I hope there are no more high scorelines, though. Next-gen PES2008 was bad enough for that. My last three games in my ML on the PSP version have all ended in 3-2 scorelines. Remember when PES scorelines were, more often than not, reflective of how real football games went? It doesn’t seem to be so nowadays. They really are pushing for the arcade crowd, you know.

Editing: as you know, I’m not overly fussed about it – changing the proper names and generic kit colours is all I need from Editing. But I know how massive Editing is with the core PES fanbase. They hated PES2008’s nerfed Editing options as much as (more?) than they hated the game itself. I hope you guys get what you want, or at least as much as would be required to make it ‘good enough’.

So I’m worried about PES2009, despite feeling well-disposed to the whole ‘PES5 in HD’ concept. FIFA08 really has altered my expectations of what makes a great football game (ISS’98 was the last game to do that paradigm-altering thing). I’m feeling slightly worried about FIFA09’s Manager mode, though. I hear there hasn’t been much work done on it. I hope they’ve at least made the transfer market more realistic.

I’m enjoying it — no super dribbling or weird offline lag for me; as I’d mentioned they sorted that with the Japan/US release. I do have a few quibbles, the pace of the game being one of them (too fast) and why . . . why . . . . why would you distort the player models so much? They look like fashion illustration they’re so long. It’s stupid/eerie and it totally breaks the simulationist aspect of the game. It makes me think that your conspiracy theory that PES is going after the arcade gamers and FIFA is going after us simulationists is spot on.

Anyway, I already know what we’ll get from PES2009 — PES 2008 with the largest bugs fixed, the editor from three years ago (with only four layers, because, you know, we wouldn’t want to tax those next-gen processors overmuch), a few new animations, a new “best way” to get a goal (used to be down the flanks, then it was the cutback, then down the flanks again, etc.) and two or three really odd features that nobody wanted, asked for, or likes (they’ll be gone next year).

Will it be good enough? For me, it probably will. All along I’ve said that I went back to old-gen PES because of the editing capabilities. With those restored, I’ll probably pick up one of my rags-to-riches ML stories on the PS3.

That said, like everyone else here, I’m ultra hot to see what FIFA can come up with. A great FIFA game that has a truly satisfying Manager Mode (with the ability to invent a team and create imaginary players) would pull me away from PES forever. Gone are the days when PES was so much better that there wasn’t a choice. Nowadays, the only thing that keeps me going with PES is that ML goodness — if FIFA can deliver a satisfying career mode, PES will be kicked to the curb.