Career advice
Posted by: not-Greg in FIFA09, PES2009, manager mode, master league, tags: FIFA09, manager mode, master league, PES2009It’s the mid-season 2010 transfer window in my Manager Mode career as Atletico Madrid on the Xbox360 version of FIFA09. (I can’t get over the new Xbox360. With games installed to the hard drive, it runs quieter than the PS3, and is just as reliable. No more freezes.)
I haven’t brought any new players in. As it is, I already have enough. The transfer market in FIFA09 is… not a good gameplay feature. To put it mildly.
As long as you have the money (and it’s easy to get the money if you haven’t got it), you can have any player you want. The transfer market is really a case of picking what players you want from a list. There’s absolutely zero sense of negotiation. This goes for any team in any division in any country. You want ‘em, you got ‘em.
The same rule applies in reverse to players you want rid of. Want to sell a player? Just put them on the list. After your next game, you’ll get an offer. Sometimes the offer will be for less than their value. If so, just wait another week, and a higher offer will come in. This is how it goes, always. ALWAYS.
Sigh. And the transfer market—if it can even be called that (it really is just picking players from a list!)—is just one of Manager Mode’s problems.
I’m not going to lie and pretend that everything is rosy in FIFA09-land. It’s not. I’ve got a big problem with Manager Mode, and the problem’s not going to go away.
When it comes to FIFA09’s core gameplay, everything is still pretty rosy. I still think it’s a superb football game. I have misgivings about its speed (even on Slow, it’s a bit too fast) and about the way it’s a bit too easy to dispossess the AI (leading to tiresome passages of ping-pong in midfield). But overall, the rest of the game stands up.
However. Turns out there’s more to a football game than its gameplay. It’s what you do with that gameplay that counts.
I only ever play a football game’s career mode. That’s how it is for me and I don’t think anything will ever change it. Online play is a very occasional pursuit—if online play ceased to exist I really wouldn’t miss it. I still haven’t even glanced at either FIFA09’s Be A Pro or PES2009’s Become A Legend modes, although I hear great things about both.
Looking back, I should have named this blog Master League Chronicles. That’s the game I’ve been playing for the past several years. That’s what I became addicted to. Not PES as such. Master League. When I started liking PES2009 over the past few weeks, I was actually liking Master League. One of the reasons I loathed next-gen PES2008 so much was that its low difficulty wrecked Master League. You couldn’t help but ‘complete’ your Master League after a few seasons.
Over the past few days of playing Manager Mode, something has become clear to me. There is no contest between FIFA09 and PES2009 for me. No. FIFA09 wins, and PES2009 loses. Yah boo sucks to Seabass, and all the rest of it.
Where the two games conflict, and where I am conflicted, is in the game modes. Master League is currently more attractive for me, by some considerable distance, than Manager Mode. In fact, I’d go as far as saying that I struggle to take Manager Mode at all seriously. It lacks too much that Master League has been doing for several years. A proper transfer market. Variations of time of day and weather (don’t underestimate the power this has to pull you along through season after season).
It’s crazy that FIFA09’s fully-licensed career mode feels primitive and somewhat empty next to PES2009’s fantasy-world equivalent. Even Master League’s menus are ridiculous. And the less said about that notorious dog the better…
But the only thing that Manager Mode really has going for it, in my opinion, is FIFA09 itself. The better core gameplay. Is that enough to sustain me through an inferior career mode? I don’t know yet.
What’s becoming clear to me now, today, is that in the medium-to-long term, it might not matter to me that FIFA09 is the superior football game (and it certainly is that). What’ll matter to me is which career mode of the two on offer—Master League or Manager Mode—I most want to play. I certainly won’t force myself to play Manager Mode if it goes on feeling pretty hollow, as it is doing at the moment.







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