Oxford United all the way. I brought in Bocanegra to sure up my defence and he has been a revelation. I just defeated ManU for the F.A Cup with a hard earned but complete miracle goal. I only wish the career mode was longer. I'm not so sure I can take Oxford from third division to the Champions league final in only five season. I'd have to win everything on the first try.
I was speaking of WE7/Pro Evolution... you can do stepovers all day long and have the ball taken from you, unless you time your cuts properly.. and it is not necessary to do the step over to get by someone... Also there is a fake shot that requires you to hold shot and then tap pass right away, this will get defenders occasionally when you are in the box but its main use is for one on ones with the keeper if you do it to early he wont go for it, if you do it to late he will take the ball off your feet, but if you do it perfectly you can round the keeper... while everyone can do the feint it works better with skilled players. For example it is possible to dribble 3 defenders with Rio Ferdinand, but much easier to do with Totti...
Nice! So what's the deal with team and player names? I mean since they do not have licensing, does that mean there is no Inter Milan or AC Milan and it's just Milan? And since there's no NY MetroStars or NE Revolution... it's just New York and Boston? And as for players is there a "Totti" or is his name "Titto" instead... know what I mean? Thanks for the info!
OK Johno, that's enough from you. Its time for the pros to take over. PES 3/WE7 is coming to PC, inthe US in February 04, but if you're an impatient prick like me you'll pre-order from the UK, as the game will be out in the UK on the 21st of November. However you must have a DVD-ROM drive on PC to play. Now about real players. They are there on the NAtional Teams. Konami has a deal w/ Adidas and Umbro, So the National teams w/ Adidas kits and Umbro kits have real player names. For WE7 they've somewhat revamped the controls. The buttons still perform the moves, but they've made small improvements. Now you can do a 360 (like Zidane, Davids, Henry, or even Rio Ferdinand) They've cahnged 80% of the animations for the better... I've played the demo to death. The single stepover is much more useful now and helps draw fouls when running and fullspeed to cause a defender problems. You can also play Keepy-Uppy. Yes you can play Keepy-Uppy, maybe not the normal since in tight corners but u can flick the ball backwards over your head then turn on the defender behind you and either flick the ball up again to run past another defender or just volley the sucker. I hear they do have real club names in the game now, moreso than before, but you need the full version in order to prove it.
my problems. MLS gets ripped. Players and teams ranked with stats wrong. goods: I can play with York City
Andres D'Alessandro, Damani Ralph and Carlos Bocanegra have all been revelations for a Reading side that has won the Carling, F.A. and is 4 points behind Arsenal for the Premiership crown. Come ON You ROYALS!!!!
Thank god, in an earlier form of Pro Evo you could do the rainbow and you could also stand on the spot and juggle or walk/jog down the field juggling... not very useful for anything other than taunting but it looks great and its great for strikers who play with their backs to the goal cuz they can post up and then chip the ball up for a swivelling volley ala Jurgen Klinsman (I love Ruud, but Jurgen is the master of Volleys) One thing i hope for is to be able to play the ball to yourself first time from an aerial pass... eg. cross comes, striker knocks over defender, volleys shot...
I visited this site: www.pesinsight.com and it has a lot of information on PES7/WE3. It notes all the special tricks and moves you can do with players (http://www.pesinsight.com/pes3/specialmoves.shtml). Are these same moves possible in FIFA 2004? Are any trick moves possible in FIFA 2004?
LoL, Ante Razov helped Manchester City to the premiership crown, and this season Amado Guevara and Ricardo Clark are holding down the midfield. =) This is a really really hard game.
I finished my first season and I destroyed teams on Semi Pro. Second season, I started playing on professional. Lost my first game, haven't lost since. Now I'm starting to play on World Class, and it's much better. Much more challenging. Also, I bought Mexes from Auxerre, Helder Postiga from Tottenham and Ricardo Quaresma. Reading are turning into the new Chelsea.
It might be fun to play as a D1 team. I think i'll give it a try... what kind of transfer budget do you have?
Not much at all. I think I started out with 6.0 I'm going to try to get to the Prem with Hull City. 5 years is a short time though.....
I got West Ham into the Prem and into Europe in the same year by winning the Leauge Cup and promotion and now my objectives include finishing in the top half and qualifying for Europe. Do the expectations change based on your previous season?
I just started with West Ham. I Bought Ricardo Clark, DaMarcus Beasley, and Clint Mathis. Clint sure is fast in this game.
Winning11/PES I have faithfully purchased every soccer game EA has put out. This summer while looking for any info on the '04 release I happened upon some Winning 11/PES stuff on the web. I went out and bought WE, feeling like I was cheating on a girlfriend. Winning 11 rocked my world and now it is hard to even play FIFA 04. FIFA lacks the feel and flow. It seems like a pinball game. I feel like I wasted $45. I am very much lookig forward to February. The only thing W11/PES lacks is name rights to players which can be annoying when you play with the Dutch. Regardless, I HIGHLY recommend it.
