This time between the release of FIFA09 and the release of PES2009 feels pretty damn peculiar to me. For the many PES fans who are still PES through-and-through—”we don’t need no stinkin’ FEEFA”—it’s just the annual agony of impatience for the new PES game. I remember how that feels and I still feel it myself, in my own way.

The high quality of FIFA09 asks me a question that I don’t particularly want to answer. I want to avoid this question. I want to run away from it and hide from it and not have to face up to it, ever.

For a year now, it’s been strange to be a PES fan who’s attracted to the new-style FIFA. I feel curiously adrift, and somehow guilty, as if I’ve been bewitched somehow and I should know how to undo the spell and get back to liking the real football game, PES. But I’ve been so thoroughly bewitched, it seems, that I don’t know I’m bewitched, and I think my new regard for FIFA is natural and proper, and it’s PES that’s in the wrong, and all the rabid ‘one nation’ PES fans who are in the wrong and simply BLIND to the obvious truth, not me, not me, not me….

Deep breath. Short version. Could this be the year that I finally give myself totally to the other game—to FIFA? After all these years, has it finally come to this? Is it le crunch?

The coming few weeks will see things go one of several possible ways:

• Status Quo—I continue as a PES player, with frequent side-visits to FIFA. Chance of this happening: very unlikely. PES2009 may be good, but I doubt it will be great. Even if it is, FIFA09 is great too. I doubt it’ll play second fiddle this year.
• Half-and-half—I focus on PES2009 and FIFA09 in roughly equal measures. Chance of it happening: If PES2009 is in any way a good game, this is the most likely outcome.
• Total reversal from last year—I play FIFA09 most of the time, and only make occasional sorties into PES2009-land. It still amazes me that this kind of scenario is even thinkable. Let alone possible, which it is. If it does happen, the blog name would have to change. I’ve already tested how it might look (see fig.1 below).
• Total conversion to FIFA—For this to happen, PES2009  would have to completely disgust me for some reason. Chances: very unlikely but scarily possible. See below.

I had a traumatic experience in midweek. After several days’ intense play of FIFA09, I played a few games of PES2008 on my PSP. And I shouldn’t have. The sheer speed of the game, for one thing. No. Never again can I ever play a football game as fast as old-style PES. Maybe occasionally, for ‘fun’, but never day-in, day-out.

But when playing PES2008 I felt pretty dismayed about the gameplay. It struck me as being crude. This for me was most shocking, as I’ve always been vocal about admiring PES’s core gameplay. This… was an interesting couple of games, put it that way.

I had to have a few goes on the PES2009 demo, just to calm my jangled nerves. I felt slightly reassured. PES2009 boasts classic PES gameplay, but slowed down and tarted up for the PS3. (A year late, but let’s not start that again now.) And who knows how the next months will play out. I read today that the CPU teams in FIFA09 seem to be unable to score from outside the box. If true, then that’s a big demerit for FIFA. I’ve already had the PES2009 CPU score a 25-yarder against me in the demo. And PES2009 will have Master League… So who knows which way the wind will blow.

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FINALLY, tomorrow (Sunday) will be a day of rest for the blog. No post. I’m not going to take every Sunday off, just most of them. Last season I posted every day, seven days a week, without fail. Well, this year that has got to change. For various reasons the Sunday post was always the one I struggled most to get done in time. It’ll be good to have that pressure taken off me, and have some breathing space.

On Monday I’ll take one more look at my FIFA09 progress. Then from Tuesday I’ll switch focus to PES2009 in the build-up to release day. How long that focus stays on PES2009 all depends.

Just a short-ish post today (promise) about how I’m getting on with FIFA09. And also some news about the blog. Attentive visitors will have noticed a slight change to its design. I’m now taking advantage of my Wordpress template’s ability to change colour schemes and header images at random. Before, I had it locked to one colour and one image. This new arrangement could get old really fast (I’m just not too sure about having a pink colour scheme…), but I’ll stick with it for now.

And, for the new header images, I’ve utilised one of FIFA09’s most attractive features. This year, during replays you can pause the action, manipulate the camera to your desired position, and then take a screenshot. I’ve posted one of mine below. It depicts Rooney— a monster of a player in FIFA09—moments after scoring. It could do with a caption. The best caption posted in the comments (if any are) will receive… a hearty laugh, from me.

The screenshots upload to that accursed EA Sportsworld place, which never worked for me at all last year. This year, so far, it’s half-working. I can upload my screenshots, and I can see all my statistics there, but I’m still having problems uploading replays. This would be a massive bonus for me, if I could upload those high-quality .flv replay videos. I could bore treat you all to them here, instead of with that ‘artistic’ mobile phone footage.

But every time I go to upload a video, I get a message saying the EA servers are unavailable. I am not alone in this, as the forums show. It’s yet to be seen if this is a temporary glitch or, like last year, a permanent lock-out for reasons unknown.

On the other hand, what about the actual game? How am I getting along with that? I’m getting along famously with it, thank you very much. My major concern at the moment is that I’ve yet to score a genuine, long-range screamer. I’ve scored plenty from around the edge of the box, but sadly nothing from 30-40 yards. It is possible, and I’m working on it. I’m loving working on it….

