“Ready for the floor” – FIFA 09

2008 is when the HD versions of the Big Two football games finally overcame the lasting momentum of the PS2 to became the leading versions. As well as playing FIFA 09 on the Xbox 360, I bought myself a copy of FIFA 08 on the same (it cost 50p, this is how it is with old FIFAs) to confirm that most of its changes had already been introduced before it. But a significant proportion of players would have been coming from PS2, so that comparison is still an interesting one. This is also another game which I played thoroughly at the time.

What’s new in FIFA 09?

The back of the box trumpets custom team tactics and “true football simulation” with an emphasis on one-touch stuff, i.e. a bunch of stuff not really noticeable except in collective feel. The skill moves from holding down LT and moving the right stick in various patterns also get further refined. If coming from the PS2, the menu system carried on from FIFA 08 is also a big new one, with the opportunity to mess around on the training ground as matches load a particularly welcome one. The way the stadium and crowd pop in is always a happy moment.

Finally, there is a change which is completely meaningless to any point of the match in which the ball is in play, and yet feels like the single biggest factor in bringing it up to the feel of a modern FIFA game. I am talking, of course, about controllable goal celebrations. In previous games when you scored a goal you would get a cutscene of happy players and basically tune out and wait for the replay. In FIFA 09, you get to command the moment and the emotion, and to pull off some fighting game style combos to do so.

Who is on the cover?

Yet again, it’s Wayne Rooney and Ronaldinho, though with the latter now a Milan player rather than a Barcelona one. There is no kind of special effect applied to the photos. In fact, the more you look at them in any detail, the worse they look, with the washed out look of Rooney’s shirt not matching anything and his sleeve having been hacked out of an original photo particularly crudely. By this point, though, they’re pretty much being used as signifier and need nothing more than that: here is a FIFA game, immediately identifiable as such, with a bigger number than last year’s.

What’s on the soundtrack?

The variety is even stronger than the previous year, in geography and genre, to the point where it doesn’t have so clear of an identity, something which isn’t helped by the odd old practice of including some unremarkable remixes of current hits. The presence of The Kooks and The Fratellis also means a new failure to hold the line against landfill indie.

Who is the best player in the game?

Very similarly to FIFA 08, the best players are rated at 91/100. Ronaldinho is still on the cover but loses that position, with Cristiano Ronaldo just sharing with the world’s top goalkeeper, this time judged to be Iker Casillas. Player ratings would take on an extra relevance with a bit of FIFA 09 that came out after its initial release, but more of that later…

Who is the worst player in the game?

There are a whole group of lower division players on 35. In England two of those fall at opposite ends of their career. James Vincent (CM, Stockport), was aged 18 at the time of FIFA 09 and went on to score some very big goals for Inverness Caledonian Thistle in Scotland. Kevin Pressman (GK, Scunthorpe) meanwhile, was 40 and in his last year of playing. This is the first time one of FIFA’s lowest rated players has been someone I’d heard of, thanks to his more successful time in the Premier League in the ‘90s with Sheffield Wednesday. He also once got sent off 13 seconds into a match.

Meanwhile in Italy, there are two in the same team at Cittadella, a team whose generic badge also highlights the increasingly uneven licensing FIFA was facing with that country. Simone Villanova (GK) went on to become their first choice the following year, if not much else. Versatile 18 year old Enrico Antoniol (CM/RM/LM/CDM) made his way around Italy’s lower leagues to not enough effect to get a wikipedia page.

What do the players look like?

They look good, you can usually see very clearly who each player is meant to be, but… somehow, in line with the wider HD era, the step up from PS2 actually isn’t that great. It’s possible to convey more detail but it doesn’t always do as good a job at capturing the essence of someone as before, and the cold dead eyes become a lot more of a problem when they stand out more by comparison. Except in players where cold dead eyes are more or less accurate, like Robin Van Persie.

How does it play?

Even more like the modern FIFA than the PS2 FIFA 08 did – really, this is where it became big and comfortable, and above all good, enough to settle. The skill moves give a lot of dribbling options without being overpowered, the gap between picking up for a simple game and higher level tactics is beautifully managed. Putting together passing moves feels great, not just because of the sensitive and sensible range of control responses but because players move in intelligent ways to anticipate what you’re going to do next.

It’s also impressive how it manages something of a philosophical follow through from the earliest FIFA International Soccer, with its spectacular canned animations. FIFA 09 doesn’t railroad situations into pre-determined outcomes in anything like as clunky a way, but at moments it has your players do things like juggle the ball as they turn with little specific input required, just when you use the right stick to direct a first touch and it logically makes sense. There’s a load of possibilities to pick from and it does a good job at picking the right one at a sufficient level of detail for it not to stand out. With my first goal in my first time playing it in more than a decade, I got an achievement for scoring with a bicycle kick, and it felt both pretty representative of the game and completely natural for that moment.

How does it score on the sepp-blatter-rain-of-banknotes.gif greed index?

There aren’t a lot of changes, but what changes there are work well. On the other hand… as with other EA games in 2008, they were really getting into the downloadable content space, and for FIFA this included some new idea called FIFA Ultimate Team which I will be coming back to at length. In short, it was the diabolically brilliant idea of implanting a footballer-based collectible card game into your football video game. 0.2 sepp-blatter-rain-of-banknotes.gifs with a bonus further 0.2.