Blue Man Sings The Whites

5 – FIFA 09
Saints be praised, at give-or-take the 20th time of asking, EA have finally made a good football game.

Yes, of course it’s pretty. FIFA games always are. Yes, of course it’s slicky-presented. FIFA games always are. Yes, of course it plays a genuinely good game of football in which goals are relatively tough to come by and always completely satisfying to score, FIFA games… no, hang on, the other one.

Personally, the core of FIFA 09’s appeal is the Be A Pro mode where you create and control just one player and guide him through his career. You pick up experience to improve his abilities and renown to increase his standing with the fans, leading to the opportunity of becoming your club captain or being picked for your national team. Be A Pro mode is compelling and genuinely well put-together – one thing that really impressed me was how different teams don’t just have different skill levels or play in different formations, but actually have noticeably different styles of play. I started “my” career as Roy Race, a blond be-mulletted striker in the reserves of German 2nd division team FC St. Pauli (because a) they have a disgusting brown strip…

Eat Racey's Rocket, Fritz!

…and b) it was the team that Andrew Eldritch sponsored while he was living in Hamburg) and they were typical lower-league cloggers – racking up dozens of yellow cards getting stuck in at the back and building their attacks by flinging balls into the box from all angles. When I eventually joined AC Milan (following in the footsteps of the mighty Luuuuuuuuuuuuuuuther, obv) it was a complete culture shock – the team were practically allergic to passing more than 10 feet along the ground, and completely refused to dive in for tackles, rather standing off, keeping their formation, jockeying the opposition and trying to provoke a mistake.

It took some getting used to.

Be A Pro mode is pretty close to being a footy RPG, but it’s a bit bare-bones as it stands and I’d love EA to develop it further in later iterations. It’d be great if you had the press and managers big-upping or having a pop at individual players, dressing-room discord, Player Of The Year awards, the sort of stuff that games like Football Manager or New Star Soccer have been doing for yonks. Also, there’s unrealised potential in the transfer system – at the moment, you get a list of teams who’re interested in you at the end of each season and you get to pick a new team without fuss or repercussion. Wouldn’t it be ace to have a bit less control, to occasionally be put up for sale against your will or conversely to have to angle for a transfer from a team that didn’t want to sell you?

Yes, it would. Shut up.

Related to that, I’d really like the chance to slag off my team-mates in the media. In every RPG I’ve ever played I end up going down the “nice” path because I’m too wet and woolly to even be unpleasant to computer-animated marionettes but ten games into my second season at St. Pauli I suddenly turned into Nicolas Anelka.

“EVERYBODY on this team SUCKS but ME. Just give me the ball, you disgusting pantfishing NOBODIES, then get out of my way and ADMIRE.”

If you do decide to take the plunge with FIFA, I highly recommend picking up a few of the free alternative-language commentary packs that are available on EggBox Live. Brazilian bloke bellowing GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL! > Martin Tyler.

4 – Burnout Paradise
Grand Theft Auto IV was a game with some issues. Its stab at a more mature and thoughtful storyline sat uncomfortably with the over-the-top ultraviolence of the gameworld in general and missions in particular. I greatly disliked being hassled every five minutes by needy clingy gits wanting me to take them to play darts. It was the least funny game in the series and In common with every GTA game in the history of all things ever, its third island was a bit dull and anticlimactic. Its biggest sin for me though, was that it fixed something that definitely wasn’t broken – out went the drifty, cartoony, knockabout car-handling model that made it so enjoyable to tear about the streets playin’ the radio with no particular place to go. In came stodgy, heavy, more “realistic” cars that responded to even the lightest touch of the handbrake by spinning you out into somebody’s front garden.

Fortunately, I’ve found where GTA’s nimble, nippy stable of cars went after San Andreas – they’re all tooling around Paradise City at seventy squillion miles an hour. Burnout Paradise gives you a big, colourful city plus a bunch of big, colourful cars and leaves you to decide what you want to do with them. There’s a good variety of different events to take on, depending on your mood and whim – straight races, time trials, stunt events where you try to rack up points for skidding, boosting and flying of the dozens of ramps scattered about the streets and Marked Man races where your goal is to reach the finish line without being wrecked by two persistent and aggressive pursuit cars. Then there’s the hilarious and absurd Showtime mode where you control your car as it bounces down the road trying to cause as much destruction and traffic chaos as possible. My favourite, through, is generally the demolition derby Road Rage events where you’re simply tasked with causing as many opponents as possible to crash. Sideswiping opponents into bridge supports, nudging them into oncoming traffic or, best of all, flying off a ramp and landing on top of them (screaming “DEATH FROM ABOVE!” optional) is never less than satisfying, particularly combined with the game’s wince-inducing damage model.

Ah, the damage model. For all the occasional frustration when you clip an oncoming car and provoke a slow-motion cut-scene of the physics programmers dancing on your grave ((c) Yahtzee 2008), crashing in Burnout Paradise is almost as much fun as racing. After watching your car go spinning through the air, smashing into scenery and other road-users scattering wheels and body panels over a wide area before colliding with something immobile and ending up six feet shorter than it started out the standard joke in our house is a deadpan “I reckon that’s drivable”.

Burny Pee isn’t without its own problems. Whoever decided that the mini-map in the corner of the screen shouldn’t rotate as you turn (making it next to useless for mid-race navigation) needs a punch in the gentleman’s area. And for all Criterion’s insistence that the streets would be so packed with Stuff To Do that it wouldn’t be necessary, the absence of a “Retry This Race” button is the stupidest design decision since some nincompoop on the Mirror’s Edge dev team decided that what an already crazy-hard trial-and-error first-person platformer really needed was to throw a bunch of hateful nigh-invulnerable pantfish shooting automatic weapons at you every twenty seconds.

At the end of the day, though, it’s fun to weave crisp-handling sportscars through traffic. It’s fun to slide wallowing SUVs around sweeping corners. It’s fun to barrel-roll a rugged stock-car off a cliff. It’s fun to kick in the boost, hear the awesome afterburner-y sound-effect and go screaming through the streets at a decent fraction of light speed. Driving in Burnout Paradise is fun, and that excuses quite a lot of mis-steps in other areas of the game.

Get that, Rockstar North?