I’ve recently had to downgrade my awareness of modern football games from ‘slightly out of touch’ to ‘haven’t really played one properly for 10 years or so’. Since PES 2010, and a brief flirtation with FIFA at around the same time, it’s largely been a case of buying one or other of the two big hitters, playing it on a moderate difficulty setting with little success, and then putting it down. So there’s been a season of FIFA 14 here, and a Euros campaign with PES 2016 there, but nothing close to the Master League madness of 00s PES. (Except when I actually just ended up playing PES 3 again, ostensibly for a feature, and fell – briefly – into that exact same madness for a time).

Unless it comes naturally, making a concerted effort to keep up with modern developments in gaming brings a certain kind of pressure that seemingly runs counter to the goals and objectives of an interest or hobby, but at the same time, drawing a big chalk circle around the period during which you followed gaming most keenly and saying you don’t plan to step outside it still seems a little bit too much like putting your head in the sand. In other words, even though I’ve spent far too much time playing old football games, I don’t want to be the guy who only plays old football games. (Even if I already am him, really.)

And it was the news that PES is no longer PES, is no longer a product that you pay for in the traditional sense, and also the subject of widespread ridicule, that tempted me back this time. If this is going to be the end, let’s have one last dance.

You’re offside, lads.

My chosen partner was the delightfully-named eFootball PES 2021 Season Update, the last Konami football game to bear the PES name, and one that is essentially just PES 2020 with some patches and squad updates. It could be the ridiculous title, or a sign of just how out of touch with modern gaming I am, but I spent an embarrassingly long time on the Fanatical sale pages trying to figure out whether the game on offer for a few quid was actually a full game or just a DLC pack, and if it was the former, why were there different ‘club editions’ available, and did that mean you have to buy access to individual teams in football games now. (The answers to such questions are: full game, still not sure, and I don’t think so but that’s possibly the future Konami has in mind).

(Equally, online modes like FIFA’s Ultimate Team and this series’ equivalent, MyClub, are where it’s at now, to the extent that if you’re a 40-year-old Norman No-Mates looking for a bog-standard league season to play in single-player mode, you have to do quite a bit of hunting in the main menu, as if the core idea of someone wanting to take control of his favourite football team against AI opponents for a year is a ludicrous and outdated one.)

All this middle-aged grumbling aside, the good news is that PES 2021 (I’m not calling it eFootball, sorry) does feel like a modern version of the old Pro Evo games. While similar claims had been applied by others to a number of new PES titles in the 2010s, my own experiences meant that I came to take them with a pinch of salt. Throughout my own dabblings with such titles, they just felt fundamentally different to what had come before, and the feeling persisted that instead of trying to recapture old glories, the whole thing had been ripped apart and rebuilt in the name of trying to do something new, different and better. Which, I figured, was fair enough: the PES I remembered belonged in the past. Football games had moved on, but I hadn’t, and that’s why I couldn’t get on with them anymore.

I tell you what, they should just make football a non-contact sport, THESE DAYS. Mate, you can’t do anything, THESE DAYS, can you?

It was the sluggishness that always most alienated me; a feeling that I was back playing [the notoriously unresponsive] FIFA 97, which I assumed would have been noted in reviews if it were universally applicable. Seeing as it wasn’t, I put it down to me being slow, rather than the game.

PES 2021, however, genuinely feels like the old PES games again, in a good way. Players react quickly to your direction, without it being an arcade-y free-for-all runaround. You still have to be careful with the sprint button and focus on keeping the ball, but for once these old lessons served me well rather than making me feel like I needed to do something more complicated to fully understand and enjoy the game.

With Leeds in a 3-6-1 formation, I found myself playing some lovely stuff, sticking to my ancient tactics of passing the ball around, looking for players making attacking runs, and trying to thread it through to them. Dribbling also seems a bit more fathomable, with the slow dribble feature, mapped to the left stick, allowing for some gentle manipulation and trickery without having to commit special moves to memory, Street Fighter 2 style.

Rodrigoooooo!

My impression of modern football is that players have to be more technically proficient and adaptable these days, rather than sticking to defined roles, and that seems to be reflected here. Individual personalities, however, still came through, from the hard but unglamorous work of Klich and Phillips in midfield, to the wing play of the unpredictable but brilliant Raphinha and the more solidly consistent Harrison, and the lumbering presence of Rodrigo, seemingly too laboured in possession to be suited to a role just behind the striker, but proving surprisingly effective in creating and scoring (if not quite recapturing the dribbling wizardry of 00s PES great Pablo Aimar).

At higher difficulty levels, the old PES games seemed to be better at getting the opposition to shut you out than subjecting you to a good thrashing, and multiple 0-0 draws were second only to their close relation, the 1-0 sucker punch defeat following domination of the game, in terms of causing frustration. (I was never good enough at the 2010s efforts to establish any kind of pattern, with the general stodginess of my own play the main obstacle to success).

