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:

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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?

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:

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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.

Confession to make: I’m in the football game doldrums. I’ve been in them for some time, probably from just before the World Cup. I shifted from playing Master League to FIFA10. FIFA10′s Manager Mode let me down quite badly, feeling even worse than ever. I was cut adrift. Then the World Cup got going and took a lot more time away from my football gaming. Football Manager 2010 and a few non-football games have also had an impact. This is definitely the least football-gamey I’ve felt in a long, long time, maybe in years.

I am still playing PES2010/FIFA10 for an hour or so every day. It’s habit more than anything. I tend to skip between the games and dabble in various modes, rarely playing the same thing in consecutive sessions. I’ve even had enjoyable sessions of Manager Mode.

I’m dragging myself through the early parts of a Become A Legend career in PES2010. It’s got quite difficult to keep playing. I mean that it’s got difficult to keep my interest levels high. It’s season 2 and I’m past the early, frustrating period of being on the subs’ bench all the time. Now I’m starting regularly, albeit wth occasional returns to the bench.

My core gaming experience of BaL is just the same, all the time. Go on the pitch, twist and turn for ages, watch the ball, call for the ball, be ignored, keep watching, take up a good position, receive the ball, lay it off tidily or dribble for a bit and then lay it off tidily, rinse, repeat, end of match. I have a shot every now and then. My player is still very young and very below-average, akin to an ML Default player.

I’m oath-sworn to give this mode a chance, at least 5 seasons—but that presupposes a certain base level of enthusiasm remaining constant, and it’s not. It could be that BaL is just not for me, in the same way that Master League is just not for some people. This is by no means the end for me and BaL. Just a signal that I’ll most likely play it occasionally, rather than daily, for the rest of the summer. It could take a while to get through the 5 seasons, but I’ll persist. I’ll persist with BaL solely because of the ML-like devotion that so many PES veterans have for it. I want to peel away the spiky outer layers and get at that soft, nougaty centre, if I can.

Over the past few days I’ve played some of my PES2010 Master League career for the first time in a few weeks. It’s got too easy for me now, but the memory of the 18 seasons I spent playing it at white-hot intensity will never leave me. It still entertains me for a few matches at a time. I scored a stylish volley from a cleared corner with one of my DMFs, the regen Gattuso. Coincidentally, in the previous session I scored a similar volley with a player in my Manager Mode team. What made the FIFA10 volley a bit special was that it came from a fully manual cross that I managed to deliver perfectly for once. Here they both are:

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I’ve come to a weird understanding with Manager Mode. I no longer expect it to take on ML-like proportions. I just play the games, one after the other. I still don’t really check on where my team is in the table, although I believe I’ve got a good chance of promotion with Coventry City in this, my second season. Will I finish the season, though? Unknown. Probably. But possibly not. FIFA10 continues to be dragged down by its career mode, which should be the game’s blazing, shining light. Oh, Manager Mode, if only you were even a bit better!

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This week has seen another stage on the road to PES2011. The new screens and videos and hands-on accounts are all over the PES web—I won’t recap them all here. Except to say that, once again, those of us who play single-player most of the time (all of the time, in my case) have been badly served by the previewers. They’ve all mainly played multiplayer again. Fucking hell.

Their argument (according to one of them, anyway) is that they were only there to analyse the overall way that the game played. Hmmm. That presupposes a lot of things.

A 1p vs 2p match is not a true representation of how a football game plays in single-player. Human players commonly indulge in sprint-clamping, which produces a particular kind of gameplay—a very different kind from single-player where the AI, bless it, rarely indulges in the benighted practice. Most of us still play single-player most of the time. I believe it is a better kind of game than the pressure-fests of multiplayer. The game that we unwrap and play on Day 1 will be qualitatively different from the one that all these previewers are reporting back on.

The infuriating thing is that I’m sure most of the previewers are predominantly single-players as well. And this is only the beginning. We’re coming into the season now where more and more grinning fools will look out at us from Flash video windows, both of them holding 360 controllers in their hands, and they’ll give us ‘the skinny’ on PES2011/FIFA11, having button-mashed one another to death for an hour or two. No, no, no, no, no, no. no, no. NO.

Which is why I’m less and less interested in reading about PES2011 nowadays. I’m just not reading anything about the actual game that I’ll end up playing.