Creation Centre
The FIFA 2004 Creation Centre has the advantage of being pretty good at what it does. I've had absolutely no problems with it and Chau Le is not simply to be cheered from the rafters but hoisted aloft in his own champagne-plumbed velvet sedan. The problem with the CC2004 is that it arrived two months late and even after the update, now resides on all of our PCs as half a product. So - the team management, the editing, the importing and so forth is GREAT, but it's just a shame we never got to see what all of the tweaks with the kits were. Presumably they had a series of generic kits lined up which never made it into the final version. If I'm missing something here, it's only on account of their being no instructions - a most basic of requisites, folks.
So - for this year, what we need is a CC that is fully functional and up and running rightfrom the start and it ought to be well within EA's capabilities, especially if Chau is still on board, to secure for us all a truly superb editing facility. Now that Konami has PES3 for the PC it is in EA's interest to have plenty of strings to its bow.
What would also be a help is for the CC to be re-incorporated into the game. It just saves time between games if you don't have to zip back to Windows to make tweaks.
Another omission from CC2004 was the ability to generate custom tournaments which really limits the game. This is the really fun part and limiting the tournaments to the few national cups when an in-built tourney editor has always existed in the game was a bit of a shame.
So - all of that, plus the tournament and season editing would be nice, toggling between generic and official kits and flags etc - yes, FIFA 2005 ought to have some of that and in truth it would be nothing extra on top of what has already been made possible over the years. It would just be Max Editing Capability - which a lot of the bigger games are now moving towards.
One final thing - for authenticity's sake at very least - is that the CC2005 must include more generic faces. It's a very bizarre spectacle to watch a FIFA 2004 game in that although the stadiums look fantastic, with a variety of adboards and crowd cheering options for each team, the kits looks superb and the crowd animations pretty good on the whole, the cut scenes and commentary adding to the realism of the experience etc etc it's a real bloody shame when half of one of the squads all appear to be members of the same family, especially when they have face #7. This has the look of someone who sat on the loo thinking they were constipated only to discover they actually had the diarrhoea and I'm sick of seeing it atop a body that scores goal after goal in game after game. 80+ generic faces (as we had in FIFA 2003) ought not to be too much of a graphics demand given the number of stadiums, kits and adboards the prog can hoist out of the database. You can't see most of the faces most of the time during normal play, but it would enhance the cut scenes and the close ups no end if it didn't always seem as if the same 19 players were playing the whole world's football, combing and dyeing their hair in between games.
What do you reckon, dudes?