FIFA 11 > PES2011

I got around to playing a couple of matches in my Master League mode on PES2011, and that was all it took for me to realise how glitchy and, well, ridiculously bad PES2011 is.

Firstly, the Master League problems I've encountered. My youth team was full of ridiculously good players, most of them better than players in my squad, and this really shouldn't be the case. The transfer window at the start of the mode is far too short, the transfer window at the end of the mode is far too long.

Now onto the gameplay problems. There's no way to to turn off the old passing and play with the PES2010 passing. The AI gives the computer a ridiculous advantage, especially on Top Player difficulty. My side-backs run up to be centre-forwards. Players with the ball are far too slow. Players move like robots. The list goes on.

I signed up half the youth team, replacing a number of the default players before playing my first match, against Portsmouth. About 35 minutes in, they scored a ridiculous goal from about 40 yards out, with my goalie just standing in the goal and moving far, far too late. They then scored a fantastic team move, and I could have no complaints about that one. Just before half-time one of their wingers was running into my half, I pulled my side-back over to tackle and made a perfect slide tackle, getting all of the ball and none of the player. Free-kick to them. WTF? Whatever, I thought this would be a minor annoyance and tried to defend the free-kick. They lobbed the ball into the box, but none of my players moved, leaving their midfielder to head the ball in unmarked at the near post.

In the second half I managed to pull two goals back but a few key decisions went against me and I lost, 3-2.

Next up was Doncaster Rovers. After my good second-half performance against Portsmouth, I thought I might have been able to edge this one. But no. At half-time, they were 3-0 up, all 3 goals coming from free-kicks and all the free-kicks were obviously not free-kicks. I switched the console off, fuming. I don't often rage quite, but this was absolutely ridiculous. I'd had enough.

After a quick look on the FIFA forums I found that the Xbox 360 patch had been released 5 days earlier, so I quickly loaded up FIFA to get back into my beloved Career Mode.

I'll tell you what's happened in a couple of days!

PES Master League

I'm starting a Master League game for the first time ever on a PES game. For some reason in PES I've always stuck to mini tournaments and Champions Leagues, but I've spent a few hours editing the Premership teams and renaming the D2 teams to be Championship teams (I also changed their kits).

I've created about 20 stadiums for all the teams to play, 4 generic stadiums (D2 British, D2 European, D1 British, D1 European) and 16 actual stadiums, mostly from the Premiership but some from the Championship. The D2 league is made up of 17 Championship teams and Stevenage. Stevenage is the only one where I've taken more than an hour to sort out. I've made a near-perfect replica of the home kit and chose to make last years away kit, which is one of my favourite ever kits. I renamed all the players (though in Master League I'll use the defaults) and made up a new badge, and made a reasonably realistic stadium.

Settings
Master League Original Lineup
Playing in an edited D2 with Championship clubs
Playing as my created Stevenage team
Promotion to the Barclays Premier League
Match Level is Top Player (the highest)
Match Time is 10 min.
Leave scout in charge of negotiations
Player Development is dynamic
Currency is pounds
Market activity level is normal


I'll start playing the mode today, try to get a few games completed and report back tomorrow.

Call of Duty: Black Ops

Seems strange that my first proper post on my football blog will be about something that's not related to football, but I really wanted to post my first impressions of Call of Duty Black Ops and that's what I'm doing here.

I bought the game for £28 at Sainsbury's on the day of release, did a load of homework and eventually got playing about 4:30 in the afternoon. I didn't have my Xbox Live Gold, so was really looking forward to playing the Combat Training, which is basically online but with AI bots. Treyarch had been calling it offline multiplayer. Soon I found it wasn't offline. You have to have an Xbox Live Gold account to play it, and, frankly, it's one of the stupidest things I've ever seen in a game. If you say that a mode's offline then why is it online?

