Dang it! My kid wants a FIFA game. HELP.

I always found that endearing, but I guess that’s because I grew up with Sensi Soccer which did the same thing.

Yeah, same. I don’t really follow football either so the names have never held much meaning to me anyway. Still, I always found that approach really amusing.

Exactly, in FUT you make your own team with player cards and get coins for winning matches or buying it with real money, you dont play with real teams you play with your own so roster changes dont affect it. Online gaming you play against other custom teams so you can play Messi vs Messi.

The other modes you play with the real teams (Barcelona, Manchester U, Boca Jrs, Inter, etc etc) with the real roster (if they have the licence, there are some weird cases) which is what i play that don’t have any monetization. . Online play is also against other real teams, so you dont get matched against FUT teams.

EA usually updates the rosters every transfer window until they release a new game. So now you have FIFA 17 and will have it updated until september when the new FIFA 18 will release.

I really think you’re overthinking it, Christien. I buy FIFA about every other year (mainly because my kids don’t play it like they used to) and it’s straightforward sports gaming. You can play with teams and players from all over the world in their current forms or you can jump into Ultimate Team and build your own. They keep it updated (which is why I said buy '17) until the new one comes out. It’s fun. Go for it!

Wayne Rooney and Zlatan Ibrahimovic. Both playing for Manchester United.

-xtien

Good news! They’re both in the game and both are at Man Utd.

@ChristienMurawski I think the biggest concern is that your son likes ManU. Not that I don’t own two jerseys from about 10 years ago.

Now Liverpool, that is a team. :)

I’m pretty sure he’s just pandering to me based on my top ten movie list for 2016. Since there was no team corresponding to my number one movie, he went to the next choice in the list.

Thank goodness he didn’t get to my number three pick.

-xtien

Thank you for confirming this! We both got pretty happy tonight upon reading this post.

-xtien

[Sidebar: on our drive home from school today we saw a car that had its back windows tinted with that advertising tint stuff. I don’t know what it was for, but a soccer player was fully featured. My son said, “Hey, that’s Neymar!”

I thought for a second and said, “Uh. Neymar. I think that guy was in the xXx movie I had to do for the podcast.”

“No way,” my son said. He grabbed my phone to check.

Letting him search for xXx on my phone as I was driving…not so wise.

Anyway, once we sorted the name of the movie it turned out Neymar was indeed the dude in xXx: The Return of Xander Cage and that was the rest of our long drive home. Me describing his silly napkin dispenser scene and then breaking down the plots of all three xXx movies. And then going into stuff about Fast and Furious movies. Since he’s never seen any of those movies. It was a cool discussion, actually.

end Sidebar]

-xtien

You should still persuade him to support a real team like Tottenham, we have climbed our way to the top not bought our way there.

Alex

I would recommend to squash it early, and send him to swimming lessons…he will thank you for it later.

If those are his favorite players then you want FIFA 2009 when they were good. (Obligatory ManU insult).

Yes, Spurs have only spent ~£320,000,000 on new players since 2012. Not like those big money clubs.

Joking aside, I’d much rather everyone supported Spurs than United.

If you look at our net spend it is lower than anyone else in the premier league apart from Swansea over the last 5 years:

http://www.transferleague.co.uk/premier-league-last-five-seasons/transfer-league-tables/premier-league-table-last-five-seasons

Anyway not to derail the thread, Christien just buy it already and I’ll give you a game over t’internet.

That’s why I picked spend and not net spend. Just you wait till next year when Gareth Bale’s number falls off the books!

Back onto topic, 10 years ago I was firmly in the PES camp. I’d given FIFA a try but it felt less like a football game and more like a goal-of-the-year simulator. In PES I’d regularly have goals go in off my arse, or bounce in off a forest of knees, whereas every other goal in FIFA was a thirty yard screamer or an overhead kick and when all your goals are extraordinary then none of your goals are extraordinary.

PES started to lose their way after PES6 though, (apart from on the Wii, weirdly, where PES12 was a really good game) and around the 2010 version I made the switch over to FIFA and felt like it became easily the better game, especially in career mode where you play as one player surrounded by AI.

I tried PES again in 13 and thought it was dreadful and I actually picked it up again this year. It’s… better, I guess, which is damning with faint praise, but it’s still a bit of a dog with slow play, fairly poor AI, (especially in goal), and almost no licenses.

It also feels like it relies on the individual moment of brilliance too much. Actually passing the ball around trying to work the defence out of position doesn’t seem to do too much - you have to get into a one-on-one situation and then do some stick-waggling skill to beat a player. One of the things I like about FIFA is with the right players you can just pass around the opposition, pulling them out of shape and opening holes for runners.

It as at least going the right way again, after 10 years, but I still like FIFA more.

**Amusing sidebar - my only Youtube copyright strike was a claim by FIFA on a video I made of a World Cup Final in PES06. Apparently putting up a video of Spain vs England in a World Cup Final was grounds for action and youtube hit me with a strike, even though the video was clearly fiction because a) it’s a video game and b) England were in a World Cup Final.

I don’t understand why you guys are still talking about stupid sports now that the thread has an opportunity to veer off into a discussion of the XXX movies.

-Tom

Surely, shooting a monkey is a sport.

I know right. I mean Zlatan only has 24 goals so far this season. If only he was still good.

Edit: Make that 26.

You’ve gone and misspelled Tottenham there.