I’ll get straight to it. In times of yore, the Vertical Long camera provided a zoomed-out viewpoint from behind your goal for the whole of a match. But we haven’t seen what I regard as a ‘proper’ Vertical Long camera in PES for over a decade now. In every version since ISS98, the Vertical Long camera has forced you to play ‘downscreen’ for one half of a match. And I hate playing downscreen in a Vertical view. So I’ve stuck entirely with the default horizontal Wide view for a decade—and now I want my old Vertical Long camera back.

I want PES2009 to have a Vertical Long camera that allows me to play ‘upscreen’ in both halves. I think I remember reading a month or so ago that the game will permit this feature for the first time in a decade. I keep wondering if it’s true, and hoping.

The 2009 batch of football games are so close that I really don’t think I can function properly until I get my hands on them. The FIFA09 demo will be available a week tomorrow; the full game is only a month away. PES2009 (and its demo) is now only 6 weeks away. Or 7 weeks—it all depends what release date you believe.

I don’t know whether I am coming or going. It’s all producing some strange symptoms…

The other day I spent an hour in town walking between various shops, hunting for a PS1 copy of ISS98. I didn’t find it. I could easily get it from eBay, but I think I’ll just leave it now. I’ll hang on for FIFA09. And I suspect that it’s only a matter of time before ISS98 (or any one of those early ISS titles) pops up as a PSP download on the PlayStation Network. In which case I would be at the front of the queue.

I’ve mentioned on several occasions that ISS98 is one of my favourite versions of ISS/PES. ISS98 was the one with Fabrizio Ravanelli and Paul Ince eyeballing one another on the cover. Back in 1998 I played it almost into the ground on my old PlayStation—whilst wearing short trousers… (Not really. I was twenty-something in 1998, but it was so long ago now that it feels as if I should have been wearing short trousers.)

No doubt the mists of memory are being kinder to ISS98 than it deserves. No doubt I’ll reel in horror, if/when I ever get to play it again.

Ah, but it had that 100%, ‘proper’ Vertical Long camera… If it is indeed back for PES2009 then I can see me and Pro Evo getting very cosy together again. There’s something about playing vertically, directly attacking a goal ‘upscreen’ that makes an already immersive game even more so. Shooting in particular when using a Vertical camera is extremely satisfying. Aiming is so much more intuitive.

If anyone has any concrete information about the Vertical camera in PES2009, I’d love to hear about it. Remember that it has to point towards the opponent’s goal in both halves. Otherwise, I’m not interested.

I doubt that any of the early playtesters—at Leipzig and elsewhere—took the trouble to test all the camera modes. Even if they did, I bet none of them played with the Vertical Long camera. And even if they did, I bet they never used it for the whole match. When the big PES websites—PESfan, WENB, that lot—start getting their promo copies of the game, I’ll post a question for them. But will I get my question answered? Those Q&A threads are nightmarishly fast and furious. I think I’ll end up finding this one out for myself.

———————–

In my next post I’ll be bringing down the curtain on the game that has occupied most of my football game year. I’m talking about the PS2/PSP version of PES2008. Old faithful.

FIFA08 ran it close. I have played loads of FIFA08, more now than ever. But that shabby, classico version of PES2008 just edges it in terms of hours played. And I owe it a special post to discuss my current state of play, what I think of it overall as a PES game, and whether or not I will continue my ML career on the PSP version over the coming year.

On my next FIFA Sunday I’ll also be doing a similar summing-it-all-up post about FIFA08. That game has been another faithful servant in this grim year for PES fans.

Last time I said that next time (i.e. this time) I’d speak about how I’m getting on with FIFA08 at the moment. I’ll have to postpone that to my regular Sunday FIFA slot now.

Too much has been happening on the PES2009 front. I can’t let it pass without comment. Since last week I’ve been holding off going into great depth about how PES2009 is being previewed, leaked, filmed, and discussed across the Internet. Such talk doesn’t really belong here. This site is meant to be just a personal blog about my daily interactions with PES and other football games. It is not a news aggregator site and never will be.

Like most people, I suspect, I’ve been obsessively checking all the major PES and FIFA09 sites across the Internet every day. Sometimes every hour. I’ve been constantly refreshing webpages. F5 is my new best friend. All I want is something, anything new—the merest scrap or morsel of new information; the slightest glimmer of hope that PES2009 might actually be pretty good.

I’m finding it all pretty exhausting. It’s hard on the nerves. I’m hardly getting anything else done. I cannot wait for the actual games to be released. Then I can waste all my time playing them instead of reading about them…

I’ve stayed well clear of the official EA FIFA forums. I pop in maybe once a day just to have a look, and usually withdraw moments later, wincing.