Here, though, despite only playing on a moderately hard setting (a source of shame and regret despite having absolutely no hesitation in choosing the middle difficulty for literally any other game) the opposition proved rather clinical, as evidenced by a 4-0 stuffing by Chelsea in my opening match. And I was on track to win the league until an unexpected 3-2 home defeat to Wolves courtesy of a hat trick by Raul Jimenez in my final game.

Bloody Wolves.

It’s been the most fun I’ve had with a footy game for a long time. I can see myself playing another season and trying to win the league, and maybe even cranking up the difficulty like in the good old days, at which point some further shortcomings and bugbears may well reveal themselves. For the moment though, the only problems are typical Pro Evo ones, such as the licensing (in the HD era plain kits and daft oversized club badges are a little harder to dismiss with a squint and a shrug, but these days the third-party efforts of brainy Internet people are more easily downloaded and integrated) and the commentary, which is as bad as always, with Peter Drury’s habit of shouting a player’s name to accompany a climactic shot on goal that never actually materialised, when the play has long since moved on, a particularly old-fashioned kind of glitch. But, and this is going to make me sound like a total nostalgia bore, part of the appeal of Pro Evo was always the slightly otherworldly feeling of it all, as if you were in a parallel universe, rather than in a hyper-accurate representation of the modern world of football.

(And speaking of which, I don’t know if the commentary on FIFA is that much better, as my one-time PES rival PG mentioned to me that he had to turn all of the sound off in order to be able to enjoy a recent instalment of EA’s footy franchise).

Perhaps I’m easily pleased, but on this evidence it’s hard to see how PES can have gone so far backwards in its most recent incarnation. The action seems to have moved to a new game engine, which possibly accounts for the much-publicised glitching, while I guess the changes to the name and pricing model have probably eroded some historical goodwill towards the series. It’s a shame, particularly as this instalment seems to have been close to recapturing the old PES magic.

Hello once again and welcome to Discussion: [indie game] (spoilers!), a series with a title that should be self-explanatory but which still prompts me to attempt further elaboration at the top of each and every piece.

If you like fairly rambling discussions about indie adventures with a story, you’re in the right place. Be careful, though, there are spoilers, so you might want to check out the game first.

Today’s item under consideration is Oxenfree, developed by Night School Studios, and released in 2016.

You are Alex, one of a group of teenagers taking an evening trip to Edwards Island, a local site of historical interest and venue for the annual illicit party of school leavers.

This year’s gathering, as it turns out, isn’t so well attended, and the kids instead choose to investigate rumours of spooky goings on, a decision which has… consequences.

Here’s a trailer:

Other than giving Oxenfree a broad recommendation, that’s all we want to say for now.

Here’s your ***FINAL SPOILER WARNING*** for the discussion below.

Discussion: Oxenfree (spoilers!) continued »

Soundtracks is where we take a look back at the use of licensed music in games. Go here if you want to know more.

And we’re back! Just as the last ‘proper’ instalment of this series promised that we would be, er, 18 months ago. Believe it or not, I do have a plan, of sorts, for these things, but although I always had an intention to do more, and a shortlist of other games to cover, it’s taken a while to get around to it, for some reason.

Anyway, let’s call this the start of Season 2, if this was TV, and I was American. Which it isn’t, and I’m not.

Today’s game is Test Drive Unlimited, a rather fab open-world racer that was the first 00s effort to really dial into what the original Test Drive and Need for Speed games were all about.

Soundtracks: Test Drive Unlimited continued »

Hi there.

I’ve been RPG-ing (and Star-Wars-ing) again.

With possibly too many references to Mass Effect and an unwitting segue into the merits or otherwise of recent Star Wars films, here’s a look at Knights of the Old Republic.

Cricket games were once released so infrequently that I used to end up buying pretty much each and every one, at some point. If there was one that I thought might be good, I’d get it on release, but even those that I was fairly sure would be disappointing, I’d look out for in sales or second hand.

Codemasters’ 00s Brian Lara games were the last time I was reasonably invested, though, and they were a while ago now. To be fair, it has been fairly slim pickings since then, with the 2009 Ashes effort a fairly desperate and stodgy effort, preceding a 2010 follow-up that was released on console only. And then we had a rushed (and botched) release for the 2013 Ashes that was so bugged it was ultimately withdrawn from sale.

At which point, Australian developers Big Ant Studios stepped into the picture, with a new series of games first bearing name of one of the greats of the 30s and 40s, Don Bradman (generally acknowledged as the best batsman of all time, although hardly a name to dispel the notion of cricket as a dusty and uncool sport). These were received well enough, especially in the absence of any competition, to later earn Big Ant official licenses and Ashes tie-ins.

