Another Sunday, and another quick look at how I’m getting on with any other football games that I might have played recently.

My newfound love for PES2008 in the guise of its PSP/PS2 version (*hawks and spits at the very thought of the next-gen version*) has led to a few casualties among my other games. Well, casualties is a slightly exaggerated way of putting it. ‘Games that I’ve stopped playing’ is what I mean.

I’ve got about a dozen great games on the backburner. I’ve got about another dozen very good games on top of that. I’m a games hoarder. Just looking through my drawer here, there’s a copy of Homeworld2 that I bought when it came out over 4 years ago. I still haven’t found the time to play it.

I’ve had an Xbox360 for a couple of months. Halo3 and Assassin’s Creed still haven’t seen any action for longer than about 30 minutes apiece. It’s almost criminal of me, I know. PES really does edge out everything else.

I’m most concerned about the PSP games that I’ve played a lot in the past but abruptly abandoned as soon as last-gen PES2008 came into and then took over my life. Disgaea in particular is one that I’ll really have to get back into soon. Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops. Patapon. The list goes on.

But the foremost casualty has got to be FIFA08 on the PS3. EA’s remarkable football sim has been hit by a double-whammy: last-gen PES2008 is great, and the UEFA2008 demo has just come out. I’ve played UEFA2008 a lot this week, and now FIFA08 just feels wrong.

I played three games of my ongoing Dagenham & Redbridge career. I’m second in League 1and an almost certainty for promotion to the Championship at the end of the season. Within three seasons I should have Dag & Red in Europe.

I should be utterly transfixed by it all and, to be fair to FIFA08, a couple of months ago I was transfixed. I’ve been pretty open on this blog about something that most PES fans have found to be quite shameful to acknowledge: FIFA is pretty damn good on the next-gen consoles. It was and is a truly scary proposition.

But time passes and attitudes can change—in both directions (eh, Seabass?).

Suddenly, FIFA08 doesn’t seem so good. I pushed my players around the pitch rather listlessly. The scripting in FIFA08 now seems very obvious and very annoying. Scripting, for me, is when the game initiates any sequence of play that is predetermined. It’s most overt when the CPU decides to keep the ball and you just can’t get it off them whatever you do. Even if you make up your mind to foul them, they’ll know when to jink sideways, when to accelerate, when to stop, when to change direction. You can’t catch them. They’re demons in the corners of the pitch in particular, always getting their crosses in. Scripting in FIFA08 is a reality. It’s just different from PES scripting, is all.

UEFA2008 could be a very early glimpse of what EA has in store for us with FIFA09. Most striking is the camera: it’s the first true Wide camera in a next-gen football game. It’s disconcerting at first, and after half a year of making do with the existing next-gen games’ faux-Wide cameras, you almost think the UEFA2008 camera is pulled too far out. But it’s not too far out. It’s perfect.

Next is the gameplay. It’s a development of FIFA08’s gameplay, I now feel—not a retrograde step as I thought last week. The animations are smoother, the passing crisper. The shooting still feels anti-intuitive to me, but that’s probably the recent weeks of intensive PES2008 playing with my mind.

I won’t be buying UEFA2008. No matter how great its gameplay, I’m not attracted by its Euro2008 tournament setup. I need club football in a football game; international teams are only there for occasional amusement. UEFA2008 is an all-International affair, which is what it’s meant to be, so I can’t complain, really.

Maybe in June or July if I see UEFA2008 in a bargain bin for a tenner then I might be tempted. But otherwise, my next football game purchase will be the other side of the summer, in September. FIFA09 is only five months away. PES2009 is six months away. It’s going to be a tense summer, wondering what the respective studios are up to, although in all but a few cosmetic aspects I’d say both games should be already substantially complete right now.

In other other football game news, I downloaded the FM2008 demo on the Xbox360 but haven’t had time to actually play it. And I finally checked in again to the Beta version of Football Manager Live. After spending almost two weeks absent, I spent 30 minutes tweaking my team. I put some players up for transfer and bought a couple of others. Then I had to go. I didn’t even have time for a quick friendly (we’re between competitive seasons at the moment).

