A few months ago, a fellow student told me that his mother was looking for people who wanted to type out interviews. These texts were necessary so that the producer and director of a television program could quite easily see what parts they want to use and which ones are to drop. As I have always been fascinated by television, this opportunity was a dream come true. The fact that I took part in the process and by doing so found out how things work behind the scenes is an experience I will never forget.

One of the interviewees was the scientist Van Broeckhoven. To make a long story short: she said that doing your best is not enough, you have to do more. At the time, I completely disagreed with her point of view. However, as time passed and all her ideologies kept haunting through my head, I started to realize that perhaps she is more right than you might think. If a surgeon does the best he can but the patient dies anyway, is that enough then?

Codemasters did their best to make a decent game and Ajax fans will definitely agree that they are spoiled: all names of players are present (even one who doesn’t play with Ajax anymore), the arena is reconstructed beautifully and best of all, there is an unlocking system. By playing, you will receive credits and with those credits you can buy stuff like video’s and photographs, don’t you just love such extra’s? I sure hope so as I guess that this feature has to make it worth for the real die-hard fans to buy the game, quite a responsibility. Perhaps the rest of the game will help carry some of the weight?

Well, the graphics are definitely adequate overall. As said, you can really recognize the stadium and in-game everything looks pleasant enough to play. Where I think it scores best, is in recreating the players. You can really tell it is Sonck juggling besides the menu-bar which makes it very pleasant to browse through them just for fun. Note that my colleague b|0-0|n reviewed the pc-version and he didn’t like the menu’s at all.

Neither did he enjoyed playing the matches and therefore I kept playing and playing because I thought I was wrong to think it wasn’t that bad. Well, things are never black or white but I sure don't hate the gameplay as it feels like an “old-school” soccer game but seemingly with an improved engine. Perhaps, I enjoyed it because after testing TIF2005 my standards were not that elevated anymore. Besides, if you just want to have good and simple fun and you don’t expect too much, then I guess you will be able to enjoy playing ball with ACF2005. However, the problem once again lies with the competition. If you really want high standard gameplay you just buy PES from Konami or FIFA from EA but I guess you didn’t need me telling you so, to realize that.

TIF2005 must have lowered my standard on the sound-part of sports games too but unfortunately Codemasters’ game won’t get it back up again. Commentary isn’t bad at all, however, we all know that repetitive commentators do not exactly contribute to making a game look grown-up. The audience doesn’t do any better, in fact they make less noise than the fifteen retired supporters of F.C. Neerwinden, a small, local and amateurish team of which there are so many. Music isn’t convincing either so it is a nay for audio-part.

You may find it sad or not but there simply is no room for mediocre football games as long as there are top-games like PES or FIFA. Monopolies are bad and some healthy competition never hurts but I fear that ACF2005 won’t be able to threaten these two giants. Do you want to support monopolies? Of course not, but nobody wants to buy a product that is less good only to give the competition a chance too. Only real adepts of the Ajax team will purchase this game and only because it is an opportunity to spend more time doing things that involve the passion for their favorite club. So, Van Broeckhoven was right after all, doing your best isn’t enough anymore these days. You just have to do better even if it won’t cost somebody to lose his life.