Re: Winning11/PES Hey jprendiville maybe you can help me with this question then. I'm definitly going to buy WE7 or PES3 (I don't know which title will be sold here in the US) in Feb/March when it comes out. But Christmas is comming and I want a new game for my PSX2. Should I get WE6 or FIFA 2004?
I would recommend getting Winning Eleven at a game resaler for a fraction of FIFA '04. This way,if you drastically disagree with me you won't have wasted as much if you do agree with me. Trust me....it was very hard for me to stray from EA thinking that nobody could do it better but after their last couple of releases it became apparent that they didn't want to add much value. Winning Eleven /PES is player's game that does its best to promote the feel and flow of the game. At first it was hard to get used to but I love the game.
FINALLY! Finally EA makes a good football game. Just got it today and it's great....no still not quite up to WE7 standards but it's close. This game will more than tide me over until WE7 comes out here. The Good: graphics and sound (as usual), Finally good ball physics, realistic midfield build up, off the ball control, finally you can control the midfield with star players, everything is less random than before and less scripted - I.E. feels like real football finally, passing is great, Finally some Mexican teams, good camera angles, 3 divisions for England, 2 for several other Countries. The Bad: Well you still can't dummy the ball as far as I can tell - why not add that next year? Shooting can feel somewhat akward sometimes. Overall I am very happy with Fifa 2004. And this is the first time I really liked a Fifa game. They more than fixed last years problems.
After 2 weks of playing I have come with some final conclusions of the game, which IMHO is really two seperate games. A lot of this will be compare to WE6 which is the other soccer game on my shelf (don't have PES3/WE7). Part 1: Career mode: This is a game unto itself and far superior to the Master League in WE6. I've bought in to the prestige points thing and it works well. About halfway into my 1st season, I'm in 1st place with Napoli in Italian D2 play and have already fulfilled 2 contract goals (clean sheets and # wins). I'm looking forwrad to getting into D1 and scapping with the big-boys and seeing if I can make it to Euro competitions. Also interested to see who I can get to come to my team once I make it there and what my transfer budget looks like. Some minor things they could fix is a clearer understanding of the transfer window. Maybe as part of the excellent fixtures calendar? Also more info on the "team news" screen like "Vidigal trained hard in Technique close to increasing his Skill rating" would be nice. This would give you a more immersive involvement with your team during the "off-days". Also, they've gotta give you more than 5 years (Madden, Tiger, NHL and NBA carrer all go 20 years). Fot the future, I'd also like to spend some of that prestige for local scouting and bringing in youngsters to reserve teams, etc. Overall though, the carrer mode is great and gives the game alot of replay value. Part 2: Gameplay. Although I agree that it's far improved over previous couple of years, it's still a far cry from WE6. With WE6 everything is so much more intuitive. Start right at the team management options. You can create custome formations, and choose marking assignments for defenders. You can choose overalll team tactics like FIFA, but you can also tell individual players whee to conncentrate their runs (overlap defenders, hold back one central defender, etc.). I find when i play with my Napoli team ina 4-4-2 formation that both central MF always make runs to support the attack and I'd like to hold one of them back unless I'm losing because if I lose the ball the opposition comes right down my throat. You jsut can't do that. Also, on WE6 you can "feel" which players are superior at passing, defending, dribbling, etc. With FIFA you just don't get that because only short passes have any bearing on the game and you quickly learn to stop trying to dribble or trhough balls, etc. It's just too damn dificult to beat a defender 1 v 1 in FIFA. They've completely taken that out of the equation. IN WE6 you can beat a defender with proper timing and change of pace, but it doesn't always work so suppose you have a 2 v 1, you're saying to yourself, 'should I beat this defender or should I pass it off" those decisions come back to haunt you esp if you lose or tie a game. FIFA AI defense also is too good. You draw a defender to you and pass it to an open player and that defender is at the pass receiver as the ball gets there. In FIFA there's no reward for exploiting defensive weaknesses. The AI coach also never makes a substitution or changes formation to suit a situation. You never see an opposing wingback making a run into the attack. IN WE6, if you're up a goal late in the game, expect to see some fresh legs off the opposing team's bench and everybody coming forward to get that tie. This gives a much greater incentive in WE6 to change formations to suit game situation and creates much higher tension levels. Go from a 4-4-2 to a 5-4-1 and take out a F for a CD. Finally the biggest problem with FIFA is shooting. I's gotten to the point where if I have a player open inside the box 1 v 1 with the GK, I either pass it outside the box or dribble outside the box then shoot. Shots between 20-25 yards out (esp around the penaly box circle) have an amazing success rate, much higher than anywhere in the box. As I said, it's gotten better and gameplay is a good complement to the excellent career mode, but if the game had no career mode, I would have already returned this game as there are just to many holes to be a stand-alone game. The fact that there are no nat'l team tournaments, no customizable tournaments, no league leader boards (like WE6)only enhance this feeling. Going through the team screens a also noted ALOT of shoddy ratings for many players. This is enexcusable and would never happen with Madden.
