FIFA Manager 08 Review

While the football management genre has hit a peak of depth and realism, there's no doubt that it remains a little daunting for beginners. FIFA Manager 08 aims to fill the gap between the hardcore management simulations and such games as FIFA Soccer 08 with an approachable football management game that has many different features to distinguish it. Most notably, the 3D match engine is more visually engaging than similar features in other management games, plus the official license affords a mountain of team logos and player photos to break up the stats. This year, the game is a deeper experience than ever with revamps of the training, player interaction, and scouting elements. The game struggles to present all the information coherently if you play at the hardest difficulty, but otherwise, it's a decent, glossy alternative to other games in the genre.

The match engine isn't up to the visual standard of FIFA 08, but player likenesses are impressive.

FIFA Manager 08 makes an excellent first impression. British gamers, in particular, will feel a warm glow when the theme song from the Grandstand TV show kicks off the welcome screen, and high production values are evident throughout the game. As with any management title, you start by choosing the domestic or international club for which you want to work. If you choose to raise a team from the ranks of the lower divisions, you'll have fewer resources and lower expectations, but if you pick a world-class club, you'll have some very serious board expectations. However, FIFA Manager 08 helps you juggle the demands of whatever club you choose by allowing you to palm off certain aspects of the running to your assistants. If your interest is in finding and cultivating talent rather than wading through spreadsheets of numbers, then your finance team is there to take care of it. Alongside this, FIFA Manager 08 places an emphasis on creating your manager rather than being the manager. You're asked how you want to look, how big you want your family to be, and what sort of hobbies you want to pursue. Learning a foreign language will help you secure a job in another country, while playing golf may enamour you to the board members of another team.

Thankfully though, the developers have concentrated their efforts this year on improving the core game. There's now a greater emphasis on player scouting, training, and motivation to the point that the game feels completely refocussed on the players themselves. Aside from short-term considerations, such as swapping substitutes or allowing talent to flow from your youth team, you also need to cultivate star players by giving them pep talks--and not just during matches.

While FIFA Manager 08 does a great job of easing you in, the interface can get messy very quickly as you activate the more advanced options. While it can go spectacularly in-depth compared to last year's relatively shallow offering, the resulting interface clutter needs to be addressed. There are some useful additions for all players, though, such as the widget system that provides you with access to everything from a notepad to an MP3 player in-game.

Training schedules can now be specified for each individual player and the overall team; thus, making small changes can have a dramatic result on performance. The transfer system now works in a much more realistic manner, with more in-depth negotiation between clubs and players, while the scouting element is a minigame in itself. Foreign player statistics are now hidden by default, and it's only when you send your scout to the region that you can differentiate from one player to the next.

FIFA Manager 08 does everything it can to visually augment the graphs and statistics.

FIFA Manager 08's 3D match engine is something that sets it apart from other games in the genre. Traditionally, matches have often been re-created using a mixture of text-based commentary and a 2D engine to represent the players. This leaves more to the player's imagination while the computer is spared more resources to compute likely scenarios. While FIFA Manager 08's match engine presents a watchable game of football, it doesn't make the job of management any easier. The game does allow you to play as one player on the pitch if you want to, but the lack of overall control means it's more frustrating than helpful.

If you're a football fan, then you'll really get something out of the official licences. They permeate the game, with a customised menu screen depending on the team you play, as well as mountains of up-to-date player photos and stats for the majority of major teams. The licensing even stretches to official newspaper reports from such publications as The Sun, something that really taps into the wider aspects of football. While the number of teams can't touch that of Football Manager, the game still covers the major world clubs. It also now includes more English and Spanish leagues than before.

It's clear that Bright Future has worked hard on updating and expanding its football management sim. While it's not quite in the Premier League yet, there's plenty here for fans to enjoy. It's a tremendously deep game that also manages to be welcoming to the novice while the official licenses and overall polish will delight both types of player. Those playing at the advanced level are unlikely to feel hamstrung by limited options this time around, but the way that all the information is presented could definitely do with some work for next year. Most importantly, the game carves out its own niche in the football management market, and although this time it falls short of greatness, it shows plenty of promise for the future.