I haven’t started a Manager Mode career yet. I never do start a career mode in any football game until I feel settled-in. This usually takes me several days.

Are there any major downers yet? There are some downers, yes. Inevitably. Without minuses, there could be no pluses. You can only ever perceive good in contrast with bad. This is a fact as old as the human race.

I’ll get to FIFA09’s faults (big and small) in the future. For now, I just remain constantly amazed at how good this game is. For today, the only issue I’ll mention is the pace of the game. It is a little faster, on default settings, than I would like. FIFA09 on Normal speed settings is quite alarmingly fast—almost, dare I say it, PES-like. No doubt this was the intention, after EA had ‘focus-grouped’ the whole game-speed issue with a typical group of ADHD-afflicted 10-year-olds. Personally I wish EA had never listened to these ‘kids’ (if that’s what happened, which it probably did), and just left the speed at UEFA2008 levels. In the long run, the damned kids will ruin gaming for us all. Mark my words.

Things are changing here on PES Chronicles—hopefully for the better. For the past several months I have chronicled faithfully my day-to-day experiences of playing Pro Evolution Soccer. I could very easily continue in that vein indefinitely, but I feel that things need freshening up. An altered posting schedule will allow me more time to compose (hopefully) better articles.

I’ll still be relating what I’m up to on PES2008 (and on FIFA08). But I’ll be doing it in a different way. After so many seasons of detailed recaps of my progress, complete with diagrams, screenshots, etc., I don’t think there’s any real need or point in doing it all over again. I’ve covered a lot of ground over the past several months. I don’t want to cover it all again and simply end up repeating myself ad infinitum. So I’ll be summarising a lot more than I used to. I’ll just be covering the big highlights.

The new style of posting will also allow me more scope to talk about PES2009 and FIFA09. Over the next two months there’s going to be an increasing amount of rumour, speculation, and hard news emerging from both camps. I’ll be ‘covering’ it all in detail (huh, listen to me, talking as if I’m a proper pseudo-journalistic blogger all of a sudden).

I’m one of the many football game fans who expects both games to be great this year. I have no means of knowing for certain, of course, but I suspect that come September/October, we’re going to be the happiest we’ve ever been with the choice of football games on offer. FIFA09 is going to be a superb evolution of the all-new FIFA franchise—I’d put a very large amount of money on that. And PES2009 should be a triumphant return to form for the tarnished series. Although I do agree with the conventional wisdom which says that it’ll be another year or two before we see what Seabass & co. are really capable of on the new generation of consoles.

On Friday I’ll be looking at all of the rumours and confirmed news about PES2009. I’ll try to sift through it all and reach some kind of conclusion. On Sunday I will do the same for FIFA09. Naturally, in neither case will I forget to mention how I’m doing in the current games of football that currently inhabit my console…

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After completing two Trebles in consecutive seasons—2019 and 2020—it would seem there’s little else to play for in this Master League career. It would seem natural to abandon it and start again with a new team in a new league with a new career path using different players. I have played Master League that way in the past. Around about PES4, I got into the habit of not abandoning ‘completed’ Master League careers. I started playing them indefinitely, all year round—in one case, PES5, literally until the night before PES6 was released.

I’m going to do the same right now. My Coventry City team marches on. There’s lots to do yet. I want to get hold of some of these mouth-wateringly talented Regens that have started cropping up. I’m talking Ronaldo (the Brazilian one), Ronaldinho, Lampard, and many others.

But not Gerrard. Unbelievably, Steven Gerrard has signed up to play another year for Barcelona. His age? 41.

Surely this is wrong. It has to be a bug, or an oversight, or something. I can only hope that whatever it is, it doesn’t stop Gerrard finally retiring at the end of the coming season. I need to get him as early as possible so I can develop him and play with him at his peak before FIFA09 and PES2009 are released. It’s a lesser PES year without having Gerrard in my ML team. Middle Shooting is his, uh, middle name. Would he be better than Bradley? That’s what I want to know…

My actual transfer action was pretty poor. I tried for, and failed, to get Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, and Lampard. I made pretty hefty bids worth a lot of the in-game money. All declined my offer—although, as ever in PES, you never know if the problem lies with the club or the player.

After a couple of weeks of pre-season I still hadn’t bought anybody. My one and only pre-season friendly was against a South American selection—an All-Stars team, in effect. They’re probably the toughest opponents to face in a pre-season friendly, and so it proved again. They thumped me 3-1. A 23-year-old midfielder called Veron had a superb game for them…

I snapped him up in the next week. I’ve always liked Veron in PES. He was one of my star men in my unforgettable PES5 career. I have a feeling he’ll be great for me in this one too. If nothing else, he could be a perfect replacement for Camacho in the right-sided AMF role. Camacho is 32 now and only a couple of years away from having to be retired to the bench. I did get Scholes to act as his replacement but Scholes’ development is coming along very slowly.

Veron turned out to be my only pre-season signing. I did keep trying for Ronaldo & co., but they all steadfastly refused. I think I may have a solution. I don’t like it, but if I really want to get these players I’m going to have to start offering silly money for them. Silly money for me is anything above 20,000 for the transfer, and anything above 2500 for the salary. But I’ve got the cash—I could easily afford it. So why not? I think I will go for it in the mid-season window. Money is no object.