In general, I preferred the days when it was possible for lots of different developers to release sports games, but in the case of cricket one game every couple of years was pretty much the most you could hope for anyway, and at least Big Ant have the opportunity to commit to the game and build upon previous efforts rather than it being a case of new developers jumping in here and there to reluctantly churn out a tie-in.

I played the first Don Bradman game, Don Bradman Cricket 14, fairly solidly for a couple of weekends and enjoyed it, but left it alone completely since. From memory, I was plugging away at a four or five day match and sort of getting the hang of things until I suddenly discovered that, at the fairly low difficulty level I had selected, going absolutely bananas aggressive while batting was a little too successful. Having patiently tinkered and nudged – and also made terrible misjudgements – with my main batters, my tailenders then had a great time smashing the ball to all parts.

England in some trouble again.

This time, I cranked the difficulty up a bit and decided to jump straight into an away Ashes series, reasoning that I probably couldn’t do much worse than the real England team. (It used to be a compulsory feature of 90s cricket game reviews to say something along these lines, and I hate to do it too, particularly as being away from home and losing cricket matches under strict COVID protocols must have been very tough, but the 21-22 series was pretty depressing viewing at times).

In the old days I would spend a lot of time messing around with the teams and making sure I was happy with the squads and their stats, but this time I couldn’t really be bothered: the game doesn’t have real teams anyway but a feature to download the efforts of those who could be bothered seems to be relatively well-integrated. I did have to abort and change the kits a little bit – the St George’s Cross on the England shirt looked particularly cheap and amateurish – but stopped myself again when fiddling with individual players’ bat labels and pads.

As I’ve probably mentioned here before plenty of times, bowling in cricket games is pretty boring because what is a physical act requiring a certain level of guile and concentration is often reduced to just moving a marker on the pitch and watching your fella run up and do the business. Putting a ball on a good line and length isn’t that simple.

Here, though, with pace bowlers, you do need to think about your approach angle and the type of delivery as well as keeping a close eye on two meters that help you time a leap into your bowling action and then delivery of the ball. (You do need a gamepad of some sort, because – well, you just do, the game won’t work without one – and most of the control revolves around the two analogue sticks). Spin bowling, meanwhile, involves a slightly frenetic but rhythmical rotation of one of the sticks while you deliver with the other.

Stokes keeps at it.

It remains fairly hard going because bowling against competent opposition is pretty hard work – however much fun it was to blast out a succession of tailenders in BLIC 05 with a succession of Waqar-style inswinging yorkers. But by keeping you engaged with the action, you remain fairly committed to sticking with it, rotating bowlers and trying different things in search of a wicket. On the downside, you spend a lot of time looking at two dials rather than the actual action itself, and it does seem to be a case of keeping things tight and waiting for a mistake, which usually comes in the form of opposition batters getting bowled or hitting it in the air: genuine outside edges to the wicketkeeper or slips are pretty rare.

Batting I found quite challenging, mainly because I couldn’t settle on a camera angle I liked and was confused by all the visual aids that are meant to tell you where the ball is going. Which are included on the basis that, again, unlike in most cricket games, you don’t spend your time as the bowler runs up here looking at a marker showing you exactly where the ball is going to land and planning what shot to play. You have to react to the ball as it’s bowled.

Unfortunately, I didn’t like the default view from behind the batsman or the first person camera either, and both the circle surrounding the ball telling you the length and line and the ball trail I found to be a case of information overload. So, on the basis that all I really want from a cricket game is just to replicate the TV coverage, but with me in charge of the players, I stuck the broadcast camera on and turned all the aids off.

Not seeing where the ball is going to pitch is definitely a good thing, and adds the adrenaline rush element of facing fast bowlers in particular. Unfortunately, it does mean your reflexes have to be up to it, first to see where the ball is going and judge line and length, then to get your brain to talk to your hands sufficiently quickly to select the front or back foot and the appropriate shot. At times, I felt I was doing about as well as I would do playing in a real match, and spent most of my time staring intently at the middle of the pitch and concentrating as hard as I could manage.

Not sure what I was trying here.

Early batting totals were fairly puny: I could make twenties and thirties with individual batters but would then get out if ever I tried to play more expansively. And after failing to score too many runs off the fast bowlers, particularly Mitchell Johnson (here recreated in his terrifying 2014 pomp, a musclebound colossus reminiscent of a beat ’em up boss character), runs came more easily against the spinner Nathan Lyon, although the temptation to play more attacking shots mean that he ended up as the top wicket taker in the series.

There are lots of stats relating to the players but they remain largely hidden from view outside of the editing suite, which means that you can’t easily look up what the strengths and weaknesses of your team, or your opponents, are. When batting it soon became obvious that trying to drive the ball on the off side was fraught with danger, although whether that was universal or simply down to the stats of the particular batters I was trying it with, I’m not sure.