I simply don’t have the time for gaming—really, I’m not joking. I shouldn’t play games at all. I really, really, really have zero spare time. But I make time, I steal time, and I tend to want to use it to play PES. Everything else is just an impostor.

Every Sunday on PES Chronicles is Other Football Game Sunday—a special day when I take time out from my hectic PES2008 schedule to report on my experiences with any other football games that I’ve played during the past week.

Today’s OFG news is… not much news, really. I’ve gone back to my usual behaviour of playing PES2008 pretty much 95% of the time.

I’m still plugging away with the PSP version of PES6 during bus journeys to work and lunchtimes etc.

The first goal in the clip is from my very occasional PSP Master League career with Barcelona. I just wanted to see what it was like to play with Barcelona. I’m anti-Barcelona. But 90% of PES players aren’t, and I wanted to see how the other half 90% live.

It’s okay really, but not very challenging. I seem to score a wonder goal with Ronaldinho in every other game.

The second goal is one that I found lurking on the memory stick. It’s been a very long time indeed since I played with International teams in PES6 on the PSP . So the goal must be from the first few days after I got the game—November 2006. It’s a long-range screamer from… Wayne Bridge.

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I did play a game-week in Football Manager 2008 as Coventry City (naturally).

I signed Malcolm Christie and David Thompson, both good additions to a mediocre squad. I played a pre-season friendly against Falkirk that I won 2-0, using a narrow 4-1-2-1-2 formation that has always worked excellently well for me in past versions.

During the 2D match highlights my PC started making the kind of asthmatic noises that signal an imminent shutdown. I got through the rest of the game, but I know my PC of old and I quit the game to avoid a reboot. It looks as if I won’t be playing FM2008 in full until I get a new PC sometime later this year when I can afford it. A few weeks ago I bought an Xbox360 and it more or less depleted my emergency fund (that’s the spare cash I keep lying around in case I have to go on the run from the authorities at a moment’s notice. Everybody has one of those funds. Right?).

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Speaking of the Xbox360… I haven’t had the chance to play Sensible Soccer at all this week. It’s a shame, as I was just getting into it—I was just starting to see what all the fuss was about—when I started playing Bioshock.

After that, well, the console might just as well be renamed the Bioshock360. All my Xbox time this week and most of last has been devoted to completing that sublime game. And having completed it, I’m itching to play it again on Hard, and in a different way (evilly), collecting all of the plasmids and seeing all the stuff I was too enraptured to see the first time around.

I will play Sensible Soccer for an extended period—for a couple of days, or a week—very soon. Before I start a league career I want to get good at the game, then play with the mid-1990s Coventry City squad. It should be interesting. Hopefully I’ll have something to report next Sunday.

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I only played a grand total of three matches on next-gen FIFA08 this week. This year’s FIFA on the PS3 and Xbox360 really is an oddity—a slow, almost stiff hyper-simulation of football. We have never seen its like on a games console before, to my knowledge.

One of the games was in my fledgling Manager Mode career with the lowly Dagenham & Redbridge in the Coca Cola League 2.

One of the major criticisms that PES players have of FIFA08 is that there is too little difference between all of the players. It’s a valid criticism. In PES2008, my dashing young AMF, Camacho, is a palpably different player at the age of 20 than he was at the age of 18. In FIFA08, all the players feel much the same, all the time. Of course, after a long time with the game, you start to notice that there are differences, but Michael Owen might just as well be Micah Richards, and vice versa, a lot of the time.

It’s only when you play with seriously inferior players in the lower leagues that you can feel a great difference. My Dagenham & Redbridge players are awful. They can’t run, they can’t pass, they can’t shoot. In the August transfer window I did get a few good players—Darren Huckerby, Bianchi, and a couple of midfield journeymen from the Free Agents list—but the bulk of my players are still FIFA08’s equivalents of the PES Default donkeys.

I played that one game and then scurried back to my ongoing Coventry City career, with my team of galacticos. For the first time in a few months FIFA08 annoyed me.

It seemed awkward and relatively dull compared to the fireworks and drama of my current PES2008 ML career. It’s only to be expected. You can’t swap between two radically different football games, as these two are, and expect to be able to translate your style of gameplay from one to the other—as a few too many PES players expect (or even demand) to do when they try out next-gen FIFA08.