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Unreal Tournament 3 Review

Unreal Tournament 3 probably shouldn't feel as fresh and as exciting as it does. When you get down to it, UT3 doesn't change a lot of the things that you liked about Unreal Tournament 2004. It's still the same fast-moving and action-oriented first-person shooter. Yet the game's new maps, the requisite graphical overhaul, and easy-to-understand gameplay modes all feel great. The way the shooter genre has changed over the three years since the previous game is also a factor. With most other games slowing things down and going for a more realistic, militaristic pace, UT3's hypercharged gameplay explodes out of the gate feeling refreshing and new.

Unreal Tournament 3 doesn't reinvent the UT franchise, but considering how much shooters have changed since the last one was released, it still manages to feel surprisingly fresh.

The UT games have never been about single-player action, but like in the previous games, there is a campaign mode in UT3. It's a series of matches against bots wrapped around a basic but uneventful storyline. The big switch this time around is that Unreal Tournament is no longer a sport. Now it's war, and you play as a character on the hunt for revenge against an evil Necris woman who led an assault against unarmed civilians on your colony. You and the survivors of the attack join up with a corporation, fight to gain territory held by other corporations, and so on. It's little more than a five- to seven-hour training mode to help you get up to speed on the maps and the modes so you can go into multiplayer with a fighting chance. One cool addition is that you can play the campaign mode online with up to three other players. Although joining other humans to combat the artificial-intelligence-controlled bots isn't exactly the most fun you can have in this game, it's more compelling (and easier) when you're playing with other people. You can set the skill level of the bots, too. At the lowest setting, they're complete idiots that won't even bother to turn around and fight you if you start shooting them from behind. The highest setting, godlike, is appropriately stiff, though not entirely impossible. It's just tough to fight against opponents who rarely miss.

The maps you'll see in the single-player campaign are the same maps you'll see online, at least until the mod-making scene shifts into high gear. You'll get into matches using a typical PC-style server browser, but the game tries to keep you away from a full list of every server running by moving you through some console-game-style menus to filter down to the gametype you want to see. UT3 comes with six different modes of play. Deathmatch is the standard free-for-all battle. Team deathmatch, as you'd expect, breaks you up into two teams. Duel is a one-on-one mode where two players go at it while other players spectate. All three of these modes are played on the same set of deathmatch-friendly maps. UT3 also has a standard capture-the-flag mode, complete with the translocator, the teleporter gun that has made UT's take on CTF stand apart from most others. There's a new vehicle CTF mode, which takes the standard CTF concept and places it onto larger battlefields. As the name suggests, you have a number of vehicles that you can use toward your goal of grabbing the opposing team's flag and getting it back to your base. The largest mode is called warfare, and like onslaught mode before it, it's played on even bigger maps, with more vehicles.

Warfare is a node-based mode where each team has a base with a power core that needs to be damaged and destroyed for a victor to be declared. The power core is linked to other nodes at various spots in the map. You must push forward, capture nodes, and link them together until you've got your team's nodes linked to the opposing team's base. At that point, you can damage the enemy core and, ideally, blow up it for a victory. There's a ton of pushing and shoving back and forth across the map when two great teams square off, and it's also the most strategic mode. It differs from onslaught mode by offering secondary objectives, like unlinked nodes that can be captured to give a team forward spawn points and access to more vehicles and a countdown node that will occasionally drain energy from the enemy core if you control it. Each of the objective-based team modes comes with its own set of maps.

Overall, the map quality is high, with plenty of symmetrical, interesting level layouts for the objective-based modes. One deathmatch map, called Gateway, has multiple areas that look really different, all of which are linked together with portals. You'll also get a new remake of the classic Unreal map Deck. Furthermore, the Unreal mod community has always been pretty rabid, so you know it's just a matter of time before someone makes one of those "giant world" levels where you can hide in a sink drain and snipe people with an instagib shock rifle while they float down into the bottom of a bathtub. Yes, that's right, the instagib mode is also back in the game, along with a handful of other basic mutators you can use to make quick changes to any of the modes.

