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.

Of course, the answer turned out to be simple. I was trying too hard to score a ’showbiz’ goal, as Mark Hughes used to call them (and often score them) back in his playing days. I needed to calm down and just try to get bread and butter goals, and pick up points and move up the table, and let the showbiz goals take care of themselves. Let them come naturally in the fullness of time.

Which is what I did. Results came immediately. My first game ended 2-0 to me. I drew the next game 2-2, but should have won it (see below). And I won the third game of the session 1-0. Here’s one of those bread and butter goals, which came about after I switched to a wide formation in the tactics editor. I wasn’t getting this kind of space until I did:

Total bread and butter, that goal. After my troubles of yesterday I felt as happy with it as I would have done with a 40-yard screamer. Well, almost as happy.

I did score a slightly prettier goal during this session. I uploaded it, but I made the mistake of submitting it to EA Sportsworld in slow-motion, and somehow it snipped off the part where the actual goal was scored. So there’s no point showing it here. For the record, it was a delicious outside-of-the-boot finish from Maxi Rodriguez, scored from a long, pretty aimless cross that’d bobbled to him across the penalty box. It went in off the far post.

I have stopped using YouTube to stream goals to this blog, possibly for good. The new site—LiveLeak—allows you to directly upload .flv video files (YouTube doesn’t), and there is little or no loss of quality. I’d never heard of this LiveLeak place until I saw them mentioned on Evo-Web the other day. I hope they’re not one of these fly-by-night setups and I can use them for a good long while.

So. I’d been trying to score stunners, long-range screamers that I could show off here, rather than just concentrating on winning the match, which is what real football is all about. And can there be any doubt that FIFA09, for better or worse, is all about real football? I don’t think there’s an argument left to be had.

There’s got to be a downside. In the middle of my three games I came up against… Osasuna.

Regular readers will recall that Osasuna were my bogey team in the PS2/PSP version of PES2008. (A very good PES game and one I will return to at some point this year). Back then it seemed that every season they were primed to frustrate me no matter what I did or how well I played. Surely the hoodoo couldn’t translate into a whole new ball game?

It bloody well could translate. I went into a 2-0 lead against them and I thought: that’s it, I’ve cracked it at last… Naturally, this heralded an Osasuna fightback. I’ve noticed in FIFA09 that there is a kind of momentum (in Seabass’ dread phrase) that the CPU can build up when it’s behind. The possession bonus that it enjoyed in FIFA08 is still in 09, only it’s a bit more subtle I think. You don’t see the CPU players twisty-turning on the wings to the same infuriating degree, but they still have the old possession ‘magic’ when they need it.

Of course, it’s up to the human player to defend better. With discipline and patience. I didn’t.

Osasuna came back to draw 2-2. Of course they did. I threw everything at them in the last minutes, aching for the winner. I was horribly frustrated. Bloody Osasuna! They’d only gone and done me again. I’ll be watching out for the return fixture later in the season.

The other night I played a game online using Atletico Madrid and I really liked their style. They’re Spanish, and I’ve never played Manager Mode in Spain. They had an attractive stripey kit—bonus.

Hey, I know, I’ll pick them as my Xbox360 Manager Mode team, I thought. I’d stick with my PS3 settings: Professional difficulty, with semi-manual passing and shooting and crossing. What could possibly go wrong?

Oh dear. I’ve played 6 games. I’ve drawn 5 and lost 1. I’ve only scored a few goals. My job security rating is down to the 40% mark. If I don’t win soon, I’ll be in danger of the sack.

When people criticise FIFA09 as being tiresome, thankless, dull, too realistic, and all the rest of it, they surely have games like these in mind. I think I had one shot on goal in one of the games. In the others I had a few more shots, but they were mainly typical of my ambition right now: vastly in excess of my ability. Somewhere in virtual reality, some of those shots are probably still rising. I still haven’t got a great FIFA09 goal to show off.

For all the grim struggles of those games, I really enjoyed playing them. My idea of fun is not endless 5-4 scorelines and festivals of long-range shooting. I do love me some long-range shooting, but I also love pizza and I couldn’t stand to eat pizza every day.

