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.

I’m still playing FIFA08. Not as often as I would like, but I am still playing it. I will go on playing it until FIFA09 is released. But it’s probably too late now for FIFA08 to become my main, or only, football game for the rest of this football game year (what’s left of it).

If the PSP & PS2 version of PES2008 hadn’t come along and rescued my PES year, I’d have played nothing but FIFA08 since the turn of the year. For definite. But ‘last-gen’ PES2008 did come along, and it did save my PES year, and thus FIFA08 has held a rather marginal position ever since.

It’s a shame, as I know there are depths to FIFA08 that I will never get to explore now. There’s just not enough time left. I’d love to have attempted to win the Quadruple in Manager Mode, on Legendary difficulty, starting with a lower-league team, and using House Rules in the transfer market to make it more realistic. What a fascinating experience that would have been—one to hold in reserve for FIFA09 and beyond. I think I might have found it impossible.

It’s always possible that both FIFA09 and PES2009 will turn out to be terrible or unsatisfactory in some way. Not much chance, in my opinion—I believe both of them will be great, I really do— but there’s still a chance. If so, I’ll always have FIFA08 to fall back upon.

At the moment I’m playing a Manager Mode career with the lowest-ranked club in the English leagues—Dagenham & Redbridge. I started out playing on Professional difficulty, which is the middle of five difficulty levels in FIFA08. The difficulty levels in FIFA08 are not the equivalents of those on Pro Evo—a fact that has probably caught out many a curious PES player. Professional level on FIFA08 is roughly the same as 4.5 stars on PES, or just below Top Player. The higher difficulty levels—World Class and Legendary—are both considerably harder than the hardest difficulty level on PES. Legendary is completely off the scale. I don’t know how anyone could play that level regularly.

I’d pretty much mastered Professional, if I may say so myself. Winning a Quadruple in my first Manager Mode career was a sign that it was maybe time to step things up a notch. I took Dag & Red from the lowest point in League Two to the cusp of the Championship. During the last few games of my promotion season from League One, I upped the difficulty to World Class—possibly reckless of me, but it was long overdue. I won promotion and have now started my campaign to get Dag & Red into the Premier League, still on World Class.

It’s hard. I’m finding it very, very hard. It’s so hard that some of it isn’t even enjoyable. Now, I adore hard games. Ninja Gaiden? Loved it. Etrian Odyssey (a really old-school RPG on the DS)? Playing it now and loving it. There aren’t enough truly hard games, in my opinion. (PES itself could do with being a lot harder.)

FIFA08 is a hard game even on its lowest difficulty setting. As you move up, things get progressively tougher. On World Class, the difficulty level hits Ninja Gaiden-proportions. Long, long periods can go by without having the ball. When I get the ball, I can’t do anything with it. In my most recent FIFA08 session I played one game where I had precisely one shot on goal in 90 minutes (played as 5-minute halves), and that shot was off-target by a country mile. (When you miss the target in FIFA08, you miss the target by a long way. The assisted shooting of PES looks and feels clumsily arcadey, almost childlike, in comparison.)

Things picked up because I persevered. That’s the key to hard games in general, and to FIFA08 in particular: perseverance. The reason games developers make so few genuinely hard games—i.e. games whose harder difficulty levels are hard and remain hard, forever, even after long experience with the game—is that hard games are not deemed ‘accessible’, and accessibility is everything from a money-making point of view. Instant gratification and bite-sized chunks of gaming are where it’s all at. (May the gods of gaming save us from the dreaded ‘casual gamer’.)

FIFA08 on its harder difficulty setting demands concentration, patience, persistence, dedication, discipline…. You can’t have half your attention on the radio. One of my worries about FIFA09 is that EA might choose to lower the difficulty settings after a lot of reviewer negativity, and bring them into line with PES settings. That had better not happen.

After a few goalless draws and 0-1 defeats—and one chastening 0-3 defeat, where I actually felt lucky to get nil—something clicked. I got it. I got what World Class on FIFA08 is all about. I started playing football, continental-style. Knocking it around at the back, waiting for an opening to emerge. In PES, especially over recent years, that style of play just isn’t encouraged. You can ping the ball forward within seconds and create a goal-scoring chance without much effort at all. Occasionally, yes, passing the ball sideways and backwards is advisable—but how often, really? About 5% of the time, in my experience. In FIFA08, that equation is almost completely turned on its head. The times when you can pass the ball forward in seconds and burst through on goal account for roughly 5% of attacks. The rest of the time, you’ve got to work hard for everything.

FIFA08 is not without its faults. Some are major, many are minor, others are just comical. Take this goal, for example—

I have a tame shot that the dodgy keeper ‘edges’ with his palm. The ball rolls towards an unguarded net, but is stopped by a CPU defender, who knocks it back toward the now-upright keeper. The ball stops at the keeper’s feet. Evidently the AI’s script doesn’t know what to do here, because neither the defender nor keeper try to do anything else with the loose ball. My striker gets in between them and bundles the ball into the net. I couldn’t believe my luck. That was a big goal in an important game.

