LEE PAYNE

Category: Video Games

  • FIFA 23 – it’s not really in the game, is it?

    This is going to be a tad niche, even going by the previous things I’ve written. What follows will only be of interest to you if you’ve played the computer game FIFA. A hugely successful game, yes, and one that tops the charts every year, but I doubt something my usual readers will have had much to do with.

    The next edition, FIFA 23, is coming out at the end of September and having owned every one since 2001 I’m seriously considering not buying it. It’s because it feels like it’s increasingly being made for a younger audience, an audience that speaks a different language to me. All the nonsense about “xG”, “top bins” and a new goal celebration called “The Griddy” – this isn’t the football I know and love. It is also obsessed with its Ultimate Team mode (which makes developer EA an absolute fortune), and I have no interest in it.

    I have always liked playing Career Mode, where I can put myself in the game as a manager and take over pretty much any club in the game. Invariably, this would start off with me taking charge of my beloved Norwich City. You can play out fifteen seasons, and as well as playing each match you could buy and sell players and bring youth players through.

    But there’s so much more this mode could do. In terms of youth scouting, you hire a scout who you can send on a trip. You determine where they go, how long for and what sort of players they are looking for. Each month the scout will send you a report listing the players they’ve found. The list will show roughly how good the player is now and roughly how good the scout thinks the player could become. How accurate these assessments are depends on how good the scout is, i.e. how much you’re paying them. You can then choose to sign the player, reject them or scout them for a bit longer.

    The trouble is, if you sign a player they are simply added to a youth squad that doesn’t do anything. There are no Under 18 or Under 23 teams in the game, so youth players just remain on this list until you either promote them to the first team or they get fed up and threaten to leave. The players do very gradually improve, but if you’re managing a Premier League or Championship club they are very rarely good enough to play in the first team straight away. You usually end up selling them for a nice little profit and then you might come across them playing against you a few years later, but there’s very little for you in developing a young player in the mode’s current state.

    What FIFA’s career mode really needs is a proper system of U18 and U23 leagues. The young players you’ve scouted could then play some games against other clubs’ academies, keeping them happy and providing them with tangible ways to improve. The manager of these sides could provide you with a report on each match, telling you the result and who played well and who didn’t. The U23s would also be an opportunity to give players who need game time in your main squad a run out. Perhaps FIFA could even go really deep and allow you to start your career managing an U18 or U23 side yourself, rising through the ranks to eventually take the reins of the first team. This would give career mode a whole new dynamic, giving you an incentive to stay at a club for a number of years to see these young players you’ve scouted break through and become mainstays in your first team.

    Now I’d like to move on to international management. At present, you have to start off managing a club and then when you start making a name for yourself you are offered a job managing a national team. If you accept, however, you don’t leave your club side – you continue to manage it alongside whichever country you’ve accepted the offer from. This is most unrealistic, unheard of really in actual football. FIFA should allow you to manage a national team and only a national team. You should be able to request scouting reports on players you can pick in your squad, organise friendlies and training camps, and take your side into a World Cup or contintental competition. This would make you feel more involved and therefore care more about the country you’re in charge of – at the moment the international breaks feel like a chore and an unwanted intteruption to managing your club.

    Those are my two biggest wishes for career mode. There’s more I could say, and more I could ask for from the rest of the game. Quick substitutes, for instance. But it’s clear that FIFA 23 will be another cash cow, unwilling to make the changes to truly put it amongst the elite. This year’s edition will be the final one to bear the FIFA name – can we hope for better from the new iteration, EAFC? I won’t hold my breath.

  • Stay-at-home pubs, Coogan films and GTA: what I’m doing to deal with lockdown

    We’re in the third week of lockdown. It’s a really weird time for everyone. By now, we’re starting to get used to the idea of staying in and finding new ways of doing things. I thought I’d share some of the things I’ve been doing to keep myself occupied and stop myself going stir crazy.

    Film night

    I have never been into films. I can watch hours and hours of sport but sitting in front of a film for two hours or so has never appealed to me. I’m a bit like Michael Owen. I haven’t been to the cinema since 2008 and even that was a sixth form trip to see a French thriller.

    The lockdown and the consequent extra time at home, however, has given me the opportunity to watch the occasional film. Where I live we have a semi-regular film night where we sit and properly watch (no devices allowed) with some snacks. The most recent one we watched was 24 Hour Party People.