Anyway, I realised that playing a full range of shots was going to be beyond me, and success would involve batting in a limited and fairly attritional manner. (I must also admit to rage-quitting occasionally when losing a wicket legitimately caused me to go slogging madly with the next couple of batters, precipitating a collapse: in general, I never felt confident enough to play aggressively and use the slog buttons as I had remembered doing first time around).

What seemed a bit frustrating was that as my batters played themselves in they never seemed to time the ball better, with boundaries rare and runs coming from an accumulation of thunked ones and twos. Accepting that at face value meant fairly slow scoring, taking up a lot of deliveries and limiting my batters to a few shots, leaving almost everything outside off stump and clipping off the legs against pace, and taking a few calculated risks against spin.

Another familiar sight.

I managed to pass team totals of 200 a few times and, once, 300 (unlike England) but like them I also got bowled out for embarrassingly low totals far too often. In a weird piece of symmetry, I also lost the series 4-0, narrowly saving the fourth match with a hundred from Jonny Bairstow, which was quite satisfying, and almost easier to accomplish in the fourth innings, with a set target number of overs to bat through.

It was hard work though, and I looked at the number of hours spent on the game in Steam and calculated that I could have probably completed two or three other games from my backlog in that time. All I did was play a single test series, and much of the main focus of the game is actually on the development of the career of an individual player, which I sort of can’t really be bothered with. It’s probably why I won’t get around to reviewing it properly either. (Uncle Dave from JGR put down his thoughts here a few years ago, though).

Anyway, my curiosity, and appetite for virtual test cricket, is satisfied for the time being. I’d have a few niggles, some of which I’ve already mentioned, and there are aspects of the presentation which are a bit woolly, although I’m sure there have been improvements made in subsequent editions. Still, from what I can tell, Don Bradman Cricket 14 appears to be a fairly decent cricket game, something I once thought might never be possible.

Hi all.

Not that I usually pay attention to such things anymore, but if our records are correct, then this is my 250th review on FFG.

And upon which legendary title do I bestow this lofty honour? Why, a daft shareware racer from the mid-90s, of course!

Here’s a review of a game called Road Hog!

Hello everyone.

The rusty birthday train has been running a bit late, but finally makes its last stop with this look back at Indiana Jones’ 00s action-adventures.

First up, a retrospective consideration of Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine, first released in 1999 and reviewed here in 2002 (!) …

Plus a new review of the sequel, Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb, released in 2003. Just under 20 years to get around to that one, then.

Right, I think that’s definitely it for anniversary features – hope you’ve enjoyed reading.

We’ll be back to our usual stuff, at its usual rate, until further notice!

Hi everyone. Roleplaying games were once supposed to be my area of expertise at this site. I’d like to think that, while I was never exactly prolific, I covered a decent range within the genre, from first-person shooter hybrids to proper old-school beardy examples. However, it’s been a long time since I contributed a review to that section. There are a few reasons for my absence, one of which being simply how time consuming they can be. Let’s… not discuss how long ago I started Might and Magic 6.

Meanwhile Rik has been broadening his horizons, doing some great work reviewing Oblivion and the entire Mass Effect series. Thus I passed him the special hat marked “official RPG guy” (it confers a +2 bonus to wisdom and agility).

However, I thought it was time I made a renewed effort. I don’t get the hat back until I finish MM6 but for now here’s the action-RPG, Dungeon Siege 2.

Hi everyone.

It’s the Winter Olympics! In real life! Right now! Which is all the incentive I need to dust off some old tie-in game in search of some virtual glory.

Here’s a look at Vancouver 2010.

Hello again, and welcome to our latest instalment of Discussion: [indie game] (spoilers!), a series which usually involves a moderately lively back-and-forth on the topic of a relatively modern indie title.

Having covered one particular type of game pretty much exclusively so far, we’ve drawn a line under walking sims for now, capping things off with a spoiler-free round-up last time around.

Today’s subject for discussion is Neo Cab, a visual novel developed by Chance Agency and published by Fellow Traveller in 2019.

You play Lina, a human cab driver in a near future dominated by automated transport. Over the course of her first week in a new city, Lina has to juggle the need to track down an errant friend with doing the day job of ferrying a variety of passengers around the city.

Here’s a trailer!

As any regular readers may know, we don’t like to say too much more here, but this is another relatively short game (around 4-5 hours) that we both really enjoyed, and would recommend. If the trailer makes it look like it might be of interest, then go no further, if you want to avoid spoilers.

Otherwise, here’s the ***FINAL SPOILER WARNING*** for the discussion below!

Discussion: Neo Cab (spoilers!) continued »