As much as we gleaned a lot of enjoyment out of FIFA 06, and would heartily recommend it as a companion to PES, this year's version offers precious little advance on last year's - save for some relatively minor additions that do little to address our ongoing concerns. Quite honestly, if you already own last year's edition, there's little incentive to shell out all over again for the ability to issue tactical commands - although being able to use PES' button mapping is a godsend: at last! Needless to say, FIFA is still uniquely entertaining by virtue of its fantastic licensing and very solid gameplay. But - and we say this every year - no amount of official team and player rosters can disguise that underneath there's a game that's desperately trying to be as good as its elusive competitor, but failing. In a way, we'd rather EA went down a completely different road and made FIFA the pick-up-and-play arcade action alternative than the PES-inspired facsimile that it has morphed into. As it stands, FIFA once again offers a huge amount of entertainment - but you'll be left covering your face after you've witnessed EA miss a hatful of chances to go top of the table.
I really don't agree with the assessment that there's been no improvement from 2005. The ball physics in this version (at least the demo), while not as good as Winning Eleven, are a big improvement from last year. I think they've also tweaked the AI nicely as well, although again final comment will have to rest until I've had a chance to play the full version.
I've seen some reports that FIFA is getting ripped in many of the gaming mags. It's too bad since these are many of the same mags that were giving glowing reviews and excessively high ratings to past years versions that were absolute sh*t! Seems like they're compensating by low balling this years version.
I'll be picking up PES5 but I can certainly see myself giving Fifa 2006 a fair amount of gaming time.
Best wishes,
Doug
"Every major sport has come under the influence of organized crime. FIFA actually is organized crime" - Charles Pierce
Based on the demo I played, the ball physics is a concern to me, it just seems too attached to the player. Also, on the graphics department EA has dropped the ball this year, while stadiums look awesome and faces are great, players look rather robotic. In PES the players have different heights/bulk, and Fifa everyone is shaped the same.
I still think among Fifas, the 98 WC edition was one of the better footy games from EA. But from the "purist" footy fan that I am , I think I'll be sticking with PES5 or WE9 as I am fully enjoying it.
Like Doug, I'm trying not to pass any final judgement until I've got hold of the full version (which I'll be doing as soon as my budget allows) but based on the demo I too am inclined to disagree with Eurogamer's take on the game.
One of the gripes that I and a great many others have had with recent FIFA outings is that there is a huge amount of space between each bank of players with little interaction between them - in other words, your midfield will resolutely stay 30 yards behind the strikers regardless of how advanced your attack is, your defence will never push up to the halfway line when you're in possession and they'll have to guard your goal without any help from the midfielders. What I've played of 06 suggests that EA have gone a long way towards fixing that, and that alone brings about enough of a change in the gameplay to warrant a purchase over FIFA 2005. I've seen midfielders follow up rebounds at both ends and make runs beyond the strikers, something the series has always lacked, and while it's not a desperately frequent occurance you'll sometimes find your full backs coming forward on the overlap providing another attacking option.
The reviewer (Kristan Reed, a man whose reviews I've come to distrust with time) does have a point regarding the graphics, mind - some of the halo effects are frankly bizarre, though I don't think the depth of vision effects are half as bad as Kristan does. In terms of the gameplay, I don't see it having the long-term appeal of a PES game but I do feel it's a greater step forward than the review would have you believe.
All that and Hartlepool United are in it...of course, I'll need to play the full version to verify all of this and I hope to be able to post a bit more in the next couple of days, if I can persuade myself to part with the cash.
The look of FIFA 06 isn't that different overall, but the subtle changes the development team at EA Canada threw in help bring the game to life. With the standard side-to-side camera perspective during the run of play, you're getting the depth of field with players in the distance appearing shorter and smaller than players closer to the "camera." A little change like this makes a big difference since the net effect is you get more room to maneuver when your player is at the top of the screen and keep proper spacing. Plus you can really see the details on player uniforms and faces when they're near the closer touchline.