As things stand right now, I’m sitting in 9th place in the Championship. I’m still struggling to find lasting form at the World Class difficulty level. I doubt I’ll be able to find my feet in time to make a push for promotion this season. But that’s fine by me. Consecutive promotions whilst playing on Professional difficulty made me get more than a little complacent about FIFA08. Moving things up a level has whetted my appetite for the struggle again.

FIFA08 is a rich, filling meal. After an hour of playing FIFA08 I start to feel very full up.

FIFA08 is an uncompromising, rugged simulation of the game of football. This much is already well-known, although I’d bet there are still plenty of PES fans who believe in the ’same old FIFA’ slogan that we’ve spent a decade confidently repeating to ourselves. It’s no longer true, but the news is taking its time getting out there.

The astounding thing about EA’s effort this year wasn’t just that they caught up with PES in simulation terms, but leapt over PES and streaked away into the distance. This doesn’t necessarily mean that FIFA08 is the better football game, of course. FIFA08 has certainly not been to everyone’s liking. FIFA08’s very simulation-ness is the reason so many PES fans dislike it so much.

It really is possible to play several dour, technical 0-0 games in a row. It’s pretty common in FIFA08 to play games in midfield for most of the time, with the AI grimly holding onto the ball or just as grimly wresting the ball away from you. For me, it’s a reason to like the game, and to celebrate EA’s belated arrival on the field of serious football games. (Maybe that should be EA’s re-arrival—I thought some of the mid-1990s FIFAs were pretty good for their time. Particularly FIFA97.)

I’m still playing my second career in FIFA08 Manager Mode with Dagenham & Redbridge. I’ve already taken them from being the absolute worst team in the English leagues (which is why I chose them) to the brink of promotion to the Championship.

I’ve quickly assembled a very good squad, which is one of the game’s great failings in my opinion. If you want a player and you’ve got the money, you’ll get that player in all but a few instances. The only way to make it even remotely realistic is to implement House Rules, which is always a bad sign. I think FIFA09 has got to have a proper transfer market, the tougher the better.

I’ve finally got off my lazy behind and moved up a difficulty level. I’d spent most of my FIFA08 play-time since September on Professional, with occasional peeks over the wall at the World Class and Legendary levels. I soon rushed back when I found a game that was so difficult it was very little actual fun to play. I’m not the kind of gamer who usually demands that a game should be fun above all else, so what I saw in World Class on FIFA08 really spooked me.

Three games from the end of the season, with Dag & Red sitting in third place in League 1, I took a deep breath (as much literal as metaphorical) and changed the game difficulty to World Class. I braced myself, and plunged in.

At first I was pleasantly surprised. One of the features of FIFA08 at Professional difficulty is the regular recurrence of 1-0 scorelines. That’s okay, really—it’s one of the most common scorelines in real-life football. But it’s often frustrating to see the AI carve itself out a great chance in front of goal only to ridiculously shoot wide or head over (from two yards). On World Class, the AI is proportionally deadlier in front of goal. The AI rarely, if ever, tries long shots on Professional; on World Class, it scores beauties from distance quite regularly.

I lost my first game on World Class 3-1. It was the worst defeat I’d had in FIFA08 for a couple of seasons. I was pretty frustrated by the AI in this game. One of FIFA08’s worst features, in my opinion, is the AI’s rather transparent keepball script. With the ball at an AI player’s feet, he’ll often turn and turn, and run in tight little circles, automatically evading any and every effort to get at the ball.

Professional fouls don’t work in FIFA08—or better to say that they don’t work as well as they do in PES2008. In PES it’s pretty easy to hack a player down if that’s what you really, really want to do (and you’re happy to accept the likely red card). In FIFA08 the AI player just ‘knows’ when you’re trying to scythe him down, and he jinks from side to side and speeds up accordingly.

As in PES, in FIFA08 the AI goes into overdrive when it’s behind. Things aren’t nearly as bad as PES’s God Mode. Your own players don’t lose the ability to trap the ball, dribble, pass, and shoot. But the AI’s keepball script frequently gets ramped up to preposterous levels. It can get very ugly out there when you’re trying to defend a lead.

I recovered from the defeat to win the next game 2-0. It was a very satisfying game that featured a FIFA08 rarity—a goal straight from the kickoff:

It’s pretty straightforward to dribble past a player or two from the kickoff, even on World Class. But I’ve found it tough to score that kind of goal. As anyone who has played FIFA08 (or UEFA2008) would testify, getting the right timing, power, and placement to execute a long-range shot is one of the most challenging (and rewarding) aspects of the all-new FIFA engine.

After this I drew a game 1-1 with a last-minute equaliser. I’d won promotion and, as it turned out, the League 1 title. I’m happy to be playing in the Championship next season. But I’ll have to play extremely well, and concentrate very hard, to have any chance of making it into the Premier League. World Class took its toll on me in this short play-session. I felt as if I’d spent my time almost strangling the controller. Did I enjoy the games more than I would have enjoyed Professional? Yes, absolutely. As a gamer I love games with depth, subtlety, strategy, all those things. It’s no wonder the instant gratification crowd have largely shunned FIFA08.

Ah, but will I enjoy a full season on World Class difficulty? Now that is the question. I’ll know more by next Sunday.