Luckily, the game came with a 48 hour Gold trial so I was forced to use that. Overall, I played for about 6 hours and reached a level of 15, with my K/D Ratio at a decent 1.12. My first impression is that the game is very well balanced, and while it is harder to kill people than it was in MW2 (probably because there's no Stopping Power) it does make for some interesting gunfights. One of the big additions to this year's game was CoD Points. You can complete 'Contracts' which are challenges, you pay a small amount of CoD Points to buy the contract and then if you complete the contract within the time limit you get a bigger amount of money back. While the CP certainly make the game better, I think they could have executed it a bit better, and one of the ideas I had was that as soon as you reach a certain level you get the gun. You have to pay for the Attachments and Camo etc but you have that gun straightaway.

The killstreaks are also good, including the RC-Car. I expected that car to be a right pain, and while it may be it can also be blown up with a single shot and you get an alert everytime the enemy sends one out, so as long as you keep an eye out for it you won't get blown apart. None of the killstreaks are overpowered, and it's a good thing that the Dogs are now an 11 kill streak which is perfect.

I had one game of zombies in the only map I've got, and it was reasonably fun although I think I preferred the original Nacht der Untoten for it's simplicity. I'll have to play it a bit more before I make a judgement on it.

My best game so far was a TDM on the Jungle map with my FAMAS w/Red Dot Sight. I started very well, getting up to 12 kills and 0 deaths. In the latter stages I got 12 more kills but also died 3 times but it was still a very good result for me. If you want to see the match then I uploaded it to my file share.

One other new addition to this year's game is Wager Matches. You pay a certain amount of CP to enter these matches, which are new fun gametypes. If you finish in the top 3 then you get some CP, if you finish outside the top 3 you don't get anything. The gametype I've played (the only one I've played) is called Sticks and Stones. In this game you have 3 weapons - a crossbow with explosive tips, a ballistic knife, and a tomahawk. The tomahawk is basically a throwing knive, and the ballistic knife is a knife that is gas-propelled, which means it travels quicker and dips less. The ballistic knife can also be used as a plain old knife. You get 100 points per kill with the crossbow and ballistic knife, 25 points per kill when you knife them in close-quarters and when you kill someone with a tomahawk you only get 10 points but the player you killed loses all of his points. One game I was in the lead with 5 seconds left when I got hit by a tomahawk and I was suddenly bottom with no chance of coming back.

Overall rating: 9/10
Online rating: 10/10
Combat Training Rating: 9/10
Graphics Rating: 8/10
Audio Rating: 5/10

Introduction ...

I thought in my first post that it would be suitable to tell you a little bit about myself, and what I'll put in this blog.

As you can see, I'm a football fanatic, and I support Stevenage FC (Newly promoted to npower League 2). I love video games of all kinds, but especially football games. Currently I own FIFA08, FIFA09, FIFA10, FIFA11, PES2009, and PES2011, which I'll rate quickly here for you.

FIFA08: 8/10
FIFA09: 8/10
FIFA10: 9/10
FIFA11: 8/10
PES2009: 7/10
PES2011 - 8/10

I believe that overall I've played about 1,000 matches since picking my Xbox up in March 2009.

Recently I got into Subbuteo, which for those of you who don't know is a football game where you flick players around the pitch and try to score. You can buy a whole load of accessories, teams, and pitches for this and I currently own the Subbuteo Dream Stadium, Subbuteo Scoreboard, two Chelsea teams, Brazil Lightweight 410 and England Commerative Heavyweight. I'm sure I'll get around to buying some more teams soon.

I have a season ticket at my local club, Stevenage FC and go to about 4 away games a season. ATM we sit 8th in the table, one position of the play-offs and we're playing good football, although definitely not scoring as many goals as we should be.

Finally, I have a decent collection of Football Programmes dating from the 1960's to the 2000's. The vast majority of my collection of 400 are from the 2000's though, including a large number of Chelsea, Stevenage and Fulham programmes.

Thanks for listening, and I'll see you later!