him in my PS2/PSP Master League career on PES2008 that the moment I saw him here in FIFA09, I had to promote him to the first-team lineup. I’ll be keeping an eye on his progress (he was rubbish in this game).

Finally, I’ve got the whole uploading-to-EA-Sportsworld thing cracked. It works for me this year, after not working at all last year. What this means for the blog is that the days of poor quality mobile phone videos for goals in FIFA are behind us. As long as the replay uploads keep working, of course..

I’ve tried my best to score a show-stopping, net-bursting goal to show off as my very first ‘proper’ replay. But I’ve been like Frank Lampard at Germany 2006 out there. It hasn’t happened yet. So instead what I have is a glaring MISS in front of goal. This is what can happen in FIFA09 when you get it wrong while using semi-manual shooting:

With full shooting assists on, that would have been on target for the low corner of the net and would probably have been a goal. No question. Which is precisely why semi-manual shooting is so great: you need composure and accuracy in front of goal, something I blatantly lacked here.

Yesterday morning I picked up a copy of the Xbox360 version of FIFA09. I’ve had a 360 for about a year now. (I got it mainly to play Bioshock. There aren’t many games worth buying consoles for, but Bioshock is one of them.)

FIFA09 feels like a different game on the Xbox360. Game developers always insist that PS3 and 360 versions of games are identical, apart from various items of downloadable content or whatever. In the case of FIFA09, I beg to differ.

I had the instant impression that the 360 FIFA09 is slower (on Normal speed) and its graphics are better. It’s possible both these impressions are false, because after a marathon online 360 session I had an experimental game on the PS3. I played a fixture in my Manager Mode (which I definitely will get around to talking about soon) and I couldn’t really tell the difference.

My big problem with FIFA09 over the past few days was the through-ball bug. It had annoyed me to the extent that I downgraded FIFA09 from my initial rating of ‘best game eva’. I did this in the form of a scientific graph, which I have decided will become a regular feature on the blog. Hopefully the graphs will illustrate that my opinions about games are always subject to change. My opinion on Day 1 is not necessarily going to be my opinion on Day 2, or Day 10, or Day 100.

Today’s graph shows the effect of an evening spent playing the Xbox360 version of FIFA09 online. (See fig. 1 below.) After a warm-up Exhibition game and trying to get used to playing football with the 360 controller (it didn’t feel right for ages), I leapt straight into a long session online.

It was one of the single best sessions of computer football gaming in my life. I played about 12 games all told. Some with 5-minute halves. Most with 10-minute halves. I played with and against teams of all skill ranges, from two-stars to five-stars, and all in between.

I was alternately humbled and exalted, lucky and unlucky, skilful and stupid. I discovered that, yes, I am a FIFA09 through-ball whore, and I’m ashamed of it (but will continue to do it).

I also noted that the through-ball bug was mysteriously absent. Although it always looks as if it’s trying to rear its ugly head in the 360 version, it doesn’t seem so bad. The players slow up slightly when receiving through-balls, but they don’t go into their infuriating little dances. So I wonder if the problem is confined to the PS3 and/or a problem just with offline play (with inferior teams and/or human players…)?

The main thing I took from my online session was that FIFA09 is simply a brilliant game. There’s no other word for it. And there’s one aspect of FIFA09 that has definitely changed. Individual players and whole teams now handle completely differently.

Diehard PES players may scoff, but FIFA09 has got real tactical depth. There’s complexity under the hood this year. One of the most stubborn popular beliefs about the new-style FIFA is that the gameplay is ruined in the long-term by all the teams and players feeling pretty much the same to play with. I’d say that there was lots of truth in that. Last season.

This season, it’s completely not true. Absolutely bogus. FIFA09 has superb player and team differentiation. In one game I was Coventry City and my opponent was Norwich City. The players were slow and ponderous on the ball. They tired quickly in the second half and the last third of the match was played at a mutual snail’s pace. It was a grim war of attrition at times.

That is what many PES veterans object to. It’s just no fun, they say, playing a football game that’s so realistic. You can see the same line cropping up again and again on forums everywhere. I saw it this morning on Channel 4’s teletext letters page, for God’s sake (p. 694). It’s one of the memes of FIFA09. It’s become the thing to say.

Well, I’m on the other side of that particular argument. Realism works for me. It’s what I want. It punches my ticket (is that a real saying or did I just make it up?).

Individuals in FIFA09 really shine on the pitch. And teams do too. In my last game last night I was Atletico Madrid, my opponent was Valencia. I’d heard a whisper on the forums that Atletico were a great team to play with, so I sneakily picked them, whilst cackling maniacally. And they are pretty good: ‘only’ a four-star team, but they handle like a top five-star team. I went 1-0 up after 15 minutes thanks to some speedy wingplay.

