Back on 24th October, the first thing I did when I opened the PES2008 case was remove the manual. Underneath was a leaflet marked: WASTED POTENTIAL? At the time, I thought it was just asking for trouble…

I have now spent 24 hours with the game since Konami released the PlayStation3 patch yesterday.

The pesky framerate jitterbugs that scarred the initial release - the initial release that should never have happened, as the game was unfinished (curse you Seabass!) - have all but gone. The offline game now plays very smoothly most of the time. It’s not perfect, but it is acceptable. This was #1 on my wish-list for the PS3 patch, so I’ll take it and say thank you very much.

Some niggles remain. Most matches still feature the traditional ‘PES prickle’ of slowdown at isolated moments. But this has been present in every version I can remember, especially PES4. What slowdown remains in PES2008 is nowhere near as bad as that.

The Bernebeu and one or two other stadia are still occasionally problematic. I don’t think I’ll ever feel comfortable playing on pitches with concentric circles. The time has come to edit all of those pitches out of my Master League.

So the 99% resolution of the offline slowdown is very welcome. But this has come at a price.

Those clever programmers at Konami seem to have given themselves a leg-up by reducing the game’s graphical quality. Textures are rougher, and the grass on the pitches is less detailed - it looks duller and glassier than ever. Perhaps it’s just me, but I don’t think so.

Nothing has been announced by Konami. There is no official word on what the patch has and has not changed. The download was a whopping 130MB - almost a fifth of an average full game - so there’s been some pretty substantial changes. We just don’t know what, exactly. So many people have reported a drop in graphical quality that I think it’s safe to say it’s not just my paranoid and bruised PES-related imagination at work.

Konami has taken with one hand whilst giving with the other. They really did rob Peter to pay Paul.

PES2008’s graphics were already relatively poor when compared to other games on the PS3 - games like Call of Duty 4, Oblivion, FIFA08, and even launch titles like Motorstorm.

Call of Duty 4 features chaotic screens full of true whizz-bang, next-gen action that never lets up, and nary a frame is dropped. It’s a hell of an achievement. Likewise Oblivion and Motorstorm. FIFA08 suffers from odd glitches, but these are so rare that they’re a non-issue for me. Graphically, EA’s football game is a true next-gen experience.

I am not a graphics junky. I have never loved PES for its showstopping graphics - it’s never really had them. Gameplay supersedes graphics when the game’s as good as PES always has been. But I do expect that the graphics should be at least decent. Otherwise, why bother with a next-gen console? Let me rephrase that: why bother with the PlayStation3?

Pre-patch, PES2008’s graphics on the PS3 were decidedly PS2.5. This patch has further degraded them. We’re now looking at PS2.25-style graphics.

It’s not good enough at all.

After I had played several games offline I visited the online section of the Main Menu for the first time. I am not much of an online gamer - PES has always been a solo experience for me - but from time to time I do mingle with those exotic creatures known as ‘people’ on the internet. I was curious.

I’ll get straight to it: the quality of online gameplay on the PS3 is absolutely shocking and unforgivable. Players who instantly teleport from one side of the pitch to the other aren’t even the worst of it. Quite often the ball itself will magically disappear and reappear in ways most strange and unnatural. The action can jump from one moment to several moments later without any warning. During one match I was attacking down the right wing, when there was a momentary flicker on the screen and suddenly my goalkeeper was diving to save the ball down at the other end.

I played around 8 full games. All but one was horrendously unplayable. The one good game was ‘only’ marred by occasional player teleports, which I strangely learned to cope with. I happened to win that game 5-0.

I played as England against Spain. Andrew Johnson was rampant. I was gratified to discover that my offline style of play translated very well into an online match. My opponent didn’t get a single shot on goal. (Possibly he was suffering worse lag than me, but who knows.) I’m only slightly embarrassed to report that I fully exploited my strategy buttons‘ alt formations. My players were always in his way. I ran riot in front of goal.

I could get to like this, I thought. But if the online code is irrevocably broken, and no one knows how to fix it, I won’t be playing online again.

The online session ended as it had mostly gone on - farcically. Playing as Spurs against Arsenal, the game seemed to be doomed from the start, with player teleports galore. Every few seconds the camera would zoom to another area of the pitch, leaving the ball behind. Then I kept seeing the ‘Waiting for another player’ message for several seconds every time the ball was ‘out of play’ (even when the ball was in play, it was effectively out of play, but never mind). After the game had stuck on this message for more than five minutes, I quit in something like disgust and went for my dinner.

