Soccer Gaming Catch-All

Joe Hart and Oxo Cube are on the cover

Prederick wrote:
davet010 wrote:

Err.....it's not very much like FIFA - its closest analogue to American sports would be Out of the Park Baseball or Front Office Football. There is a demo on Steam that you might want to try before investing your hard earned dollars

Yeah, even with the semi-3D match engine, this is 10,000x more Text-based sim than it is FIFA. 10,000,000x even.

Also, anyone heard any word on FM 13 yet?

Getting announced at the end of August, I heard.

Question for people outside the US that play FIFA: I'm in Europe currently and considering picking up a European copy of FIFA so I can listen / read Croatian or Russian, etc. Does the typical Euro region FIFA have those languages? At least one of them? Is there more than one version of FIFA available in Europe?

Oh, and as far as I know PS3 and Vita games are importable. Is that correct? I assume XBox is region locked.

I bought my FIFA 12 copy on Amazon France, and it includes English, French, Dutch and some other languages. I will check tonight if Croatian and Russian are on there as well, but I'm afraid it won't be.

davet010 wrote:

Err.....it's not very much like FIFA - its closest analogue to American sports would be Out of the Park Baseball or Front Office Football. There is a demo on Steam that you might want to try before investing your hard earned dollars

I'm aware. I'd be really into playing this!

Give the demo a go, but before you start prepare yourself and your environment.

- Tell your friends and loved ones that if they haven't seen you for a few days, they are to kick the door in.

- Don't use a mouse that is expensive or heavy...it'll be hitting the wall when your opponents get a disgraceful last minute penalty (my FM career started with the original Amiga version in 1992, I've killed three mice playing this).

- Your non-FM mates may be impressed by your new encyclopaedic knowledge of European football. Or mystified by your exclamations of "why didn't you do that when I signed you, you bastard" towards the TV.

davet010 wrote:

- Your non-FM mates may be impressed by your new encyclopaedic knowledge of European football. Or mystified by your exclamations of "why didn't you do that when I signed you, you bastard" towards the TV.

:)

Or refer to Craig Beattie as "The new Alan Shearer"... Don't do that

The interface is going to take some getting used to but it's not nearly as bad as say, Out of the Park Baseball. From what I've seen from the help sections they'll probably help you out a fair bit with figuring out where things are but not having used them I don't know for sure.

Like everyone's said give the demo a whirl. The 6 in-game months will get you through a fair bit and familiar with enough of the game to decide if it's for you.

And everything (team, players) is hyperlinked - so if in doubt, click on it.

Guys, have you ever tried playing with three defenders and/or wing-backs? I've started new game with Levante and I'm looking to try some new system: squad that I've got fits perfectly into 4-2-3-1 shape but I'm tired of that so I want to try 3-5-2 shape.

Actually, I'm leaving tomorrow to hike/camp in the wild for a week or two with my good friend who's a huge FM fan. Last year when we've done that we ended up not talking about anything else than our FM saves for long hours. Talk about taking a break.

Laptop, spare mouse (or two), solar battery, beer - make sure you've packed everything.

Prospect of carrying everything on my own back is always a successful deterrent

I love FM and will likely pick it up this year (my last purchase was FM11). FIFA13 is also a day one purchase. Cannot wait!

FM 2013 info, straight from the man himself. Interested to see exactly how 'lite' classic mode is.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-09-06-football-manager-2013-interview-acres-of-new-information-about-that-classic-mode

Read it yesterday but it didn't excite me enough to post about it. I feel like I'm either going to play in 'full' mode, doing everything by myself or not play at all.
I think I sank >120h into FM this year, which makes me want to give myself a year of break. Unlike almost all of other video game time-sinks, FM is mentally taxing and not really a game you fire up to relax in the evening, which always makes me think that I could've spent my limited mental resources elsewhere.

I'm intrigued by Classic Mode as well. Just as Miles said in the video, I no longer have the time to get through multiple seasons in FM -- not just because of work/family/life, but because the game has become so complex and feature-rich. If they can capture the nostalgia of early Championship Manager releases, I'd be very pleased. My fondest FM/CM memories are from when I've taken a club from a lower division to Premier League and/or European glory. That can take 5, 6, 7 seasons or more and I simply haven't had the time to do that in recent releases.

UCRC wrote:

Read it yesterday but it didn't excite me enough to post about it. I feel like I'm either going to play in 'full' mode, doing everything by myself or not play at all.
I think I sank >120h into FM this year, which makes me want to give myself a year of break. Unlike almost all of other video game time-sinks, FM is mentally taxing and not really a game you fire up to relax in the evening, which always makes me think that I could've spent my limited mental resources elsewhere.

I know what you mean UC, it's not the sort of game you just fire up for a 30 minute blast before you get ready to go out (although in my case, it's fair to say that I don't have many games where you can do that). Unless I see more features, I'm thinking that I can just carry on with FM12 so long as I can get a data update after this window.

B Dog wrote:

I'm intrigued by Classic Mode as well. Just as Miles said in the video, I no longer have the time to get through multiple seasons in FM -- not just because of work/family/life, but because the game has become so complex and feature-rich. If they can capture the nostalgia of early Championship Manager releases, I'd be very pleased. My fondest FM/CM memories are from when I've taken a club from a lower division to Premier League and/or European glory. That can take 5, 6, 7 seasons or more and I simply haven't had the time to do that in recent releases.