Then in the second half it all changed. My opponent brought on Morientes to play alongside David Villa. He changed his tactical sliders in the Formation screen to all-out attack. The difference was incredible. Suddenly, I couldn’t cope. I couldn’t get, or keep, the ball; he was attacking my goal for fun, stitching together moves and runs and having shots without any opposition. He got the equaliser. It was incredibly lifelike to see the second-half turnaround.

But my opponent made a mistake. He never changed his all-out attack posture back to something more balanced. No doubt he thought he could keep his momentum going and crush me….

I brought on two fresh players and changed my formation to 4-3-3. I needed to hold the ball up front. Midway through the second half I raced clear with one of my pacy subs, Pongolle I think, who left Valencia’s exhausted left back for dead. I scored. 2-1. And I got two more goals in exactly the same way: through-ball whoring with my fresh players, going up against his knackered defence. It was a lame victory in many ways. I was embarrassed to win 4-1 on the counter-attack, but that’s football.

It was the last game of my session. Two and a half hours. I had some trouble winding down before going to bed. Tactically FIFA09 is incredibly deep, whereas before (even last year) it didn’t feel very deep to me. Gameplay-wise, it’s rich and varied and realistic; it’s also fun, despite the doubters’ doubts. And this morning I discover that EA have fixed the problem of PS3 replays not uploading to that accursed website.

Now, if they can just fix that PS3 through-ball bug….

FIFA09 started well with me. In a graph (see fig.1 below) depicting my attitudes to the game, it would begin last Thursday in the 90s. It would stay up there in the 90s for the next couple of days—before slipping into the 80s yesterday and continuing a downward trend.

Frustratingly, this decline has nothing to do with the game’s core gameplay. I still believe it is the most compelling football gameplay yet seen on a next-gen console. I love the shooting. I love the passing. I love the tactical options. I love the pace of the game (plenty don’t). For the first time in years, I’ve had a pretty good time playing online. It all seemed too good to be true…

And, sadly, FIFA09 has a most unfortunate bug that could potentially wreck everything. I’ll be calling it the through-ball bug, but I’ve seen it called the spinning bug, the side-shimmy bug… Its name is legion. Yesterday morning, the damned through-ball bug grew from being a relatively minor issue that I felt I could cope with or ignore, into a massive, in-my-face, potentially game-wrecking problem.

Let me recap. The through-ball bug occurs when you play a through-ball—in the air or along the ground—and your receiving player, instead of smoothly running onto it as he should, inexplicably spins on the spot as if looking for the ball in the air, or goes into a weird side-shimmy next to the ball. In both cases this allows chasing defenders to catch up and smother the player and ball, usually denying a clear goal-scoring chance.

Yesterday morning I started a Manager Mode career. (I wish I was just writing about that today; perhaps tomorrow I will be.) My first game was tough. Finely balanced at 0-0 in the last few minutes, I managed to spring the CPU’s offside trap and send one of my strikers clear. And the through-ball bug struck. Here’s the clip. After admiring my perfect timing and the weight of the pass, watch what happens at 12 seconds:

The defender jostled me off the ball and my great chance was gone. 0-0 it ended. I have to stress that when my striker starts doing that side-shimmy thing, I’m not doing anything ‘wrong’ with the controller. All I’m doing is pressing the direction+sprint, trying to get clean away from the defence. (I thought it might be the sprint button causing the bug, so I subsequently tried laying off it when running onto through-balls—but it did no good.)

Aerial through-balls result in your player spinning in a circle. The effect is the same as the side-shimmying: delay. The defence catches you.

Why wasn’t I seeing this in the first few days? I was, but not so much. Very rarely, in fact. This was because I was still learning the game, getting used to the engine, testing what was and wasn’t possible. Over the past day or two I’ve started using more through-balls, and succeeded in planting them where I want. Thus, the bug has more chances to ’shine’, and boy is it doing that.

To say I get annoyed about this bug would be an understatement. But I could have accepted it and got over it if it was an isolated incident. A once-in-a-hundred-games fluke.

Sadly, it’s not a fluke. I’m now seeing the through-ball bug all the time, in every game. Almost every through-ball I play results in my player spinning-around or side-shimmying instead of gathering the ball. This is the kind of thing that could make the game unplayable for me in the long term. What a damn shame that would be. Konami must be wetting themselves with glee.

There is a lot of talk of a patch on the official forum. Posting yesterday, David Rutter said his team is ‘looking at it’.

I think it’s pretty damn crucial for this to be patched as soon as possible. Even if fixing it unbalances the entire game. Without the bug, I think I could easily create twice as many clear-cut goal-scoring chances every game. So they might actually just leave the bug well alone. (Could it actually be a deliberate ploy to limit the player? But if so,  why something as blatant—and stupid—as this?!)

I’ve deleted the FIFA09 demos from my consoles, so I can’t check them. But I don’t remember the bug featuring in the demo. Which suggests it was something added, or a side-effect of something else that was added, in a subsequent build of the game. It shouldn’t be hard to find and fix.

So the halo has slipped. Whether it slips further is anybody’s guess.