Here’s a couple of goals from those three games on next-gen FIFA08 this week. The first is from the Dagenham & Redbridge game. The second goal is a super-duper-long-range strike from Van Persie (in my CCFC team):

I was going to say a few words today about the parlous state of FIFA’s online ‘community’ but I haven’t had time. Maybe that’ll be another one for next Sunday.

I was going to make today’s post the first of my special ’stats tracking’ posts.

So far on this blog I’ve pretty much ignored PES2008’s inner workings. I’ve hardly mentioned individual players’ stats at all. The main reason for this is time constraints. Working full time and with plenty of other irons in the fire, I’ve sometimes barely had time to put together the usual kinds of “So I played PES and I pressed kick and it went in and it was good” posts.

But I’ve decided to make time from now on, and today was going to see the first of a new kind of post.

It was going to be all about my young midfielder Camacho: his current stats, his ability stars, his present status, his glorious future… But none of the mobile phone pictures that I took of his stats turned out very well (see left) and I only took a few handwritten notes. Then, to cap it all, I got him sent off against Atalanta.

I won’t be able to try again until tomorrow, or maybe even Saturday, so it’s a roll-over for Camacho and for ’stats tracking’.

Atalanta 1-0 Singers FC

Yes, Camacho was sent off. Before being sent off he played really, really well - for an unfinished 19-year-old, he is a real midfield presence in every game he starts. One of the few handwritten notes I took this morning shows me that he has quite a high aggression stat - 83 - relative to his other stats, which are all averaging in the low 70s right now.

What does the Aggression stat mean? What does it control? How does it translate into on-field action? These are the kinds of questions I’ll try to discuss at length in the future.

This defeat was not due to me going down to 10 men. Atalanta got their goal in the first 30 seconds, before I had even touched the ball. (Don’t you just hate it when that happens?)

For the rest of the game I enjoyed lots of possession (65%) and had many good opportunities to score (10 shots on target) but couldn’t get the goal.

Singers FC 1-1 Napoli

This game was almost an exact copy of the Atalanta game. Napoli scored in the first few minutes and I spent the rest of the game launching wave after wave of attacks at their goal.

Every shot I had either screamed wide or was saved. Annoyingly, the saves were mostly ‘clean’ ones: the infamous PES2008 goalkeepers didn’t come to my rescue and politely palm the saves toward the feet of my players.

By the 88th minute I’d almost given up hope when I got the ball with Lagutz out on the left. That area of the pitch was Elcherino’s old stamping ground. The Great One’s spirit seized me…

Yes. It is a disturbingly similar goal to many of Elcherino’s 120,232 goals from last season. Truth be told, I knew it would be an almost certain goal even with a player of Lagutz’s modest abilities.

I’m still harbouring doubts about PES2008. They’re lurking at the back of my mind and refuse to go away.

The amount of points I am dropping here at the start of the season is starting to alarm me. I want promotion this year. With a bit of patience and self-discipline I think I could make a serious challenge, even with my fairly average squad. But it’s looking as if next season is a more realistic possibility.

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Other news in brief: I’ve played the demo of Football Manager 2008, albeit not on my own PC. I played it on a PC at work (I have Administrator access to the work PCs, and am always happy to abuse the privilege).

I only had time to play it for 10 minutes or so, but that was enough time to gather a few first impressions.

I set up a career as manager of Coventry City, of course, and played the first half of the first pre-season friendly. Football Manager is a hyper-realistic game, so a 4-3-3, ultra-attacking formation was not desirable… I went for a 4-4-2 with a diamond pattern in midfield. I didn’t spend any time tinkering with tactics, runs, defensive roles, etc. Falkirk, my opponents, scored three goals in the first ten minutes. Hmmm.

I had to stop playing, but I saw enough to know that Football Manager could get me again.

This blog is obviously heading towards being a general football video game blog in any case (PES2008 just can’t sustain it on its own, sad to say). In a month or two, FM2008 should be one of those games.

I’ve also been playing yet another football computer game over the past few days, one that I’ve only previously mentioned once or twice, in passing. The game was Sensible Soccer. I played on a friend’s Xbox360. I’d really never played it before in my entire life. I’ll talk about that one in a special post in a day or two.