During the short cinemas for fouls, substitutions and other close-ups, FIFA 06 really shines. The players stay in focus while the background gets blurry and soft. During night time games in the rain, you see the mist flowing down in front of the big stadium lights and it really adds to the drama that you're about to create on the field. You can see the emotion on player faces as they argue calls with the referee or square up on an opponent in anticipation of a brawl that will never happen.
The player animations have been refined to reflect the deeper player-ball physics system. The quick moves with the ball you were able to make just by leaning the left analog stick in FIFA 2005 aren't as reliable in FIFA 06. Instead of a player playing the ball ahead, say 8 yards to beat a defender, he'll only play it ahead 3 yards now. Little touches like that change the way the game is played considerably.
Sound
The impressive list of music acts from around the world is guaranteed to expand your musical horizons if you're going to be logging a lot of time on FIFA 06. The ability to go into the playlist, listen and easily edit which songs you do and do not want in rotation is certainly welcome. They even have iTunes style cover art for most of the acts.
The announcing duo of Clive Tydsley and Andy Gray are a nice change of pace from Motson and McCoist, the announcers in previous versions of FIFA. Team and player specific lines of dialogue are always a nice touch and just hearing them from different guys makes for a fresh experience. In sports games you end up doing the same things over and over again, because you have success with them, and so it's virtually impossible to avoid hearing the same announcer lines repeatedly. In FIFA 06, the developers have done as good a job as you can expect keeping things interesting dozens of hours into your campaign or tournament.
The way the crowd explodes when the home team scores is extremely impressive. There isn't a lot of scoring in this sport, so it's worth it to have your surround sound system set up to bathe in the glory of a goal.
Closing Comments
FIFA 06 is a decent improvement over the 2005 edition and it's instantly apparent to anybody familiar with the series. The visuals and physics will the first to grab you and the manager mode will keep you fumbling around menus for hours. It still hasn?t struck the balance of intuitive play and depth of control that you get from Winning Eleven but the power of authentic players, teams and leagues still carries a lot of weight. Like many other EA Sports games, FIFA 06 does a wonderful job of capturing the culture of the sport it represents. Fans of world football will feel that from the opening video sequence.
That's the last page of that review. It got more and more masturbatory as it went from page one to two, then page three just took the cake. Not that I think FIFA will suck ass or anything, but just that IGN will never chastise EA for much. This third page is pure fluff.
"FIFA 06 does a wonderful job of capturing the culture of the sport it represents. Fans of world football will feel that from the opening video sequence"
An insult to all those fans that played the WE series.
I think its an accurate statement, its about all it does get right tho. The demo felt a lot different than 05 and it plays way better now , i was liking it a lot until i tried PES 5 demo man Konami have just nailed it this time.
If they would just get that fifa feel and licences it would be as close to perfection as needed
I feel they would just clean up if they would get licences. do you realy think they are just milking it this much ? Does it realy take all there resources to just do the little fine tuning every 6 months ?
The tweaks they make are usually spot on, seems like they shoot themselves in the foot, they could capture the world with some licensing.
Sorry but you cant talk fifa without pro evo rearing its head.
Has Konami said whether they're trying to get the licenses?
Did anyone see Real Sports on HBO last week? They had a segment on racism, particularly the incidents in Spain with the crowd making monkey sounds when the black players on the England team touched the ball.
An activist working against racism said in every game in Spain, Italy and Eastern Europe, you'll see displays of racism in the crowd.
They even had a picture of the Spanish team captain doing the Hitler salute to the crowd. A lot of clubs have sections specifically for fascists/racists with Nazi-inspired slogans.
Doesn't sound at all like isolated incidents. So does FIFA reflect this part of futbol culture?
FifaInspected wrote:I'm looking forward to WE9, and can only hope that Konami would be brilliant enough to add online leagues and or tournaments similiar to the 2k series.... Or maybe that would destroy my marriage and career....
Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on there, little dogie!
As a newbie to the bizarre world of Konami game release logic, you can be forgiven for being optimistic. But you ought to be told, you can't get excited about Konami and features, especially for their North American releases. That just leads to heart break and depression.
It took Konami 3 years to release PES/WE on the PS2 in NA. 3 years! I'm just happy we have a game on Xbox that is playable, right now. Sure, they've said they're releasing WE9 in NA in the late winter, and they've said it will be online, but I believe them about as far as I could throw a champion Sumo wrestler.
With Konami, one must take an "I'll believe it when I see it" attitude, or else suffer the consequences of hopes dashed. When that game is in my machine, and I can actually get online, then I'll believe it. And I would hope they would use the 360 to get their NA release cycle in synch with the release cycles in Japan and Europe, but I ain't counting on it. Expect that if they release WE 360 in NA that it would come in Feb. of 2007. But hey, no guarantees they will actually release in NA. We've been through that movie before.
From TVG:
"One of the few introductions is for the player to bring the ball under close control, shielding it away from opponents. The implementation however is extremely shallow, requiring the sole use of one button and emphasising the sensation that the ball is stuck to the player’s foot whilst skating along on ice! "
That's the feeling I had as I mentioned earlier in this thread. Another annoyance is that your teammates don't have an understanding of what a thru pass is all about as the ball gets intercepted all the time by the ooponents' D, not so much because they anticipate what you're doing but your own players just don't read ahead of the play.
On some runs the feeling of running with the ball is like the ball being attached to an elastic band to your feet.
10spro wrote:On some runs the feeling of running with the ball is like the ball being attached to an elastic band to your feet.
I haven't put serious time into FIFA since the 2002WC game, but this sounds about what I expect it to be. Plus the 'foosball' positioning.
The one thing about it is that I have enjoyed FIFA head to head (not to mention 2 on 2, where the game really starts to open up, but of course they wouldn't want to let us do that online, would they), and so I'm tempted just for onilne play. Anyone have impressions of head-to-head play? Are teams different enough to have personality? Is there variety in the play, or does it descend into both sides trying the same couple of tricks?
Get yourself a beer or three, we might be a while.
Zep, I've got no online impressions - such is life for the 56k-if-I'm-lucky brigade - but based on what I've played offline I don't imagine there's a great chance of teams displaying any individual personality. As ever, how you play FIFA is defined to at least some degree by what actually works as opposed to what should work, and while it still emerges as a perfectly playable title you don't tend to find all that many surprises when it comes to how teams play. I'd be quite interested to hear what sort of breadth of playing styles there is online, though, just because I can't imagine there being more than a couple of ways to have any success.
Having got hold of the full version, it's pleasing to be able to say that the 'table football' positional quirks of past FIFA titles are on the way to being dealt with. It does still happen that you'll find yourself cursing your lack of support, and there's enough in the game to suggest that the AI lacks more than a little in the I department, but often now I'm finding that after hoofing the ball to the strikers I'll have a winger making a supporting run outside if I can hold the ball up for a little while. If an attack builds down the wing there'll be bodies to aim for in the box instead of the 'one forward scratching himself' approach taken by FIFA 2005, and every so often one of the full backs forgets himself and sets off on the overlap - that one caught me by surprise, I seem to recall cursing at other FIFAs more than once because I'd played a pass to a full back who wasn't there when he ought to have been.
Not totally certain about the new free-kick system, since as far as I can work out it's actually the same basic code presented in a slightly different way, but I like the new corner system a little better. Sorry, I like the changed corner system, even if it seems exactly like the system they'd used for years before all the set-piece routine business came in. I miss the off the ball control on corners a little - in the last couple of years half of the fun on corners has been shaking off your man or blocking a route to goal - but there's a little bit more unpredictability about what happens in the area this year, which I like.
