We break up, we break down; we don’t care if the school falls down. Yes, the nights are drawing in and the ‘08 range of football games are in their last days. On Friday I delivered my final verdict on the PS2/PSP version of PES2008. As could only be expected for a game that I played intensively for months, I rated it highly, a solid 9/10.

My other main football game for this year has been EA’s bolt-from-the-blue football game, FIFA08. There are still a significant number of PES fans who insist that it wasn’t and isn’t any good, that it’s just the ’same old FIFA’ in new clothes. This type of PES fan loves to pretend to think that people who like FIFA08 do so because of its licenses, etc. In too many cases they’re wilfully blinding themselves to the painfully obvious. PES’s long-standing claim to being the most realistic simulation of football on the market has been blown out of the water by FIFA08. Which doesn’t necessarily make it the better game, of course…

This isn’t the place to rehash an unending argument. I came to sum up my year of FIFA08, not detail a war that can be found raging (tiresomely) on a dozen or more websites at any time of the day or night.

FIFA08 is remarkable. It represents a new philosophy in football gaming. It’s as if the team at EA Canada, sick to death of being unfavourably compared to their long-term rival, finally thought: To hell with it, let’s show them what a simulation can really be like. And they went ahead and did it.

With at least slightly mixed results, it has to be said. Because a full-on simulation is not necessarily a great game—as legions of PES fans have expressed in numerous ways on a thousand message boards posts.

Me, I’m on the pro-simulation side of the divide. I’m pro-FIFA nowadays—a massive departure from the past. For me, the all-new FIFA’s simulation angle just works. It does make a great game. It suits my temperament.

Ahhhh… but if I love it so much, why have I spent most of the football game year playing last-gen PES2008? Because I also still love the gameplay that PES has offered me over many years. I like apples and oranges. I’m a player who straddles both camps, who really does want to play on both sides of the (imaginary and rather childish) fence. I’m a double agent.

Next-gen FIFA08 gets 8.5/10 from me. 8 would be too low; 9 would be too high. The game has issues preventing it from being a timeless classic. I’ve always found the shooting to be unpredictably fussy and unsatisfying—although, contrary to popular belief in some PES circles, with practice it is manageable and, in its own way, rewarding.

At times playing FIFA08 I feel curiously detached and uninvolved. But I know what causes this: weirdly, it’s the official licenses. For a decade I’ve played Master League, set in a make-believe PESverse. I’m used to it. Playing FIFA’s ‘real’ leagues with actual teams is unsettling.

Another negative for FIFA08 is a couple of user-interface issues that I find personally infuriating. For one thing: the way you have to manually press down repeatedly to get to the bottom of a list, rather than pressing right once to go straight there: ANNOYING. Also, the lack of replay saves to the console hard drive. Uploading to EA Sportsworld doesn’t work for me and never has. EA Support were useless in resolving the matter. These things might be tiny, inconsequential matters for some; for me, they’re not. The replay thing in particular is a long-standing sore point that I have never got over. I will always resent it.

All of which is more critical of FIFA08 than I think I’ve ever been so far on this blog. I still say that FIFA08 is arguably the most significant football game since the original ISS on the PS1. That game changed the way gamers thought about football games; I believe FIFA08, for all of its much-maligned slow gameplay, has acomplished the same thing. The question now is whether EA are bold enough to forge ahead on the same path, or if they’ll capitulate to the arcade kiddies (we all know who they are) and revert to the FIFA style of old. Time will tell.

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This Thursday will see the release of the demo for FIFA09. After a few months now of ecstatic previews, in recent days a note of caution has been introduced with some relatively lukewarm (but still good) reviews from the mainstream gaming media.

I think it’s a healthy dose of reality. FIFA09 is not going to be a perfect football game, and we shouldn’t want it to be. What else would there be to look forward to?

It’s still going to be bloody great, though, and I’ll be up bright and early on Thursday to grab the FIFA09 demo before the masses get there, while the download speeds are still high. (I have an awful feeling that the masses—curse them!—will be thinking the same thing). I have high, but not astronomic, expectations for FIFA09. I doubt I’ll be disappointed. I’ll post a special, short ‘First Impressions’ post on Thursday night after hopefully a few hours on the demo. And then the countdown to the full game’s release on October 5th can begin.

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Before we get to Thursday, though, I do have one more post to come. On Tuesday (maybe Wednesday) I’ll have a very special post about my experiences over the past few days of playing one other football game. The game? PES2008 on the PS3. Yes, I went back. Just for fun, you understand. Just to see.

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.

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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.

Recently I’ve spent most Sundays talking about my adventures in FIFA08 land. It’s a peculiar thing for an ostensibly PES-oriented blogger to do, but there you go. We live in interesting times.

As we move towards the end of the current football game year, quite a few stories are nearing their ends. The story of the PS3 version of PES2008 ended for me a very long time ago. In years to come it’ll be as if that game never existed. I believe that there are still a lot of people playing it, online and offline. Good luck to them, I suppose.

