Games of 2009: FIFA 10

I like using the right stick to flick the ball past people, which doesn't work very well if they're sliding into my legs and I've forgotten the button combination to hurdle them. And I may know not to rush my defenders towards the ball, but that doesn't mean I have the discipline not to do it. As a result my defence frequently has more holes in it than a Dan Brown story treatment. Similarly, I can predict that Martin will forget Eurogamer Rule No.1 Of Football: you can't play football back there. He always tries to pass it out of his own half, and more often than not I tackle him and set up a shot. Yet on and on he goes, just as I will not give up on my beloved right stick.

There are a few exploits - the long-range shots and chips in particular - but there's nothing that seems to work with certainty like FIFA 09's elevated through-balls and fast strikers. That only works in FIFA 10 when the opposing player plays a high line with sloppy defenders and defends suicidally. The looping, elevated through-ball out to the wing is often useful to bolster an offensive - owing a lot to the game's newfound ability to deal with fast-moving aerial passes - but one of FIFA 10's many checks and balances prevents a speedy player from controlling a long ball without losing momentum. Similarly, crosses are seldom converted unless the receiving player is in space. There's artificiality in this, but it's not impossible to score from crosses - just improbable - and until there's a better solution that allows for subtle skill-based determinations it's not the worst prominent tactic to blunt.

Football in real life is a game of skill, subtlety and tactical acuity. And of dodgy officiating. (And, apparently, of unofficial £10,000 guided tours of the training facility with your friend "Tony Ticket"). It's these things that draw us back again and again, and it's these things in FIFA 10 that retain the interest of the more than half a dozen of us at Eurogamer playing together regularly, who also make it the most popular office multiplayer game of the year as a result of their numbers and persistence (Modern Warfare 2 lasted about one week).

But it's not just that - it's also the fact that unlike the FIFAs of old, these days the game has a personality. The commentary may be dreadful and repetitive - an insurmountable problem, presumably, given that most of the things the sound designers can select for Martin Tyler and Andy Gray to speak about are precisely the things neither of them would ever commentate on - but it has a certain charm. Robinho with his dribbling skills! Tevez with his bulldog-like approach! DIMITAR BERBATOV! And if you don't have 25 shots on target, the only good thing Andy Gray will be able to say about that half is that we did see a goal (undoubtedly scored by the opposition, by lobbing the goalkeeper). And did you know Andy Gray is always optimistic about football?

And while we once mocked the decision to let you choose your goal celebration in FIFA, it's tempting these days to view it as the full stop on the argument that EA Canada understands how we feel about football better even than ourselves. In a game that gets heated, even played among friends, there is surely no finer way to draw matters back from the brink of a physical altercation than sliding the ball underneath the goalkeeper, running towards the camera, and doing the baby.

All hail the baby, and all hail FIFA 10, my game of the year. Even if the Manager and Club Modes are broken, and it doesn't punish quitters properly, and the menus are so bad they initially prompted the reaction, as I settled down in my Liverpool PJs to play the game for the first time, of "WTF". Happy Christmas everyone. Do the baby.