Ok let me first start by saying im a fair man when it comes to testing games. Ive been playing fifa since “fifa internaton soccer” which was its first release. The many years ive played fifa, each new release brings out a revolutionary feature and with this feature the gameplay went from great, to bad then in the later years to just unplayable, everything was scripted and it felt like you were never in control, i was sort of fed up with football games for a while and just stuck to my usual nba live season on the pc, thats until PES3.
lets zoom ahead a couple of years and after playing PES3 and PES4, ive been more than happy with the game and even with its lack of licensing and commentry the game play makes up for it. Recently i found fifa release 06 and i had been told it had mimicked the play of winning eleven (or pes europe) So I thought id try out fifa 2006 demo on the pc to see how this years model turned out.
Install went fine. then i loaded the game up… menu started to act crazy… select language screen was going wild, like someone had a right keyboard button held down. ok…? so in time with the computer changing my options i hit enter when english came on. Got it! lol. ok next screen, select a team, screen going crazy again! arghhh what the hell??
i tried to enter the game, but that was a no go, the selection was going nuts so i tried to exit out…wheres exit? in the end i had to kill the .exe process in task manager and then i searched to figure out what the hell was up.
So now to the forums…and to my suprise many more people had the issue, and the solution was oohh so easy… unplug all your usb components except your game pad! :huh: are they serious?? looking a little more into it, alternatively you could disable your human interface device (in your device manager) while the game was playing (using alt-tab) so trial and error to see what device disabled would stop the madness… and thats it … so simple… but WHAT THE HELL?
Why should i touch my device manager to make a game work, and especially a game with as much history and experience as EA sports and FIFA range? this is bloody ridiculous.
So in the end i worked out which one made the game work for me, (disabled on of the HID’s) then the game worked fine.
So im in the game, and let me say the game does look nice, but nothing to say wow about. I started to play using a usb converter for my playstation controller and i tried to work out how to play fifa again.
few games after i got the hang of it, but i was far from impressed. Animations looks great, great right analog stick moves but the rest of the game play was just plain ugly. The whole movement to control the characters felt sticky/robotic and scripted, the whole gameplay felt fake, the players did not respond and at time i felt like if i put the controller down the game would play itself, when i scored it was more relief then joy, the goalies save everything, clear breaks any angle, and i cant even say that my goal was any thing like real football, Using manchester united i accidently hit shoot with roy keane outside the box he turns around in one motion hitting a curler (yes keane) to the top right post, hitting the post to let rooney score the rebound… Roy keane smacking a turn around shot from outside the box? and it almost went in? yeah ok :sure:
I did enjoy some of the game, when some of the right analog stick moves came off and when I scored a nice header via Ruud. But other than the shinny polish of the licenses and all the names and teams in the game, the corners still sucked along with the free kick system and the gameplay is just worthy of a pimp slappin of all the EA sports Fifa team. Ive unistalled the demo and again EA has let me down… 
if any one else had a go at the demo… im not posting the link to it. but you can find it at www.soccergaming.com
tell me what you thought of it.
