It was during a recent heated discussion about the merits of Fifa 11 that I came to a strange realisation – for me, the world of football sims and football management sims peaked in about 2005 (as an aside, this was probably the year real-life football peaked for me as well).
There's always an element of rose-tinted glasses in this sort of statement. I was at university at the time and living with friends - the perfect scenario for prolonged bouts of social gaming. The tendency to get misty-eyed about your pre-job/wife/child (delete as appropriate) lifestyle means it's not that hard to find people who genuinely believe that Space Invaders was better than Call of Duty or that PacMan was better than Fallout.
However, despite my fondness for that period of my life, it seems I'm not alone in holding such opinions about these particular games. For many, Championship Manager 03/04 and Pro Evolution Soccer 4, both released in 2004, represent the pinnacles of their respective genres. How is it that, six years later, they're still looked back on fondly by so many gamers?
Depth, depth and more depth
I've been playing the preview code of Football Manager 2011 (out in the first week of November) for the past few weeks – it would be unhealthy to do nothing but play New Vegas, right? – and, as much as I love it, I can't help but feel that the series has long since taken a wrong turn from which it may never recover.
This wrong turn, as sort of illustrated in the graph above, is to focus on becoming more and more realistic at the expense of what makes the game actually fun. Depth, it seems, is now valuable for depth's sake alone.
In CM03/04 it was possible to sit in your living room, laptop in hand, and whizz through half a season with your eye on the TV, pausing only to pick the team and delve into the transfer market. The depth, if you wanted it, was there lurking below the surface – the tactics engine was, and still is, obscenely complex.
But you could leave that to someone else if you wanted – just download a tactic from a forum, stick one of the game's super players in (Evandro Roncatto playing MC in 'Diablo' ... ahhh ...) and you could lead pretty much any team to glory.
Now, many of you will sneer at this. What's the point in playing a management game if you aren't even going to make your own tactics or create your own training regimes?
But for many (dare I say most), the pleasure to be found from 'Champman', as it was affectionately known, was not in watching 90 minute matches to observe the movement of your right-back with 'Closing Down' increased by 10%, but in creating your own fantasy world in which Plymouth could beat Real Madrid in the Champions League final and Cherno Samba could become England's greatest-ever striker.
Everyone could play Sports Interactive's Championship Managers in the way they wanted to. And it's this freedom and accessibility that's given those early iterations a place in the hearts of so many today.
Overwhelmed
Six years on, and starting a season on Football Manager is about as complex and stressful as a mortgage application. Training regimes, press conferences, tactics training, player interactions, coach recommendations, scouting, board meetings - it's easy to feel overwhelmed.
It's true that you can switch off a great many of the extra bells and whistles if you'd rather have a simpler experience. But knowing that your appalling home performances may rest on the fact you've neglected to fiddle with one of these thousands of variables is frustrating.
New features include being able to hold short conversations with players, greater tactical analysis, more press conference questions – all well and good for hardcore simulation fans but, for the rest of us, it just means it now takes even longer to get through a season.
Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy Football Manager and think the game is an incredible accomplishment on many levels. But the level of effort and commitment required is now beyond the point most people are interested in.
Fifa 11, I feel, has suffered from a similar problem. Fifa 10 was probably the most I've enjoyed a football game since university. 2010 World Cup was even better, I felt, although obviously hamstrung by its lack of club teams. I was disappointed, then, to find Fifa 11 really quite different to the previous two iterations.
The game was critically very well received – after all, in terms of graphics and gameplay it is a fantastic rendering of the game of football. But I've found that, more often than not, matches are simply hard work. Chances are few and far between and, unless you play as a top team, it's difficult even to keep possession.
I daren't write off a new game completely after only a month of playing, but, as with Football Manager, it seems to have been decided that realism at the expense of fun is a fair exchange.
Thirty-yard screamers and last-minute 5-4 comebacks were unrealistically frequent in PES 4 – but who cares? If realism is paramount, why do people so rarely play games of Fifa with 45 minute halves? Australia won the 2006 World Cup when I played through it with a friend. Spain won in our version of 2010. I don't need to tell you which is the more cherished memory.
Of course, it seems logical that games offer more and more depth as technology improves. The games industry needs us to buy new versions of the same games every year, and new features and added realism are always the most obvious bait. The question is, how long can this trend continue? In 10 years, will Football Manager allow you to pick the types of food a player eats before a game?
Reversing the trend
The forthcoming release of NBA Jam for the Wii suggests games publishers are aware of the gap in the market for sports games with a focus on 'fun'. I'd predict that a similarly pitched football title (or even a simple HD re-release of an old PES) would go down very well with gamers.
The simple answer to all my moaning, of course, is that there's a difference between 'games' and 'sims' and Football Manager, and now Fifa, are the latter (ironically, Fifa contains the closest thing out at the moment to a management 'game' in its watered-down management mode).
Racing fans can choose between F1 2011 (sim) or Need for Speed (game). Aviation enthusiasts can pick up full-on flight simulators or opt for H.A.W.X. But Fifa, Pes, Championship Manager and Football Manager all seem to be pushing in the same direction. Why can't football fans be offered the same choice?
It's assumed, with sports titles in particular, that what people want is the closest possible representation of real life on their small screen. But this isn't true of other genres.
Medal of Honour, for example, isn't an attempt to recreate real life as a soldier. It's an attempt to recreate the life of a soldier as depicted in an action film. Logic would dictate that the biggest-selling football series would have more in common with the recent Goal! films than Sky Super Sunday.
Of course developers are hardly trying to make games that aren't fun. But the overwhelming focus on new features and realism is, I feel, beginning to make the whole genre of football games suffer.
Since there must be a levelling off point for game realism, a new trend for simplicity and retro, Sensible Soccer-style playablity will come. But how long will we have to wait?