The weapons in Unreal Tournament 3 should be old hat to anyone familiar with the series. The shield gun has been ditched in favor of the impact hammer, and your default weapon is the slow-firing enforcer pistol, but beyond that, the weapon differences feel limited to minor balance changes. The bio rifle's gooey projectiles seem to do more damage, which makes it somewhat more useful. The secondary fire on the flak cannon seems as if it flies out at a slightly higher, slower arc, which forces you to make a few changes to how you aim. But again, the changes are minor. The rocket launcher can still lock on, the sniper rifle is still great fun for headshots, and the redeemer is still a huge missile that you can guide into targets to cause a nice, big blast that's handy in some of the larger vehicle CTF games. But when isn't a large explosion handy?

The other gameplay changes also feel relatively minor. Recent UT games have employed an adrenaline counter, which built up as you killed enemies or collected large pills around each level. When the meter was full, you could activate a special ability, such as invisibility or regeneration. This system isn't present in UT3. Also, the rules for double-jumping after a dodge move seem to have been altered a bit. Again, these are minor differences that don't really get in the way or drastically change the overall feel of the game, but they're noteworthy just the same. A more dramatic difference is the hoverboard, which is in vehicle CTF and warfare. The hoverboard lets you pick up a little more speed, which is useful on the larger battlefields. The catch is that getting hit while on your board knocks you over, which gives enemies more than enough time to finish you off as your character slowly arises from the ground. You can even do tricks while on the board, which isn't useful for gameplay purposes but is still totally rad.

Unreal Tournament 3 uses Unreal Engine 3, the same basic set of tools that powered Gears of War. As such, this is a really great-looking game on high-end machines. But even if your PC isn't top of the line, the game scales better than most, giving you a playable experience on midrange machines as well. But, of course, the game is at its best when you're exceeding the game's minimum requirements, in situations where you can run at a high resolution and still get a great frame rate. It supports widescreen resolutions, but playing in widescreen actually gives you a smaller view of the overall action, given that the game appears to cut off the top and bottom of the 4:3 view to fit it onto a wider monitor. UT3 certainly isn't the first PC game to have this problem, but given its highly competitive nature, cutting off parts of the screen seems to be a pretty bad solution.

Whether you're riding a hoverboard or running through tight corridors, UT3 looks great.

The game's textures, character models, and animation are all top-notch when you've got everything turned up. Characters can be tweaked and modified using different torso pieces, shoulder plates, and more. The handful of levels that have running liquids in them have good-looking water effects, too. Overall, it's a very sharp-looking game if your machine can hang with its higher settings. The audio fits right in with what you'd expect a UT game to sound like. The music is high in energy, the explosions and gunfire sound great, and the character voices, which occasionally pipe up to taunt you when you get killed, fit right in as well. The announcer is appropriately loud and booming when calling off your head shots, killing sprees, and the like.

It's a very basic, straightforward package, but don't take that to mean that UT3 is a no-frills sequel. With its variety of modes and its occasionally crazy high-speed action, UT3 still feels very different than the typical first-person shooter coming out these days. On top of that, it's very exciting and just as much fun now as it has been in previous installments. UT3 has more than enough content to keep you busy, and with mod-making tools included in the package, the potential for more user-generated content in the future is certainly present.

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Pro Evolution Soccer 08 Review

If you're looking to play this year's Pro Evolution Soccer, you could do worse than check out the PC version. Judged on its own merits, it stacks up well against the console equivalents by looking sharp and playing well, especially if you have a couple of Xbox 360 joypads. However, compared to other sports games, Pro Evolution Soccer is struggling to keep up with the times. The presentation is unpolished, with poor online functionality, mediocre commentary, and few officially licensed teams. More importantly, practically no new features have been added to last year's game while the online gameplay is buggy with frequent lag and disconnection problems. Ultimately, PES 2008 plays a great game of football, but it's starting to seriously fall behind its contemporaries in terms of features.

You don't need a fast computer to get the most from the PC version of Pro Evolution Soccer, which looks sharp and moves well.

