It was 09 where you could burn players into dust by just giving it to Ronaldo and sprinting. 08 and 09 had the crude acceleration - but because 08 had it slowly it worked pretty reasonably - better than 10s acceleration in fact. 08 played a better, more reasonable game of football than FIFA 10 did online - and this was primarily because of its pace.
No, FIFA 09 typified the problem which was in FIFA 08 but less noticeable because of the way the game was more on rails. This forced you to play the exact same way over and over again.
It's no coincidence that pass across the back for and play it up the wing, cut back goal came from the easy of repeatability inherent in FIFA 08.
Because trapping was so poor in FIFA 08, response so poor the game didn't have any balance.
FIFA 10 whilst suffering from pressure issues, it actually a much more technical football game than FIFA 08 was. Alternative passes actually can happen and can allow for more creative build up.
Simple shielding improvements and not so on rails as FIFA 08 make it much much better than FIFA 08.
As with anything though nostalgia is a wonderful thing.
FIFA 08 is in almost every way less technically accurate, technically clever, but because it's the only one of 08/09/10/WC to have even close to reasonable pacing, it still came off as a better game overall once you went online. You don't need to model acceleration right to make a decent game - most people still look on PES5 as the best football game sim - clearly that game was technically not very clever - but it didn't need to be.
PES 5 was a highly fun and playable football game, much in the same vain that Sensible Soccer is a fun and playable game.
By not being "technically very clever" it is highlighting the difficulty in making a good fun balanced game and the new generation (FIFA/PES) that are trying to replicate the finer points of football and all the nuances that go along with that.
Whilst there are flaws in the latest incarnations of FIFA and PES I for one don't want to keep looking back, we need to look forward and for me that is the deepening of the entire engines. I mean seriously who would want to play for a year a football game that isn't trying to implement physicality, 360 dribbling etc.
If you can't get the basic things right, as 09 and 10 didn't, none of the technical improvements really matter at the end of the day.
The basic things are there are as is the way a better revision year on year.
None of this changed from 07, 08, 09, or 10. Even now with analog sprint it's not really going to change that. Do you think FIFA 08 had better footballing logic, or FIFA 10? Because for me it's FIFA 08, definitely.
That's rather emotive.
FIFA 10 is the far superior game, for all the flaws and foibles its the closest any game has got to reproducing football on a console. Is it perfect no. Is it ultimately more fun than 08, probably not but then I want a better football game not a fun all the time football game.
I'm not one of the people who constantly says "Go back to FIFA 08" becuase there is no doubt that the improvements in 09, 10, and 11 are good - I just think that something in 09/10 is broken badly, which utterly ruins the multiplayer experience for me.
Its the people I play that ruin the multiplayer experience for me. Its the exploitative nature of human "gamers" that find an flaw in a game and then milk it to fucking death.
A formation like 6-1-3 could never work on FIFA 08, for instance.
Of course it could. The fact you didn't need to and just to use the 532 with Inter shows how flawed 08 was. Because it was so linear and predictable you had very limited ways to break down a 5-3-2 because of the running vectors and angles to goal always game the 5-3-2 team the advantage.
FIFA 08 was a nice game but it was the game that spawned the FIFA "winners" showing them how to capitalise on repetitive aspects of the game engine. Cutback anyone? Kick Off Goal to name but 2.
So for all its fun playability FIFA 08 was the catalyst for "exploiters" sure it was fun but very linear in comparison to PES and FIFA of the last 2 years.