I was considering dropping down a difficulty level on the 360, to Semi-Pro, just to get some confidence back. To hell with the humiliation of it all. But I’m sure my problem is just one of adjustment. I did start this career on the Xbox rather suddenly. I was still finding my feet on the PS3. What I think I’ll do is go back and play my Coventry City career some more. Not that I’m doing much better there…

After a pretty good start with Coventry City—the through-ball bug notwithstanding—I’m still in the top half of the table. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how useful my Coventry strikers feel. The likes of Eastwood and Mifsud, for me, feel more dangerous in front of goal than Atletico’s Forlan and Pongolle et al. Curious.

It’s unusual for me to play two careers. I love the immersion factor when it comes to a football game’s career mode. Spreading that attention across two careers means less focus and less immersion. But there’s a good reason for my apparent recklessness right now.

A week tomorrow, PES2009 should land on my doorstep (GAME willing). If it turns out to be any good, I know I’ll want to play it, and I’ll want to play Master League most of all. I doubt the new PES will displace FIFA09 in my affections now. There is just too much water under the bridge for PES—in its current arcadey form—ever to occupy the place it once did in my affections. It still pains me to say that, and I know what to blame. PES2008 on the PS3 represented a massive betrayal of one of the richest heritages in computer gaming.

But if the PES2009 demo is anything to go by, at least this year’s game might be playable for more than a few weeks. Certainly it’ll do me no harm—and a lot of good—to have a lighter alternative to FIFA09.

Which would mean less attention for those two Manager Mode careers I was talking about. But that’d be fine. I’ll always come back to them. And in the meantime I can have—buzzword coming up—fun playing them while I wait for PES2009 to land.

The career as Coventry City started with a win and a few draws. But then I encountered that through-ball bug towards the end of a crucial game. Which slightly soured me on FIFA09 for a day or two. At the moment I’m mid-table, having lost the last two fixtures in league and cup. I’m in no danger of being sacked. The goal for the season is to avoid relegation from the Coca Cola Championship. I’ll do that.

Atletico Madrid, on the other hand… In this career the board only wants me to win the Spanish title. Gulp. This is actually my first experience of starting Manager Mode with a top club, and I hope I don’t get sacked for my trouble. So far I’ve played just the one game and it ended 0-0. And who is that midfielder wearing the number 24 shirt…?

Yep, that’s the one and only Camacho, in his real-life guise of reserve central defensive midfielder at Atletico Madrid. I spent so many seasons playing with him in my PS2/PSP Master League career on PES2008 that the moment I saw him here in FIFA09, I had to promote him to the first-team lineup. I’ll be keeping an eye on his progress (he was rubbish in this game).

Finally, I’ve got the whole uploading-to-EA-Sportsworld thing cracked. It works for me this year, after not working at all last year. What this means for the blog is that the days of poor quality mobile phone videos for goals in FIFA are behind us. As long as the replay uploads keep working, of course..

I’ve tried my best to score a show-stopping, net-bursting goal to show off as my very first ‘proper’ replay. But I’ve been like Frank Lampard at Germany 2006 out there. It hasn’t happened yet. So instead what I have is a glaring MISS in front of goal. This is what can happen in FIFA09 when you get it wrong while using semi-manual shooting:

With full shooting assists on, that would have been on target for the low corner of the net and would probably have been a goal. No question. Which is precisely why semi-manual shooting is so great: you need composure and accuracy in front of goal, something I blatantly lacked here.

FIFA09 feels like a different game on the Xbox360. Game developers always insist that PS3 and 360 versions of games are identical, apart from various items of downloadable content or whatever. In the case of FIFA09, I beg to differ.

I had the instant impression that the 360 FIFA09 is slower (on Normal speed) and its graphics are better. It’s possible both these impressions are false, because after a marathon online 360 session I had an experimental game on the PS3. I played a fixture in my Manager Mode (which I definitely will get around to talking about soon) and I couldn’t really tell the difference.

My big problem with FIFA09 over the past few days was the through-ball bug. It had annoyed me to the extent that I downgraded FIFA09 from my initial rating of ‘best game eva’. I did this in the form of a scientific graph, which I have decided will become a regular feature on the blog. Hopefully the graphs will illustrate that my opinions about games are always subject to change. My opinion on Day 1 is not necessarily going to be my opinion on Day 2, or Day 10, or Day 100.

