It’s that time of the season, March 2024 in my Career mode world to be precise, approaching the 30th game mark, the business end, where teams fight to avoid relegation, or fight for titles and trophies, luckily enough, we are involved in the latter of the two.
This is the league table as it stands after 29 games:
Very tight up there, all the way down to 5th place could still yet have a say with 9 or 10 games to go, I played table topping Chelsea in my most recent session, it ended 1-1, after being a goal down at the Bridge, great game, cancelling each other out all over the pitch, the finest margins counting, end to end stuff and one of those draws that as a neutral, you would have thoroughly enjoyed watching.
I also recorded my biggest win on World class level, a 7-0 hammering of Huddersfield on their own turf, they were white dog shit.
Every match continues to be a solid 9.5/10 experience, tense tight matches, lots at stake, and extremely enjoyable, maturing season after season like a vintage 1983 Chablis, Cheers!
I did some business in the January transfer window to bring a few new faces in to cover positions where players had left, I let LM Moses Simon go after some disappointing performances this season, Adama Traoré has shifted out to the left now to cover, and Wylan Cyprien, my talismanic CDM also left, he was 32 and wanted a decent payday before retirement, and moved to Besiktas.
The players scouted are for the summer, however I did sign a CB from Liverpool, Ruben Dias, when we played them he was a rock, but £43 million plus our CB Bruno Viana sealed the deal,
After finishing group runners up in our Champions League group, we were drawn against Villareal in the last 16, a solid 3-0 win at home followed by a 1-0 defeat in the Estadio ceramic, saw us through on aggregate, the noise in that Spanish stadium with the flares and drums, insane!!! Villareal are 3rd in la Liga behind Real Madrid and Barca, so a great victory, and we eagerly awaited the Quarter final draw, only to be pitted against Barcelona, no Camp Nou Stadium in FIFA unfortunately but will still be a great occasion.
A shock exit in the FA cup 3rd round to derby, and a Semi final 2 legged defeat at the hands of Man Utd in the carabao cup means we are out of both domestic cups, so just the poor mans double of the Premier League and UEFA Champions League to play for, not expecting to win either, but we will give it a damn good go.
Finally a little 2 and a half minute compilation of a few goals, including a couple of youth player come star in the making, Karl Schinkel, who continues to perform way above his 70 OVR rating, and bang the goals in alongside Brewster.
FIFAFX.com 
Paul – getting to the business end of my season 3 as well and am at that stage where every match is a momentous occasion. My first real in-depth experience of CM (Manager Mode in FIFA09 doesn’t count) and I’m giving it a massive thumbs-up. Takes the best element of Master League – the squad building and the development of Youth – and puts it in a proper footballing world.
You’ve got a good squad and are well capable of taking the title there, if so would you go up to Legendary? Ultimate? I’m still toodling along on Professional but there are ample signs it’s time for me to take the step up as well.
Loved that goal at around 1:20. First time, proper boom from inside the box, post and bar, fantastic.
Messing around with Origin the other night I spotted that FIFA16 is part of the package. I don’t think it was there before. They might have added it because of the ‘buzz’ that surrounds it online. With my football game historian hat on I dutifully grabbed it, installed it, added the ReShade patch (don’t think I could play any PC footy game without this now!), and had a couple of matches. Looked fantastic, I’ll post a snippet here later for you to look at – no goals or anything. I didn’t have time to track down any of the many mods that are out there for ’16, it was just a test, two matches in CM mode. Vanilla not as good as FIFA20 modded but there are promising signs, I noticed an extreme tendency to punish no-look and one-touch passing etc. One for the summertime project list, I think.
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NG – One thing that FIFA does so well that i’v always praised, is making important matches feel important, the commentary, presentation, atmosphere, and the game play, and I’m getting that in spades right now being involved in a title race and the latter stages of the UCL, its glorious.
Absolutely with yu on the Re-Shade patch, it begs a question as to why game devs don’t incorporate more realistic colour and lighting palettes within the base game, I watch FIFA 20 footage on Youtube and feel so sorry for console players as the game still looks great but dull and drab in appearance compared to what we get with the added reshade settings.
When you do step up, you will LOVE world class, as someone who enjoys the challenge, WC is so much more rewading than professional, where you can coast man games after a certain time, WC demands composure, and concentration every minute of every match, even my recent 7-0 drubbing of Huddersfield required a few bum squeak moments and careful tactical play in the first 20 mins, it wasn’t until I made a tweak and got the first goal that the flood gates then opened.
Look forward to your FIFA 16 footage, will be interesting to see how it holds up.
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With it being the Origin version it’s the final patched version – unmodded in any way apart from the ReShade – which the FIFA cognoscenti say is the adulterated, commercialised, dumbed-down-a-bit version – still looks good though, albeit a bit random and chaotic compared to FIFA20. The clip is worth watching to the 1 minute mark to see two errors, one from the AI (wide player letting the ball run out of play), one from me (too much of a knock-on). I played with ReShade until it looked like that as I couldn’t find the preset you gave me for ’20 in the time available and I just wanted to get on with it – that was around 3.30am the other night/morning! Definitely one for the summertime project list for me. Long long way to go with ’20 yet though, all my footy gaming time is devoted to that.
Whenever I see unmodded visuals on footy games now it’s like watching black and white. I think the devs – guessing here – know there’s still a broad variety of screens and TVs and monitors out there and they default to the one that looks the best on most. Pure guesswork. In the PC case the extra horsepower of the CPU and GPU and RAM are wasted without the visual mods too, as it’s such a trivial impact on resources.
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NG – F16 still looks like a good game, even to this day, not keen on that annoying ‘click’ sound of the ball being kicke dbut graphically its pretty up to date, its held its own.
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