Edit: For those who weren't aware, off the ball control has gone totally, not just from set plays. On the field, you're not going to be asked to control more than one man at a time this year and so you don't have to go cycling through players and making them run to where they should have been all along. I never found it to be essential in 2004 and 2005 but that's just as well because the bloody thing was so unwieldy as to be unusable. Removing it represents something but I'm sure progress isn't the right word for it. Improvement. That'll do.
I've not come across anything that I'd consider money so far, though I dare say we all will in a day or two. What worries me a little at the moment is that if you're having trouble beating the goalkeeper on the deck, he's susceptible to a chip even if he's only stood about 2 yards off lhis line. I've not tried this with any sort of regularity so I don't know how much of it was down to any game-specific flaw and how much of it was down to Brentford's Stuart Nelson not being all that good.
Speaking of goalkeepers, there's not a lot going on in the game to suggest that anything much has been done to the 'keeper AI, and therefore they're as reliably unreliable as before.
Someone, somewhere within EA really believes the Manager mode serves some sort of purpose. It doesn't even serve as any sort of half-decent career now since you can start with a Prem club if you wish rather than working your way up the leagues, and the pre and post-match activities might take up about a minute if you're feeling leisurely, so...why? Same idea with the momentum meter - your gauge being empty, full or somewhere in between makes no appreciable difference to either your team or the CPU, and the criteria used to judge it are a mystery to me too. My Pools were battering Swansea City away from home, had the momentum gauge filled and then went 2-0 down in the space of 5 minutes after the restart. Momentum gauge still full, Swansea gauge still at minimum, absolutely no difference made to the game itself.
Time for a vent - Adam Boyd, scorer of 27 goals last season, is a £1m-rated striker. He is not, regardless of what EA may believe, a natural central midfielder, nor should he be one of the worst players in the Hartlepool United squad. I wonder how many other examples of plainly inaccurate team members there are through the game. While I'm at it, why are only half of our summer signings in the game? Why is it that at least two members of the HUFC team that went to Cardiff last season aren't in the game at all? Rant over.
Nearly done, I promise. I'm not sure I totally agree with the ice skating analogy - I had half the players I've controlled so far as 'running through treacle' - and the dribbling to me feels a tiny bit tighter than before, but it is still relatively loose.
10spro has the through balls nailed - they tend not to work, unless you play them in one of the few situations for which they've apparently been strictly designed. The chipped through ball has a higher success rate but again only in certain situations, usually those where your player has space to play with. As far as I can tell, the problem with the through ball in general is that it's not designed for use as what you'd think of as a through ball - it's a means of playing the ball ahead of a man in space, provided there are no obstructions between ball and target player. Try to play it through a gap or between bodies and it's very unlikely to come off. That to me isn't how it should be, but if you can make yourself play within the limitations of the pass (I know, you shouldn't have to) then it's more likely that you can maintain possession.
Despite all that, the action on the field is still fun and I wouldn't do anything to dissuade anyone from picking it up, provided you weren't marching into it expecting any great shift in emphasis. It's still recognisably FIFA and still not on the level of a Pro Evo in terms of variety, believability or Sweet-Jesus-did-you-see-that factor, but it is fun and I rate it enough of an improvement over 2005 to warrant a purchase.
Cheers,
Simo
Last edited by GB_Simo on Tue Oct 04, 2005 7:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Zeppo wrote:Are teams different enough to have personality? Is there variety in the play, or does it descend into both sides trying the same couple of tricks?
That is my biggest beef with FIFA over the years. While last year's gameplay bordered on the tolerable, this still killed it for me in the long run - there was no difference in the style of play whether it was a MLS side or the top of the Premiership. Same can be said of differences among players, other than speed there seems to be little if any.
Why they don't address this year after year is beyond me. FIFA '98 did a pretty good job in this regard, and it's been downhill ever since.
BTW, speaking of RTWC, did anyone see the announcment of 2006 RTWC? What's the deal with only 76 sides? There was nothing like the thrill of trying to qualify with the Solomon Islands back in 98 RTWC, obviously that's not going to be possible this time around.
