Football Manager 2013 CD Key
If you have told me at the start of the entire year that I would spend more time in 2012 playing a football game not given by EA Canada than Used to do inside the grip of its imperious FIFA series, i then guess I would have told you there was clearly more potential for Robin Van Persie signing for Man utd. But hey, strange things do happen.
Weirdly though, this unexpected interloper wasn't PES 2013, although Konami's latest is an excellent football game. It absolutely was New Star Soccer. By breaking football on to short bursts of its most fun and rewarding elements, like long-range shots and Hollywood passes, and tying that right into a shallow but addictive management sim, New Star Soccer completely took over my free time. Through my long hours playing it, I often believed that Konami and EA Sports could learn a thing or two from its success which of games enjoy it.
Well, it looks like EA has been doing. The new Skill Games mode in FIFA 13 is the kind of bite-size football challenge that makes smartphone treasures like Flick Kick Football so compulsive - with the exception that it's built using one of the finest football gameplay engines around, with all the pomp and connectivity you'd expect from the modern sports game.
My current favourite Skill Game may be the Advanced Shooting Skill Challenge, where you get 2 1 / 2 minutes to attain as many goals as possible in the revolving array of scenarios. There's always two burly defenders chasing you down along with a goalkeeper to conquer, but not you're racing onto a through ball to chip the goalie, sometimes the ball is fired into you in the box to get a bicycle kick, sometimes you're around the halfway line with the keeper retreating into his area, sometimes you are going to get a header 12 yards out, etc and so on, and you may react however, you want.
Perhaps the headline changes for FIFA 13 are more evolutionary than anything. The most noticeable is First Touch Control - which we've nicknamed "Dave" in the office, as with "I might have put you through there but Dave screwed me over", due to the tendency to produce fluid attacking moves less predictable. Dave uses individual players' finely tuned stats as well as their situation when they get the ball - under pressure, facing away from it, sprinting close to the touchline, etc - to ascertain how well they initially control it. This can disrupt the tempo of your play, however with take action really just allows you to pay more attention to what are the ball is performing instead of assume you'll have instant control and look up for a quarterback pass for an advanced attacker.
Another major tweaks are the addition of more fine control of dribbling and better supporting play from the ball from your team-mates. The former is quite satisfying, enabling you to apply almost FIFA Street amounts of close control when you're facing up to a well-disciplined defense, while the latter is really a definite improvement over this past year, whenever a great deal of attacks would peter out as you went to the advantage of the opposing penalty area and realized nobody had bothered to come together with you.