    Games

    What’s going on at the moment can make you feel helpless. The news is relentlessly depressing and there’s no end in sight to the pandemic. I’ve found it really helpful playing games. Games give you something to focus on, some achievable goals (as in you can’t stop the pandemic but you can win that game) and a form of escape.

    There are three types of game I’ve been playing since this all started. In my house we’ve been playing games such as Uno and Bananagrams to give us all something to do together of an evening.

    I’ve also been playing The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt on the PS4. It’s not the sort of game I’d usually play, but it features a massive open world that you can explore and that seems pretty appealing when you can’t really go anywhere in real life at the moment. Some might think it’s daft finding solace in computer games but apparently Salman Rushdie played a lot of Mario when he was in hiding and says it helped him through it.

    A few times a week I also play FIFA or GTA with a friend of mine who lives in Cambridgeshire. We talk to each other over a headset while we play so there’s a healthy social aspect to our sessions, even if we are not very good at the games. The video below, for example, is my friend missing the most open of open goals.

    A stay-at-home pub

    My landlord and I like to go to the pub every now and again, but that’s obviously not possible at the moment so we’ve dedicated Wednesday nights to our very own stay-at-home pub. We’ve called it The Head In Hands.

    We sit around the fire, have a couple of drinks and listen to music. Each week the music has a theme. Last week the theme was Brians (don’t ask) and this week it was originals that are less famous than their cover versions. One great example is Gloria Jones, who recorded Tainted Love nearly two decades before Soft Cell had a number one hit with it.

    What these themed nights are doing is giving me a way to mark the days of the week instead of allowing them all to blur into one boring mess. They’re keeping me social and broadening my horizons. I recommend everyone give them a try.

    Stay safe everyone.

  • FIFA 13 demo review

    FIFA is winning the annual battle of virtual football. The EA Sports title upped its game for the 2010 edition and has since become the game of choice for professional players and the wider public – FIFA usually holds the top spot in the gaming charts for months after release. Today, gamers had the chance to try out the latest version for the first time, after weeks of teasers, previews and press events. Is FIFA 13 up to the job?

    Before we get to the match itself, there are some minor details to note. Before you get into the main menu, we still have to pick which language we want the game to be in. This has annoyed some players, who feel it would be much easier to just select a language once and have it saved to remove the need for this button press. As I said, it’s something minor but it is still there. The game starts with a little live action piece showing Lionel Messi, the game’s new cover star, firing a shot into a net. We’re then asked to press start.

    If you haven’t played the demo before, it will ask you to sign in or create an Origin account. This is just the fancy new name for an old EA account so previous players of FIFA should have one to log in with. After that’s out of the way, you can sort your controller settings out and pick your favourite demo team.

    We’re then into our first match, powered by the new Matchday feature. I went in as Arsenal against Borussia Dortmund. The first evidence of the Matchday feature I had was some players not being available through injury, so Vito Mannone was standing in for Wojciech Szczesny. Other players had their overall rating altered to fall in line with their recent form. So, into the game we go.

    The match ended 0-0, as I was still trying to feel my way into the new game, but in the event of a draw you do have a penalty shoot-out. I lost the penalties, hitting one too hard and hitting the post. The penalty system is, however, unchanged. The match itself was quite impressive, with an added hint of randomness. The ball can cannon of a defender’s shinpads and disappear into the stands for a throw, last ditch tackles are more reckless, and there are a lot more deflections – it seems that this year at last it’s possible to have a shot deflected into the net.

    There was a great sense of relief when I discovered that the referees have been sorted finally. No longer (I have now played six games) are perfectly timed tackles penalised with a penalty kick and a red card. In fact, the refs are quite lenient. The free kick count went right down, and I don’t think I got one in a shooting position, so I haven’t been able to try out the new tactical free kicks.

    Skill games are more than just something to pass the time away, they’ll actually help you get better in matches. In the demo the skill games manifest themselves in the loading screen when you’re waiting to kick-off a match. I had a dribbling game, lob passing, ground passing, free kick and penalty challenge in my few matches so it seems there is a good range of different games to master.

    So, the Fifa 13 demo looks like it’s shaping up to become the full game that will occupy our evenings for yet another year. It’s well worth pre-ordering and it has made the best of the engine it has. Next year we should get some really exciting advancements with maybe an early build on a next-gen console.

    There’s a lot involved in the demo, and I can’t cover it all here, so if you have a question then feel free to ask in the comments and I’ll see what I can tell you.

    If you fancy giving this football sim a try, take a look at Origin for the PC, the Xbox Live Marketplace or the PlayStation Store. The full game is out on 28th September.