+1

davet010 wrote:

I know what you mean UC, it's not the sort of game you just fire up for a 30 minute blast before you get ready to go out (although in my case, it's fair to say that I don't have many games where you can do that).

As I get older (and I'm still almost the youngest guy around ;]) I see more and more appeal of 10-hour-long AAA titles. Which feels really weird, as my tendency in teenage years was to get sucked in FMs, Guild Wars, long RPGs or Paradox strategies.

Data update would be great, but usually they're crap. So many young players develop so quickly, that entire database would have to be rebuilt. (Just look at Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain's profile in FM 12 or Wilshere's in FM 11 to see how quickly real world changes compared to in-game development of those players.)

O God. I started a game after reading the pro vercili blog. My last version is 2011 as I was smart enough to know what this game can do to you.

Anyways I think I'm into my fourth season as the mighty bath city. Leading the 2nd npower league at Xmas so should be going up. Nothing fancy, just a 442 spending most my time min maxing my squad with free transfers. Most notably a certain Frimpong who was released by arsenal this year is my box to box dynamo.

Was having a hard time finding players that would keep their supposed rating until I finally upgraded the training facilities just one month ago. After a solid month of training and pretty good coaching tho all my guys are jumping into the 3.5 4 star range and results are taking care of themselves.

19k wage budget from the 8k I started at makes it interesting also.

I started classes this week. This might be the wrong way to start a semester.

So... Australian Steam price for FM2013 = $90USD

Green Man Gaming with their current 25% off code, $30USD

Now to decide if I'll have the time to play it. I'm thinking no.

But as a heads up for the rest of you GMG25-1BW0K-K1A3G gets you FM2013 for $30 at GMG and it's Steamworks.

The slimmed-down mode is pretty appealing to me since the main game has had a lot of stuff I don't bother using, it's at the point of pretty big feature creep. Having to make 6 or so times to get a player to learn a preferred move or to see if they'll tutor a player is incredibly annoying, press conferences are too repetitive to be of any interest unless it's a really big game and ditto team-talks (the tone of voice thing is nice in those big games but it's really just more clicks and time).

I'll wait and see what the consensus is on the classic mode before making a purchase decision. I'm basically doing that without the benefit of much shortened playing time by holidaying between matches so if it's done right that'll probably sell me.

I should get back to reading that Pro Verceli blog since it's damned good. Writing AARs about sports sims isn't something that's easy to do well but the guy does it.

UCRC wrote:

As I get older (and I'm still almost the youngest guy around ;]) I see more and more appeal of 10-hour-long AAA titles. Which feels really weird, as my tendency in teenage years was to get sucked in FMs, Guild Wars, long RPGs or Paradox strategies.

No question. Half the reason i've come to love OOTP baseball so much is that I can sim a season and feel engaged in 45 minutes.

Sometimes I wonder how silly the game engine is.

In the Qtr finals of the Johnstones Paint trophy aka the useless extra tournament that congests your schedule and injures your players. I use a starting line up of all my subs some starters. 1-0 at halftime. I switch my GK to forward and move everyone up to a 2-4-4. I really don't want to be in this tournament.

Result? My backup keeper as a forward scores 2 goals and we win 3-0. My back up MC/DM gets injured for 6-7months. W.T.F and apparently the other manager thinks I'm totally out of my depth. But hes the one who just lost to a team playing 2-4-4 with a keeper as a striker 0_o

FIFA 13 demo's out. You wanna know what's sad? Fully 25% of the reason i'd buy it is because the FIFA soundtrack has usually turned me on to 2-3 new bands pretty regularly (I haven't been listening to BBC 6 enough recently).

I'm still freaking terrible though. I don't completely understand shooting in this OR PES.

I'm still freaking terrible though. I don't completely understand shooting in this OR PES.

Join the club. I tried assisted, manual and semi-assisted shooting and I still can't get it right. Always makes for great fun when I play against my friends. I usually dominate the entire game as I have much more experience with the game, but still lose 1-0 after they bury that one little chance in the top corner.

dejanzie wrote:
I'm still freaking terrible though. I don't completely understand shooting in this OR PES.

Join the club. I tried assisted, manual and semi-assisted shooting and I still can't get it right. Always makes for great fun when I play against my friends. I usually dominate the entire game as I have much more experience with the game, but still lose 1-0 after they bury that one little chance in the top corner.

I swear to god, I can't figure out how to aim in EITHER game with any consistency. And don't even ASK about heading the ball in FIFA.

Hey, I'm the same. I'm great at ball retention and playing a lot of one-twos through the whole pitch just to kick it straight at goalie when I'm one-on-one. My usual game against friends usually finished with 65% possession and trailing 0-2.

Not really feeling Football Manager 2013 from what I've seen so far in the previews. Doesn't seem to be adding much. And I'm finally getting Red Star into position to make it up into Ligue One in 2012. This may be the first one I pass on after a few years of no questions purchases.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...

Unexpected! I haven't payed any attention to PES or FIFA this year, but might give it a try.

Lots of new FM13 vids on the Eurogamer site as well, none of them really grabbing me by the scruff of the neck though.