I’ve been sacked. I’ve been sacked in FIFA09 for the very first time. I feel strangely euphoric about it, as if I’ve been secretly waiting for it to happen. Wanting it to happen. Now I’m in the club.

I knew it was going to happen and I knew there was nothing I could do to avoid it. If you have ever played Burnout, there are times when you know that in a few moments you’ll clip off the side of a truck and crash into a wall and there’s nothing you can do about it. This career has been a little like that.

Over the past week I’ve detailed my struggles with various aspects of the game. As mid-October in my first season came around, I was bottom of the table with a record that said: WON 0, DRAWN 4, LOST 8. I got a final warning (as it turned out) then I played a Cup game, lost it, and that was that. El Sacko. After 12 league games. I think I was lucky to make it as far as mid-October.

When the crucial game finished and I’d lost it, I still believed I might survive another week. This was ‘only’ a League Cup game, after all. Surely I was worth one last game in the league? But no. Even so, the game took its sweet time in letting me know.

The first indication that anything was amiss was when FIFA09 started to simulate the rest of the season. When I saw this, I knew something was up:

Only after the season had been well and truly simulated did I get the confirmation. It’s another sign of the slapdash approach to Manager Mode that you’re told about the sacking after the game has spent several seconds simulating the season while you watch. Really, EA. You must try harder with Manager Mode in FIFA2010. (The scary thing is that the final feature set for FIFA2010 has probably already been decided, if not actually programmed.)

And just in case there was any doubt (note the generic stripey-shirted footballer in the graphic: nothing at all to do with me or my team):

After this, I was taken straight back to the Arena. As others have discovered, Manager Mode doesn’t let you carry on your career with another club in the same game world. Which is very odd. I’m sure it’s not meant to be that way. Could this comprehensive Game Over be yet another bug?

I didn’t reload my old save. I never reload. Game Over means game over.

All of which leaves me rather high and dry. I’ll start again, in due course, with Coventry City—but on Professional difficulty next time. World Class is a step too far for me. I need to learn the game better at a lower level. But that’s for the future—probably next week now.

In the meantime, I’ll be playing my PES2009 Master League. Yes, this blog is going back to its roots for a long weekend. Will I find anything there to tempt me back?

So… FIFA09 and its notorious through-ball bug. Ouch—especially for PS3-owners, who seem to have drawn the shortest cross-platform straw (again).

There’s a patch in the offing. It’ll probably arrive in the next few weeks. I’m sure it’ll correct the problem and everything will be rosy. But it grates on me that we ever had to put up with the problem at all. It simply shouldn’t be like this.

What the frack happened in testing? What happened to games being released when they were ready? Let me rephrase that: whatever happened to games developers committing the necessary resources and personnel to a game to get it released BUG-FREE in the time available?

In the era of Internet-connected consoles, downloadable updates and patches, there’s a nasty new trend in the air. Games are pushed onto the shelves laden with the kinds of bugs and glitches that would have caused delays in previous eras. In the old days (not so long ago really) developers had to get it right within a specified timeframe, or they failed. Simple as. And they mostly didn’t fail. Games still appeared with bugs and glitches, of course they did. But nowadays the threshold of what is and isn’t acceptable on release day (Day Zero in developer-speak) is a lot lower. All because of the damn Internet—curse its miserable, virtual hide.

“We are all Beta-testers” has become an online cliche, applied to FIFA09 and to dozens of other games, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

The through-ball bug (also known as the side-shimmy bug, or ‘crab-walking’) in FIFA09 occurs when you play a through-ball to one of your players. (It’s also affected me whilst playing normal passes, but I won’t go there today.) For anyone who needs a refresher on the through-ball bug, here’s a clip of it in action. I’m currently seeing this happen two or three times in every game, often several times per half:

Instead of running smoothly onto the ball, the player inexplicably starts side-shuffling, dancing on the spot, slowing right down. It’s a ball-gathering animation that belongs in another context completely, when a player would be waiting for a slow pass from behind. Here, the player should be running ahead onto a ball in front of him. Hopefully this will be quite easy to fix. I have to say again: how could this have escaped the notice of EA’s playtesters? Perhaps it didn’t escape their attention, but it was too late to fix it so they just went ahead and published anyway, knowing they could rectify things with a patch. We really are just cash cows to the games industry, when it comes right down to it.

Instances of the bug SEEM to be related to the quality of players you choose to play with. Playing with Coventry, I suffer it several times per game; playing with better teams, maybe once per game, or once every other game. Many people report seeing the bug very rarely, or not at all. Xbox360 players seem to be the most fortunate, and I have to say that in my games on the 360 a few weeks ago I rarely saw it either. Some people claim never to see it. It exists, though. Oh yes. It exists.

I don’t think any football game in the history of football games has ever appeared with a bug quite like this one. The nearest comparable bug that springs to mind would be PES5’s ‘auto-stepover’ bug that constantly gave away silly, stupid, infuriating throw-ins. At least that bug never directly affected your goal-scoring efforts.

