PES Chronicles

Another Other Football Game Sunday is upon us—and no, I still haven’t played Football Manager Live again all week.

That makes it about 10 days since I last logged in to play with my team and face off against another player live, online, the way its makers intend. All of my games have been taken care of by the AI.

I hope I don’t suddenly receive an email terminating me from the Beta test. Somehow I don’t think I will. It’s people like me—casual players—who’ll make up a significant portion of the game’s subscribers after it goes live. We must be catered for.

I have some time off work next week and I plan to spend at least thirty minutes playing FM Live every day. But I also have lots of other stuff to do next week as well, including a Very Special development related to PES Chronicles itself (see below), so we’ll see how that intention holds up.

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Just in time for OFG Sunday came the demo of UEFA 2008 on PS3. It’s also out for the XBox360 but I went with the PS3 version of the demo as that’s where I’ve played FIFA08 all year so far.

UEFA 2008 is a development of FIFA08, and an early taster—perhaps—of what EA has in store for us with FIFA09.

I’ve only had time to play a couple of the two-minute games allowed in the demo. First impressions are pretty good, despite what many would see as a retrograde step: FIFA08’s slow, methodical, love-it-or-loathe-it gameplay style has been tweaked backward, toward the old-style FIFA.

The same solid gameplay is there but it’s now a wee bit more arcadey, with ‘better’ player response times and ‘improved’ passing. I think that the UEFA 2008 engine—and, I predict, the eventual FIFA09 one—is a concession toward the anti-FIFA08 brigade.

Shooting in UEFA 2008 feels a great deal more satisfying, but it’s still not all it could be. Shooting is one aspect of FIFA08 that I have never really learned to love. It seems to lack the visceral ooomph-factor that PES shooting provides in bucketloads.

I’ll post more about UEFA 2008 after I’ve spent some more time with it over the coming week. These are just my very first impressions. I’ve spent literally minutes playing it.

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Here’s some news for everybody who reads this far down.

In a couple of days (a week, tops), visitors to this Wordpress-hosted domain will be redirected to peschronicles.co.uk.

I bought the domain name months ago (no dot.com snobbery for me) and now I’m finally going to use it.

Moving to my own domain gives me total control over the site’s design and content. I won’t be keeping the current template, but I will stick with the basic three-column layout with everything roughly where it is now (First XI, Squad list, Top Posts, etc.).

In addition, I will be deploying some advertising. This blog attracts steady traffic—not enough to make serious money, but hopefully enough to cover my hosting costs. I appreciate that this could irritate some visitors, but the adverts will be discreet. Anybody who is really aggravated by advertising on the Internet should already be using Firefox+Adblock anyway.

I’ve got several ideas for how the blog could develop to include new kinds of content. As we move through this summer towards PES2009 I’ll be trying out various things, but the core content—daily chronicles of playing PES—will never change.

I’m announcing it now because I’m not an expert at these things. The new site might be a little—how you say?—screwy for a while.

Similar posts:

• Stand by your PES, man
• ‘Twas the night before FIFA09
• FIFA09 full game: 1st Impressions
• Football Manager – Live!
• FM Live: an acid test