If you're a newcomer to the series, you'll be impressed at how well Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 plays. It captures the realism of the sport almost perfectly but, most importantly, it also remains eminently playable. Thanks to a combination of exquisite control, superb animation, and worthy artificial intelligence, it's highly replayable in single-player, but it really comes into its own in multiplayer. With that said, series veterans may wonder what exactly Konami has done to improve the gameplay in the past year. Aside from making minor tweaks to the animation and AI, it's fundamentally unchanged from Pro Evolution Soccer 6.

The biggest upgrade to the game is supposedly the new Teamvision artificial intelligence system, although its claims to revolutionise the playing experience prove to be overstated. Computer-controlled opponents are slightly more intelligent when it comes to changing playing styles, although defenders still feel a little bit superhuman in their ability to resist attack. Overall, the game feels more fluid than last year, but rather than feeling revolutionary, the improvement just feels like a return to the earlier glory of the series. In fact, the immediate changes feel so minor that even hardcore fans of the series will have trouble picking them out. The ball feels slightly weightier and players move with more physicality. They also tussle with each other more, pulling shirts and out-muscling each other over the ball. It adds up to a more natural-feeling game this year where you can still play an accomplished game of football. Anyone who hasn't played Pro Evolution Soccer will find that this is still a solidly playable game, but long-term fans may wonder what Konami's done this year to deserve the £50 upgrade fee.

Many of the new gameplay tweaks are actually more annoying than they are welcome. Goalkeepers now fumble the ball with infuriating regularity, and the fast pace now makes Pro Evo feel more like an arcade game rather than a simulation. Another new feature that betrays the game's simulation roots is the ability to make your players take a dive. It's something that undoubtedly happens in the real world, but its inclusion in a serious video game could be seen to tarnish an otherwise respectful representation of the sport. Used in the penalty area, the dive can win penalties, and while it's only successful in the minority of cases, it could be used to tip the balance of the game. We expect that discerning gamers will shun the new skill out of sportsmanship, but it'll be a real shame if faceless online players manage to win games by effectively employing the tactic.

The master league mode has a new emphasis on pleasing the fans, but it's otherwise business as usual.

In terms of features, the PC version is broadly the same as the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 iterations. Unfortunately, it lacks some of the cool new game modes from the PlayStation 2, including the world tour and the community mode. The latter mode allowed up to 16 people to compete in cups and tournaments on a single console. Instead, what you do get is the usual match, tournament, and cup modes, which up to four people can play simultaneously as long as you have enough controllers. There's also the master league, which forms the main challenge for the single-player mode. As well as allowing you to play through a series of proper football seasons, the master league offers up basic management functions that include training and transfers. This year, players also talk to the media and do interviews, although as with every other part of the master league, this pales in comparison to dedicated management games. While it's not really trying to compete with such games as Football Manager, many of the tasks feel like distractions from the main job of playing the league itself. Basically, the master league is the same as it's been in previous versions. True, signing talent is an important part of winning, but it simply isn't in-depth enough to warrant spending lots of time on training and scouting. The main idea is to perfect your starting lineup, get your players in a decent formation, and play well on the pitch.

The online offering is built to offer two-player ranked and unranked matches over the Internet. The retail build of the game was lamented by fans for lagging too much, and even though Konami quickly issued a patch, it's done little to remedy the problems. It's nowhere nearly as bad as the PlayStation 3, but a fair bit of slowdown affects online performance even when you have a decent connection. We also encountered a high proportion of disconnections. While some of these could have been down to the users, it was indicative of a patchy and unpredictable service.

Aside from the somewhat patchy performance, Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 is severely lacking when it comes to overall Internet functionality. There are no real-world score tickers, no news feeds, and no online leagues--features which the rival FIFA series has been offering for two years now. There's no voice chat either--just a text interface for typing in pre-match messages. Even worse, the only games you can play are single matches. The complete lack of online leagues and tournaments is restrictive when compared to other sports games on the market. It's also worth noting that the online registration process locks your copy of the game to your Konami account for online play. This means that if you ever want to sell your copy of the game, the next person will be unable to play online unless he or she has your registration details.