Finally, do they actually have league scoring tables this year? Are assists tracked? Both were huge omissions from last year that also killed some of the longevity.
But the real test will be if 90% of the goals don't come from through balls into the box or runs down the middle. I'm willing to bet that hasn't changed much.
Blublub - there are scoring charts, yes, at least in Manager mode. I don't recall there being any assist chart, though I've not gone looking. In honesty, I didn't realise too many people tracked assists on a football game so it's not something I'd thought about looking for until you mentioned it.
There's a little bit more variety to the scoring this year. For one, it's possible to win the first header from a cross this year so attacking down the flanks is now a way to create a scoring chance rather than a way to concede defeat, and I've had a couple of goalmouth scrambles and long range specials thrown in too. Having said that, I'd be lying if I said the methods of scoring were hugely different from last year.
Thanks Simo, are there tables showing the league leaders or just individuals by team? The latter was in 2005 but not the former, and it was hugely annoying.
You're right about assists - I think that's the American in me talking, but since they've been in the WE series for years I've grown to like it as a way to track the production of my midfielders.
Blublub - there's a table for the top League goalscorers, not just the scorers for your chosen team. Much more useful to have that than to go sifting through every team picking out the dangermen, though I don't have any idea whether those who seem to have scored regularly in other matches pose any greater danger to you during user controlled matches than those who haven't. Nice to be able to see it, though.
10spro, I haven't played PES5 yet - as far as I know the demo is PC-only at present and with me being 56k I really don't have the strength. What I've heard so far suggests more evolution rather than revolution, as you would expect, but the funny thing with Konami football is that you don't appreciate how much they improve each year until you go back to the previous edition. Conversely, with the EA games it seems as if you can tell straight away that something is better, but on playing the older versions the steps forward aren't as big as you imagined...October 21st is release day for PES5 so I can throw some impressions out shortly after that for anyone interested.
Picked it up for the PC and have played a couple of games.
My impressions so far:
Started with my team of Bristol City and immediately was offered a game against a World XI squad. Now Bristol City are a not very good 1st Division Team so I was a little doubtful when I scored a quick goal against Zico and Co. to go up 1-0. Then I looked at the age of 1 of the World XI players - 67! Ah, so I'm 1-0 up against some ageing geezers - well that's alright then (phew!).
On to the serious impressions.
Graphics: The colours appear quite cartoony and the lighting affects are really bizarre, particularly the way the hair looks up close. Try some Grecian formula gentlemen! The animations aren't bad but they are nowhere near as smooth or varied compared to Winning Eleven. It almost looks sometimes as if there are missing frames of animation. Play a game of Winning Eleven immediately before and the herky jerky motions are even more jarring.
Ball Physics: Better than last year, still far, far to go before they get into Winning Eleven territory. I can't really get a good feel of the pace of shots and it seems like I just don't quite have full control. Every once in awhile you'll see the ball jerk back suddenly - the string hasn't quite been broken yet. The flight of the ball looks better as its crossed in from the wings than it did last year.
AI: As others have noted, the AI just doesn't like to spread the ball in the air from side to side. Teams like 1st division Doncaster play a controlled game on the ground much like their premier league and Serie A cousins - just not as well. Teams in the lower leagues in England tend to play much more of a long ball game but there has been no evidence of this so far (admittedly I've only played a couple of games) The AI also passes up opportunities to play a quick throughball through the middle for a striker to run onto in favor of waiting until a supporting player makes a run down the wing.
Overall, the game is reasonably fun to play although the key question is going to be its longevity. I'm definitely importing PES5 and after I get that I don't know how much I'll play Fifa. It'll likely take 10-15 games before I get a real sense of whether FIFA has made enough of a stride to keep my gameplaying attention for the long haul.
More impressions to come...
Best wishes,
Doug
"Every major sport has come under the influence of organized crime. FIFA actually is organized crime" - Charles Pierce