Today’s graph shows the effect of an evening spent playing the Xbox360 version of FIFA09 online. (See fig. 1 below.) After a warm-up Exhibition game and trying to get used to playing football with the 360 controller (it didn’t feel right for ages), I leapt straight into a long session online.

It was one of the single best sessions of computer football gaming in my life. I played about 12 games all told. Some with 5-minute halves. Most with 10-minute halves. I played with and against teams of all skill ranges, from two-stars to five-stars, and all in between.

I was alternately humbled and exalted, lucky and unlucky, skilful and stupid. I discovered that, yes, I am a FIFA09 through-ball whore, and I’m ashamed of it (but will continue to do it).

I also noted that the through-ball bug was mysteriously absent. Although it always looks as if it’s trying to rear its ugly head in the 360 version, it doesn’t seem so bad. The players slow up slightly when receiving through-balls, but they don’t go into their infuriating little dances. So I wonder if the problem is confined to the PS3 and/or a problem just with offline play (with inferior teams and/or human players…)?

The main thing I took from my online session was that FIFA09 is simply a brilliant game. There’s no other word for it. And there’s one aspect of FIFA09 that has definitely changed. Individual players and whole teams now handle completely differently.

Diehard PES players may scoff, but FIFA09 has got real tactical depth. There’s complexity under the hood this year. One of the most stubborn popular beliefs about the new-style FIFA is that the gameplay is ruined in the long-term by all the teams and players feeling pretty much the same to play with. I’d say that there was lots of truth in that. Last season.

This season, it’s completely not true. Absolutely bogus. FIFA09 has superb player and team differentiation. In one game I was Coventry City and my opponent was Norwich City. The players were slow and ponderous on the ball. They tired quickly in the second half and the last third of the match was played at a mutual snail’s pace. It was a grim war of attrition at times.

That is what many PES veterans object to. It’s just no fun, they say, playing a football game that’s so realistic. You can see the same line cropping up again and again on forums everywhere. I saw it this morning on Channel 4’s teletext letters page, for God’s sake (p. 694). It’s one of the memes of FIFA09. It’s become the thing to say.

Well, I’m on the other side of that particular argument. Realism works for me. It’s what I want. It punches my ticket (is that a real saying or did I just make it up?).

Individuals in FIFA09 really shine on the pitch. And teams do too. In my last game last night I was Atletico Madrid, my opponent was Valencia. I’d heard a whisper on the forums that Atletico were a great team to play with, so I sneakily picked them, whilst cackling maniacally. And they are pretty good: ‘only’ a four-star team, but they handle like a top five-star team. I went 1-0 up after 15 minutes thanks to some speedy wingplay.

Then in the second half it all changed. My opponent brought on Morientes to play alongside David Villa. He changed his tactical sliders in the Formation screen to all-out attack. The difference was incredible. Suddenly, I couldn’t cope. I couldn’t get, or keep, the ball; he was attacking my goal for fun, stitching together moves and runs and having shots without any opposition. He got the equaliser. It was incredibly lifelike to see the second-half turnaround.

But my opponent made a mistake. He never changed his all-out attack posture back to something more balanced. No doubt he thought he could keep his momentum going and crush me….

I brought on two fresh players and changed my formation to 4-3-3. I needed to hold the ball up front. Midway through the second half I raced clear with one of my pacy subs, Pongolle I think, who left Valencia’s exhausted left back for dead. I scored. 2-1. And I got two more goals in exactly the same way: through-ball whoring with my fresh players, going up against his knackered defence. It was a lame victory in many ways. I was embarrassed to win 4-1 on the counter-attack, but that’s football.

It was the last game of my session. Two and a half hours. I had some trouble winding down before going to bed. Tactically FIFA09 is incredibly deep, whereas before (even last year) it didn’t feel very deep to me. Gameplay-wise, it’s rich and varied and realistic; it’s also fun, despite the doubters’ doubts. And this morning I discover that EA have fixed the problem of PS3 replays not uploading to that accursed website.

Now, if they can just fix that PS3 through-ball bug….