PES Chronicles

“A man who is tired of PES is tired of life,” Samuel Johnson once nearly said.

I don’t think I’m tired of PES. I’m just confused and disappointed. I’m still more than a little angry.

For the first time in a decade PES was not playable out of the box. PS3 players (arguably the most disappointed of all of this year’s disappointed PES fans) had to endure a PC-style wait for a patch to make the game run properly in single player. Online multiplayer will probably never be fixed – that much is now clear. How Konami can just let this slide is beyond my comprehension.

I don’t think I’m the only one who’s determined not to buy MGS4 or PES2009, or any other Konami game, without first seeing what other gamers have to report about its technical quality and gameplay. I’ll never trust reviews again.

I could talk from now until October about how and why PES2008 just wasn’t and isn’t and never will be up to scratch. About how betrayed I feel. About how taken for granted I feel. About how Konami’s apparent unprofessionalism and arrogance leaves me literally open-mouthed in disbelief (January 7th and still no acceptable online multiplayer).

And then there’s the strange case of the magazine and online reviewers who lavished a broken game with praise (with a few honourable exceptions).

But I haven’t got the time or the inclination for that. To hell with them. A pox on all their houses.

I’m a gamer, not a pseudo-journalist. I’m a gamer who has got into the habit of playing a football game every day over the past decade. That’s all. I still need my football game for this year. It’s time for action.

Will it be PES5?

I’ve completed another tournament on PES5. I was eliminated from this one in the first match of the second round.

I have always found it peculiar that the PES franchise treats the group stage and the second knockout stage of International Tournaments (and European Cups in Master League) as if they’re separate competitions. Upon finishing the group and starting the knockout phase, you get a whole new introductory animation and announcement. They’re not separate tournaments in real life. You don’t see another opening ceremony before the second round of the World Cup.

Playing on 5* difficulty on PES5 is a very intense, mostly enjoyable experience. The pace of the game continues to trouble me. Not in the gameplay sense – I can cope with its flow. It just doesn’t look right. Maybe it’s the graphics, maybe it’s the resulting quality of gameplay. I’m not going to play PES5 for the rest of the year, no.

Next-gen FIFA08 and PES2008 (to a lesser extent) have shaped my expectations of what a football game should be like in 2008. More than anything, I now know that I want something different from the past. I want next-gen football. PES5 was the past. No, you can never go home again. It was of its time and there it should stay.

So the search goes on. I’m determined to get myself one football game and play it almost exclusively until September/October. The list of candidates is now made up of:

FIFA08 (next-gen – I really do have to keep stressing this; it’s a wholly different game from the old-style FIFA): A good game that suits my temperament and playing style, but it has several ‘issues’, possibly major ones. And it does have scripting, whatever anyone says.

PES6: A last-gen game, but it might have to do. It’s tried and tested, but could I hack the pace?

PES2008: Stringent House Rules would be required. Would I spend more time trying not to dribble and score ‘wonder goals’ than actually playing? Would disgust with the goalkeepers overwhelm me no matter what I did?

Tomorrow, I’ll be giving PES6 another shot. Wednesday, I’ll run the rule over FIFA08. Thursday, I’ll be giving PES2008 one more chance…