The FIFA09 through-ball bug penalises your patient build-up play by blowing a fat raspberry in your face. It blatantly robs you of clear goal-scoring opportunities. It smells, and I hate it I hate it I hate it.

I couldn’t blame the bug for my singular lack of progress in my Coventry City Manager Mode career. There are plenty of other ways to craft a goal in this great game (I still think it’s a great game) than the through-ball. My lack of goals is all my own fault. But the through-ball bug seems designed to infuriate struggling players in particlar, who might only create a handful of chances per match.

I’ve played another few games of my career. I managed a draw, but lost three games. A game against Norwich saw the worst-yet manifestation of the through-ball bug. 0-1 down with seconds to go, I somehow fashioned a killer through-ball to set my striker loose for a one-on-one opportunity—but my striker side-shimmied instead of running with the ball, and the defenders got back to smother the chance.

I’m about as resoundingly bottom of the league as it’s possible to be. I’ve had all the warnings from the board. I’ve had the dreaded vote of confidence. I predict that I will be sacked from this career within the next few games.

I’m really not impressed by some major elements of FIFA09’s Manager Mode. The transfer market for one. It is completely broken. It might as well not even be in the game. As long as you have enough money to pay the transfer fee and/or wages, you can get any player. It doesn’t matter what club you are, or what division you are in. There are no exceptions.

Starting with any lower league team you pretty quickly have the kind of bank balance that’d be the envy of many a top-division club. Sponsorship money is ridiculously inflated. You can sell any of your rubbish players straightaway for their full market value or greater. If a low offer comes in, you just reject it and wait another week—the higher offer invariably arrives. By the end of the first January transfer window in the first season, you can virtually replace your entire First XI with good or even great players.

No, FIFA09 is not Football Manager—and I wouldn’t want it to be. But I’d at least like it to be on the same level as PES’s Master League, where the much-maligned transfer system is actually hyper-realistic when compared with FIFA’s dismal effort.

And the transfer market isn’t even the half of it. There are many other issues. There are no night matches in Manager Mode, ever. (I know about the menu trick to get night games. It doesn’t count.)

EA’s publicised reason for this is that some of the stadia in the game have no night versions, and thus it would be inconsistent to have midweek games played at those stadia in broad daylight. This excuse utterly dumbfounds me. I find it hard to believe that presumably dozens of otherwise professional, sober games developers decided it would be more consistent for there to be no night matches at all in a 15-seasons-long career mode. For a game that would like to be reborn as every footy gamer’s favourite simulation, this is laughable. My genuine personal belief is that they just couldn’t be arsed with enabling Manager Mode night games—or that they simply forgot it. The whole ‘consistent/inconsistent’ argument reeks of the kind of spin put on things after the fact to make a silly oversight more palatable to the punters.

If FIFA2010 appears without a radically transformed Manager Mode I’ll be very disappointed. In fact, even at this early stage I’d have to deem it either make or break for me. The transfer market is only part of what needs to change. Just give us night matches, dynamic weather effects, realistic transfers and injuries (injuries! don’t get me started on injuries!), and that’ll be the current generation of football games all but sewn up.

Now that I’ve worked myself up into this frenzy of moaning, there’s another thing.

I’m bloody irritated by FIFA09’s North American-style treatment of football teams as being singular entities. In Europe, or at least in the UK segment of it, we would say (for example) Coventry City are through to the Cup Final. But FIFA09 would say Coventry City is through to the Cup Final. The goddamn verb is just plain wrong! It makes me double-take every time I see it.

——————

After all that solid-gold moaning, here are my House Rules. I’ll be applying them strictly to my current Coventry City career. The rules are deliberately straightforward. I could draw up complex tables and graphs and computational charts designed to tell me what to do every time I want to make a substitution, but I’d prefer to get on with the game.

I can sum up the meat-and-potatoes of my House Rules in three paragraphs:

• Transferring players in and out. I have to maintain a squad of at least 24 players. No selling off of the youngsters willy-nilly. No buying-in of superstars, unless it’s realistic for them to come. My transfers must be appropriate at all times. I can never buy players way, way above the average ability level of my squad. If and when I make it to the Premier League, then I can start picking up better players.
• Staff upgrades. Just like my transfer policy, my staff upgrades must run in parallel to the growth of the club. At the moment, down near the bottom of the Championship, I can only upgrade my Attacking, Midfield, Defensive, and Goalkeeping staff to the 4/10 level. If I get to the top half of the table and hold steady there, I can go to 5/10. If I get promoted, 6/10. And so on.
• A special case here is the Fitness coach. Upgraded past a certain point, your players never get tired between matches. So the maximum I am ever allowed to upgrade Fitness to is 4/10. At this level, I’m forced to practise Master League-style squad rotation from match to match. If I win the Premier League with Coventry City, I can go up to 5/10. But no further than that, ever.

And that is all. The rules are subject to change at any time, depending on how realistic or unrealistic I want to make things.

I’ve already played a number of games in my first season. Things have not gone well for Coventry City, who are down near the foot of the table. So far, then, yes, it’s all proving very realistic…