Presentation has never been Pro Evolution Soccer's strong point, and the 2008 version does little to break with tradition. The menu system is basic and unwelcoming while the soundtrack tries to span genres but is awful throughout. The majority of teams also don't feature the official kits. This will be a familiar problem to fans, but Konami's selection is becoming increasingly schizophrenic. English Premier League teams Newcastle United and Tottenham Hotspur are now included. But this is at the expense of Manchester United and Arsenal, who've been out since the last game. We assume that Newcastle was included thanks to star striker Michael Owen adorning the cover of the game, but the same theory doesn't apply to Christiano Ronaldo and Manchester United (who are named "Man Red"). There are only 15 stadiums, and although Mark Lawrenson is now onboard as a commentator, his contributions are frequently inaccurate.

You'll definitely need a joypad to get the most out of PES 2008.

In terms of graphics, the PC version looks even sharper than its PS3 and Xbox 360 counterparts, running well even on modest systems. We had no problem cranking the detail and resolution right up to the maximum settings on an 18-month-old test machine, with no drop in overall performance. Certain player likenesses, such as the aforementioned Christiano Ronaldo, are very realistic. However, the game offers little in the way of incidental graphical effects, such as true cloth deformation, video walls, or goalkeeper head protection. We also like the fact that the referee can be seen on pitch, although waiting the few seconds for him to blow his whistle for free kicks is detrimental to the pace of the game. Ultimately, the success of Pro Evolution Soccer is a paradox for the game's designers. It's difficult to improve on the standard that was achieved with the fifth version of the game, but the designers could certainly start by introducing some truly new features to build on the excellent playability. Konami has tried to make subtle changes to the gameplay, some of which are successful and some of which are not. However, what the game really needs are new modes, features, and online offerings to warrant the upgrade, as well as bring it in line with other PC sports offerings. It will be quite a task, but next year's game needs to deliver all this and more if it's to retain its massive fan base.

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Need for Speed ProStreet Review

It can't be easy to be a game developer in charge of releasing a new game in a series every year. People don't want the same game over and over, yet they're unhappy if the game strays too far from the established formula. EA deserves credit for trying something different with Need for Speed ProStreet, but the new direction of the series fails to live up to the level of the previous games. There's still a solid racing experience here, and the online component of the PC version is quite good. But the game's premise is uninteresting, the in-game advertising is over the top, and it doesn't run particularly well. In the end, ProStreet is just another decent but uninspired racing game.

The racing is solid, but nothing special.

Unlike the last two Need for Speed games, which told the story of an underground street racer through campy yet entertaining cutscenes, ProStreet follows the legal street racing career of Ryan Cooper. The game still uses cutscenes to try to instill some story into the proceedings--something about Ryan getting dissed by a big-time street racer--but it's uninteresting thanks to terrible voice acting and unlikable characters. Ignoring the story, it's your goal to head to different events, dominate them, challenge the best of the best, and then take on Ryo, the man who disrespected you after your first race.

Thanks to the sheer number of race days you'll need to win, it will take a long time to get to Ryo. Each race day consists of a number of different events. Most of these will be familiar to anyone who's played previous Need for Speed games. Grip races are standard races with eight cars on the track, and your goal is to finish first. Other events have you trying to get the fastest time or highest speed through checkpoints, or the best time out of your class of cars. Drift racing is back, but has been revamped and is actually fun this time around since you don't lose all your points for going off the track. You'll also be doing a lot of drag racing. It's fun for a bit, but gets old quickly thanks in no small part to the preceding minigame in which you have to heat up your tires; it's lame, and you have to do it before each of the three rounds. While there's no shortage of events, there isn't a whole lot of variety. Many of them feel the same--you just want to go fast. This makes the game grow old quickly, a problem when there are so many events to slog through before you reach the end.