The PSP/PS2 version of PES2008, on the other hand, is still going strong for me. It’s dominated most of this year on my blog, and the story demands proper closure (for just one thing: I picked up a 20-year-old Kaka’ in the 2022 pre-season negotiations). I’ll get to all of that next week, or the week after—definitely before the FIFA09 demo lands on 11/09, anyway.

My FIFA08 story also needs closure. As of right now, I’m playing it a lot. Playing catchup, in lots of ways. I really have neglected the game all year, and I didn’t mean to. I got distracted by the classic gameplay of last-gen PES2008 and, well, you know the rest.

I’m playing a very enjoyable second career in Manager Mode. I’m playing as the reputed worst team across all four English divisions—Dagenham & Redbridge.

I got my Dag & Red team promoted to the Premier League last season without much trouble. This was after I’d started mixing up the difficulty levels. I played home games on Professional and away games on World Class. I’d struggled to adapt to playing FIFA08 regularly again after several months of PES2008.

After a few games in the Premier League I started winning more easily (but never easily) on World Class again. Then I realised that it has been now almost a year since I tried playing FIFA08 with all-manual controls.

You can switch off all the computer assists in FIFA08. You can choose to be responsible for everything: passing, shooting, crossing. Everything except the physical acts of running and jumping. (Now that would be a truly hardcore football game…)

Every football game ever made has helped the human player carry out all of the basic actions of football. Passing, crossing, shooting—especially shooting—have all been done for us by the lines of programming code contained within the games. All we have ever done, really, is make suggestions to a pre-programmed AI, which then carries them out. Pointing the analogue stick (or directional buttons) at your team-mates and pressing pass makes the game magically transport the ball the intervening distance. Ditto for shooting and aerial passes and through-balls. There’s no actual precision aiming from the human player.

With manual settings on FIFA08, all of that changes. You are the one who must aim your passes. You aim the shots. You direct the aerial balls where you want them to go.

I tried it last year and I didn’t like it. It was too hard. I didn’t find it enjoyable. It was too realistic. After literally two games, I abandoned the (brief) experiment with manual controls. I felt that I needed assistance from a football game in order to enjoy it.

That’s actually a pretty strong argument against FIFA08 as a whole—from a PES point of view. A higher level of simulation of football does not necessarily make for an enjoyable football game. In this view, there has to be some element of ‘gameyness’—even, yes, of arcadiness—for a football game to be truly satisfying. We need to be fooled. We need the illusion of control, not actual control. I’m not saying I agree with this argument, necessarily. Just that it’s the strongest argument, in my opinion, on the anti-FIFA08 side of the debate.

And I didn’t find my latest experiment with all-manual controls any less frustrating at first. Most alienating was the apparent impossibility of scoring goals. I think that shooting is the main problem with manual controls—everything else can be adjusted to, and pleasure found in; but manual shooting is a nightmare.

From a position directly in front of the goal, it seems impossible to aim for the corners of the net. The ball will always fly ludicrously wide. There’s no middle ground—seemingly—between that and shooting straight at the keeper.

The only goals I scored using manual shooting were from tight angles. To aim diagonally was to aim for the corner of the net. When in front of goal, it should actually be easier to find the corners. More of the net is visible—but it isn’t easier. It actually seems impossible.

I had to abandon manual shooting after it got too much. I’m still looking for a solution, though. What have I missed? (Apart from lots of open goals…?)

I left everything else on full manual, but I put shooting back to semi-assisted. That’s still a step ‘up’ from the default auto setting. You still have to exercise a lot more care over aiming than on full assists. I was finding the corners again, which was a relief. It’s my routine on FIFA08 to spend loading times in the Arena curling balls into the postage stamp corners of the net using the finesse shot. (I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned who my Arena player is. It’s Eric Cantona.)

Generally, what I love about manual settings so far is that you are forced to play balls into space and let your players run onto them. The system lacks full sixteen-direction aiming. You’re limited to the eight cardinal points. It makes for an initially messy passing game, but I soon adjusted. Passes don’t zoom magically to other players’ feet. The game is weirdly more open, more natural-looking, with manual passing.

My form on these settings was pretty bad. I won a game or two, lost another few, and drew the rest. Fortunately for my Dag & Red team’s progress in the EPL, I wasn’t playing with them. For the manual experiment I resurrected my old Coventry City career. I’d abandoned it after assembling a squad of galacticos and winning the Quadruple. It did that team good, I think, to come back to life for a few sessions.

I’m still settling into using manual controls on FIFA08. It certainly is a whole new game with them. Will I persevere, and maybe even play FIFA09 on nothing but manual controls? At this stage I’d say that’s very likely. It would certainly be worthwhile. There’s a small but dedicated number of FIFA players who use manual controls. And this year they’ll be able to find and play each other online. So it could be the way forward. I’ll have to see how I get on.