With all due respect to the people who must work very hard to keep the EA FIFA forums going, they are possibly the very worst games forums I have ever encountered anywhere on the Internet. Every second discussion thread seems to be packed with 13-year-old trolls. The threads themselves are rarely actually about anything of interest to me. Why is it so bad over there? I suppose it could be a legacy of the old-style FIFA’s traditionally younger demographic. Ah, well. Now that the FIFA franchise has attracted us snooty PES types, at least we can still look down our noses at their forums. Oh yes, there’s always a silver lining….

Anyway, I started out wanting to say something about the way FIFA09 is being anticipated by the PES community this year. I have noticed a trend that greatly annoys me. A trend that looks as if it’s here to stay. It’s this: there are clearly a great number of die-hard PES fans who have never played FIFA08 (or have only played the demo—for five minutes or something) but still feel entitled to criticise it.

It’s manifesting itself in all kinds of ways. The familiar PES vs FIFA arguments are more bitter than ever this year, and with good reason. PES2008 was terrible; FIFA08 was very good.

As has been shouted from the rooftops, oh, at least a million times by now, this state of affairs is a complete inversion of the usual state of affairs. It’s an irony that still has me shaking my head in wonder every so often. Seriously. I can be sitting on a bus in the middle of a regular day, on my way somewhere or other, and I’ll remember that PES was bad and FIFA was good this year. And I will shake my head. The fall of the Eastern Bloc in the early 1990s didn’t even have that kind of an effect on me. I can’t think of anything that really has. That’s what PES has meant to me—and still means to me, really—for an entire decade of my life. That’s how deeply it’s penetrated into my heart and mind. And then came the steaming pile of turd that was PES2008. Curse you, Seabass.

I’m rather late with today’s regular FIFA-oriented Sunday post owing to a few factors. Mainly because I was up late last night watching PES2009 videos and playing FIFA08, and the blog actually clean slipped my mind.

After spending most of the football game year posting here every day, I’m in the middle of enjoying a blogging summer holiday. I’m only posting a few times per week until the FIFA09 demo arrives (two weeks this Thursday!). After that, I’ll almost certainly return to daily posting, although I might give myself one day off per week. I’ll see.

It all really depends on the quality of the football games. If FIFA09 and PES2009 are good enough to sustain intense daily play, I’ll play them every day, and post accordingly.

Speaking of PES2009… I’ve spent the weekend watching some of the longer, hi-def videos doing the rounds. Perhaps it’s wishful thinking, but I believe I can see the more sedate pace, and the more ‘muscular’ gameplay style that has led some people to dub it a next-gen PES5. As I’ve said before I for one would actually welcome his. Give me classic PES gameplay on my PS3—and at a slower, more considered pace—and I’ll be happy as Larry. No, scratch that: I’ll be happier than Larry.

The short clip below from Gametrailers has me feeling quite hopeful. I love the speed the ball moves and the apparent heaviness of the players—unlike PES2008’s featherlight ballerinas…

(Be sure to choose SD playback in the clip below to view it normally in the browser here; for me the HD option opens a new window, and the playback is faulty—i.e., it only shows a corner of the screen.)

So I’m feeling a bit optimistic about PES2009 again. If the above clip is actually representative of the final game’s gameplay, I think I’d be happy with it. I’d have a classic PES to play and a stunning new iteration of the all-new FIFA franchise. 2009 would be a great football game year. HOPEFULLY…

But the PES forums are still buzzing like angry wasps’ nests. I know why everyone is feeling so raw and emotional about things. Superficially, the game does look like nothing more than PES2008 Reloaded.

The debate will rage on until we actually get our hands on the game. According to the Internet, which is never wrong, the PES2009 demo will be made available ‘in the week of release’. That’s really, really disappointing—and suspicious. After last year’s PS3 demo failed to appear until after PES2008’s release, it was obvious that Konami had something to hide (the phrase “unforgiveable slowdown” springs to mind).

Today I would normally have posted my latest progress on FIFA08. I’ll do that in detail in the coming week. For now, I will say that I have secured promotion to the Premier League with my Dagenham & Redbridge team. I’m liking FIFA08 more than ever—but I’m also seeing its faults larger than ever (some of which are really my faults as a long-term PES player).

As for my Master League career on the PSP version of PES2008, that has also progressed a lot further. I easily won the Treble in 2021and I’m well into season 2022 by now. I’ll post about both games on Wednesday or Thursday. At the moment with all the excitement of the build-up to FIFA09 and PES2009, it seems hard to focus on exisiting football games.