With the high quality of this year’s ‘Big Two’ football titles, any other simulations of the sport will have to do something incredibly special to even make a mark. Pro Evolution Soccer 4 is as good as it gets right now, with FIFA 2005 bringing up the rear for those who don’t get on with Konami’s behemoth. But what of Sony’s own This Is Football 2005, which, for the umpteenth year running ‘ claims it is indeed ‘all that’ and more.
This year’s edition features a host of new animations, more teams, more moves, enhanced online play and enhanced AI. All of the usual promises, then…but a little more than the usual PR gumph comes to light from the main menu, and that is the ‘EyeToy: Cameo’ tool.
With this, you can take two photos of your face using your EyeToy camera, set some marker points on the image and the game maps these photos onto an in-game head. When trying this out on myself, I went through the process and set my marker points, before confirming that I wanted to create my very own cameo. After about two minutes of waiting for the progress bar to fill, the game turned out an error message, stating that my marker points were ‘incorrect’. How’ I marked in the places the game asked me to! After three more attempts, it worked, and my hideous looking cameo was created, complete with a selection of demonstrative expressions, such as ‘Surprised’ and ‘Angry’ – each one being funnier than the last, and not at all realistic.
Naturally, the first thing to do was to put my cameo onto a created player, so into the customise menu I went, and randomly edited Mikeal Forsell. I changed his name, swapped him into the England team and gave him my cameo as a head. After saving my work, I waited as the game loaded my cameo head from the memory card for a minute or so, and then continued loading the match for another minute. The players took the pitch in a game between England and Switzerland and I quickly took the lead with a goal from the plucky number 11, K Barnes. Lo and behold, when the game cut back to show my player celebrating, he had Mikeal Forsell’s unmistakable blonde hair and features.
Quite why this is, I don’t know, since before the match I had to wait for a minute or so whilst the game loaded my cameo head from the memory card. Did I miss an option somewhere’ I checked everywhere after the match and tried it again to the same effect. A bug’ Maybe, but even if it is, when you’re tooting your horn about new features and one of them doesn’t work, it doesn’t look good for the rest of the game. If I have missed something somewhere, then it doesn’t bode well for the game’s ‘intuitive’ menu structure.
And that is a fair way of summing up the rest of the game. As a gaming experience, This Is Football 2005 falls way short of the mark. Very responsive controls and a fast-paced match can be found here, but these are instantly counterbalanced with some absolutely shocking AI and animations that skip and jump as if they’re missing a few frames (again). As always, the ‘Career’ mode is a fun challenge that will provide reason to come back again and again to TiF 2005, should you be able to get past the gameplay deficiencies. Unfortunately, if you’ve ever been within twenty five feet of a Playstation2 that has a Pro Evolution Soccer 4 disc spinning inside it, then you’ll instantly see the holes within the very fabric of TiF 2005.
Defenders will often fall short of the mark and scatter like pigeons as you sprint clean through on goal unchallenged from the halfway line. Your keeper always seems to be keen to throw the ball out for a throw-in when he has it in his hands, and your teammates will gladly make themselves available for a cheeky pass, but will then take far too long to get the ball under control and will generally end up giving up possession to a defenceman. Those are just some of the criticisms that come to light when TiF 2005 is loaded up for the first time.
When the competition is battling it out for ‘Game Of The Year’ awards, a title that won’t be shortlisted by many as ‘Sports Game Of The Year’ isn’t going to cut it. The presentation is fabulous, but the matchplay does away with all of that hard work in a few, short minutes. Better luck next year.