Hey ctruppi good review. Nice to see another Napoli fan out there About the career mode, do you actually play the games or do you just manage the team and then watch the players play a game? Also in regular playing mode can you still use the right analog stick to do a special player move like in FIFA 2003? Finally I just want to say that my fustration with EA's FIFA series is that they never IMPROVE their games. They never seem to build on the good aspects of the old game. With every series they improve one feature but then take away other good features. They take a step forward and one back! I don't know if anyone can consider that improvment or progress. Great so they have this management feature in FIFA 2004. But we can't customize our tournaments to create our "dream fixtures" or "dream cups", there are no National International Cup tournaments, there's no Creation Center (on the console) to correct EA's player attribute mistakes... We may have some suggestions to improve the Team Management feature for 2005, but you know what, that might not even be an issue. EA may decide to do away with it for FIFA 2005. In FIFA 98 we had the ability to customize our formations and they took that away in FIFA 99. I've never played any of the WE or PES titles, but I'm reading that Konomi not only is improving its gameplay for WE7, but it's also getting the rights to certain international club teams and players. See, that's improvement. They didn't pull an EA where they took away the ability to customize formations but said "Look now we have rights to x# of teams and x# of players!"
Yes, you do get to play the games in the career mode, which is really fun (regardless of the deficiencies in game-play). The R3 stick is used for "skill moves", but these don't mean sh!t because you literally can not beat a defender 1 v 1. For me though, the biggest problem is in the lack of managerial options. How can you call a game a soccer sim and not be able to assign defenders marking roles or zone roles? Imagine Madden football having one generic play-book for every team? They have individual play-books for all NFL teams, oplus you can create you own plays!! Also, customizing line-ups is fundamental. Look at Lazio and Inter in real-life Italian soccer, they both play a variation of a 4-4-2, but the individual players w/in those systems play vastly different roles. The base formations are foundations that a real manager tinkers with depending on his ideas and the players he has at his call and who the opposition is. In FIFA, there is none of this. In WE you start a game and you can tinker as the game progresses and you see how things are unfolding. It's truly fun to change things ever-so-slightly and get a positive result because of those changes. If you have a PS2, go out right now and get a copy of WE6. You can unlock all-time great nat'l teams (Holland, France, Italy, etc.). I played a fully customized, 16-team, 30-game season as all-time Italy and every game was intense. One week up against all-time England with Matthews, Linekar, Banks, Keegan, etc. The next against Holland and Cruyff, Van Basten, Krol. You get the idea. Your soccer management juices really boil when you get to the pre-game screen vs all-time Brazil and you have to decide who marks Pele or Zico or Rivellino? Do you hold back the central mids, or do you attack against a not-so great defense. All said though, I really like the career mode in FIFA 04. The gameplay is improved over the last couple of years, but still not there.
Why, oh why did I ever think FIFA 2004 could be better or just as good as Winning Eleven. Why, oh why did I just spend 50 dollars on this piece of garbage that Electronic Arts has the balls to put on the shelves. I just can't fathom why you can't run onto a ball. I can't fathom why it is literally impossible to beat a defender one on one even if you are playing with Schevchenko or Henry or Ronaldo. I just can't fathom why you can't create your own tournament, league or player. I just don't understand why you can't play an international tournament. None of these things make sense to me and it doesn't make sense to spend your hard earned cash on what could possibly be the worst soccer video game ever made. Go buy Winning Eleven 6 or wait till 7 comes out. Whatever you do - DO NOT buy this game.
More issues I have with the game - For one thing the commentary is too low and for another thing they need to bring back Andy Gray. Also, Motty keeps referring to me as "league champion" 12 games into my MLS season. Why there is no league leaderboard for goals or bookings. And why is the Career Mode only 5 years long? There'd be a lot of fun in taking Yeovil Town from Division 3 to the top of the Prem but it becomes much less likely that we'd be able to do so if we only have five years. Even if you did win the league every year you wouldn't get to the Prem to the fourth year and there'd be only one year to get to Europe. One more issue I have always had with the FIFA franchise is kind of hard to explain. I already mentioned the fact that the player you are controlling freezes so that he can't run onto a ball. But there are also times when you think you have a good scoring oppurtunity and your player almost seems to hesitate for a moment and has the ball taken away from him. This happens sometimes when I get in on the net all alone and the ball goes inexplicably wide when I do manage to get a shot off in these situations.