The game also grows tiresome because the action on the track just isn't that exciting. Some of the later cars you unlock, like the Lamborghini and Zonda, are superfast, but for the first 50 races you'll be racing some rather pedestrian vehicles. Since you're on a track there are no shortcuts, so many of the courses end up feeling the same, especially since a "new" course is just an old one with a few different turns. Most importantly, there are no cops. Getting chased by the five-0 was easily the best part of the last few games, so its omission here is huge. Damage plays a more pronounced role this time around; you'll have to repair damaged cars, but you always have enough damage-repair markers to take care of things. We encountered a fair amount of lag when we used a controller with the game, which made car damage a more significant factor with the PC version.

Now that everything's on the up and up there are no cops to be found.

While you always want to win a race day, that's not your only goal. You'll need to dominate as many race days as possible to unlock new events. After each race you're awarded points based on where you placed, how fast you finished, and how much damage you took. If your combined score for all the events breaks the old record, you've dominated the race day and you're awarded with a prize like cash or parts for your ride. You don't always have to race perfectly, but you'll have to win most of the events to dominate. This is made difficult because you can bring only a few cars into each race day--one for each event--so if your car can't hang with the other rides, you're in trouble. All is not lost, though. Like in other NFS games, you can purchase new cars or upgrade your ride to improve performance. And like in the last game, you can sculpt certain aspects of your cars' bodies to make them more aerodynamic. This time you even get to use a wind tunnel. It looks cool, but it's not that useful. Nor are all the visual customization options, because it seems that you can't use your rides online. The tool for putting on decals and vinyls is similar to what is found in Forza 2, but not quite as deep.

On the PC you can create your own race day by picking a location, race types, and even what cars can participate. You can then play these race days online in ranked and unranked matches. There was some lag, the racing was a bit choppy, and we had difficulty finding opponents, but it was still fun--you can really build up some good rivalries by racing the same people in multiple events during an online race day.

Every platform gets a piece of the avalanche of advertising that permeates the game. Sure, races in real life are heavily sponsored, but ProStreet takes it too far--there's nary a stretch of track where there's not some sort of advertisement for motor oil or car insurance. It doesn't seem possible, but 360 and PC owners get to enjoy even more advertising thanks to dynamic ads that will be downloaded when you start the game up for the first time. Even better, some of the achievements are sponsored by a car insurance company. It's too bad that the cost of the game and the ridiculous amount of advertising isn't making EA enough money--on the Xbox 360 (and according to EA, soon on the PS3) you can use real cash to unlock cars and upgrades. Every single time you go to buy a car, you're asked if you want to use in-game cash or real money. You don't even need to have unlocked a car to be able to purchase it with real cash, which is really unfair since you can use that unlocked car to zoom right to the top of the leaderboards on the early courses.

If you've got a rig that can handle it, the PC version of Need For Speed looks just as good as the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions. With all of the visual options enabled the game looks very nice--particularly its cars, which look fantastic. They look great when they're shiny and new, but they look even better when they're all smashed up. It hurts your wallet when you total a car, but it sure is entertaining to watch the windshield shatter, the bumper fall to the ground, and the hood peel away like a sardine can lid. Unfortunately, enabling smoke effects, car damage, and bumping up the detail causes the game to run poorly. As mentioned earlier, the game doesn't give off a tremendous sense of speed, even with all of the bells and whistles turned off. This is partially because you'll spend a lot of time driving slower cars, but also because the frame rate isn't very fast and is frequently choppy. Everyone gets in on the terrible career menu, which is ugly and difficult to navigate. We also experienced numerous crashes, regardless of the visual settings.

Most of the cars here are the same cars from the last few games.

ProStreet's audio isn't very good. This is mostly the fault of the game's announcers, who are poorly voiced, have a terrible script, yell into the microphone, insist on calling you by your full name every time they refer to you (which is hundreds of times over the course of the game), and basically do everything they can to get on your nerves. The cars sound OK, but there's not a whole lot of variety to the engine noise. The music isn't anything exciting, either, and you'll hear the same songs dozens and dozens of times over the course of the fairly lengthy career.

What it all boils down to is that without the story, cop chases, and open world of the last two Need for Speed games, ProStreet is just another racing game. Other than a nice online mode, its only truly distinguishing feature is its amount of advertising, which makes an already uninspired game feel even more soulless.

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