Later, I double-checked that my internet connection was still working fine with other PS3 titles in my collection. Warhawk, Motorstorm, FIFA08, and Call of Duty 4 were all working online as they always have done - perfectly. I loaded up PES2008 and went online to see how things were now (this was after midnight) - and it was still a dog’s dinner. If anything, things seemed a little worse than earlier. Sheesh.

But I’m an offline, average, Master League player, so I’m all right, yes? Well, no.

I care about the franchise. I don’t want to see it trashed and trailed through the mud like a common whore. I’m also very keen not to be swindled out of my money by a product that promised next-gen graphics, online play, and a lasting PES experience, and delivered relatively little. I also care how my fellow PES gamers are feeling about the game. We’re a tight community, and my brothers in PES ain’t happy…

What must a very common type of PES player - the type who loves Editing, and loves nothing more than to play online - think of PES2008?

For the first time, I can really understand the anger that is out there amongst the wider PES community. I’m angry too, but I’m less angry now that the offline framerate has been sorted. If I had bought PES2008 primarily to play it online, I’d have been spitting nails during the month since release. After seeing the online game in action, post-patch, I’d be speechless with outright disbelief right now.

At this point, I’m going to execute a rhetorical handbrake turn and re-emphasise what I have stated many time before, here and elsewhere: that I like PES2008. Yes, I like PES2008. I like PES2008 because I’m a Master League player through and through, and I can overlook the game’s graphical shortcomings because I find the gameplay to be satisfying - for now.

Along with everybody else I hate the goalkeepers. I hate the fast pace of the game sometimes (let’s have a FIFA08-style pace for PES2009, eh lads?). I am concerned that I’m suddenly the world’s greatest dribbler after seven years of not being able to dribble at all, but - I like it. It’s still PES, warts and all.

However, for the first time in my entire PES life, I doubt that I’ll still be playing this game regularly in six months’ time. I might not even be playing it regularly in a month’s time. FIFA08 is burning a hole in my shelf right now. So much about this PES year is unprecedented. Perhaps FIFA08’s serious challenge is the most unprecedented thing of all.

PES2008 on the PlayStation3 is nowhere near being the next-gen game that it should have been. It’s not even halfway there. An offline mode that only just passes muster (after a 130MB patch) simply isn’t enough nowadays. It fails on too many fronts for even a dedicated fanboy like myself to continue making excuses. Wasted potential? I’ll say.

[ANOTHER EDIT, Tuesday 27th November 2007. The PS3 patch has finally been released, and seems - touch wood - to have resolved the bulk of my complaints about offline play. I have reset all the settings detailed in this post and it still seems - touch wood again - to work OK. It's still relatively early days, though. We don't yet know if the patch is the final patch. (Online players certainly hope it's not the last.) It's likely that slowdown will never be fully eliminated from the PS3 game. So I will leave this post below as written.]

[EDIT, Saturday 27th October 2007: I believe I have found my solution to slowdown, but will let this post stand as it was originally written. I have edited in the details of my solution at the bottom of this post.]

I never wanted to write posts like this one. I wanted this blog to be pretty much an episodic recounting of my day-by-day adventures on PES2008. It still will be that way, I’m sure, in time.

For now, though, there’s a turd in the punchbowl. I’m talking about what many PS3-owners have discovered upon firing up PES2008 for the first time. Yes, the game’s now-infamous framerate issues on the console. I’ll call it slowdown for short.

Many people don’t see it. They don’t know what we’re talking about. They stop short of calling us liars, but they suggest that we’re exaggerating, or that we’re over-fussy and over-critical. “I played 20 games today and saw slowdown just once on a corner OMG what are you people on about!” - that’s about the size of it. Things can get brutal out there in the wild.

What they’re not seeing, and what I’m seeing - along with many others - is a disastrous drop in the game’s framerate that can happen dozens of times during every game.

Most often it will happen when the screen is full of players, or when playing a long ball or having a long shot. The previously silky-smooth game suddenly slows to a crawl. It’s similar to a Bullet Time effect. It can last anything from a split-second to a couple of seconds, depending on the situation. It’s exceedingly ugly and frustrating, as it plays havoc with your timing.

If it happened just on occasions when the screen was packed with players, I think I could live with it - grudgingly, and indeed grumpily, but I could live with it. I played an entire year of PES4 with ‘packed penalty box slowdown’. But I’m seeing the problem under all conditions, at random times.

Just this morning I was playing a big International Cup quarter final, England vs Italy. I was on a breakaway attack. There were four players on screen. Four. I played a through-ball to my other attacker, and the slowdown happened. I had anticipated the ball arriving earlier, and cued up a shot. A shot that never happened, because the ball was still on its way to me. The defender intercepted easily (my attacker completing his shot animation too quickly).

Most games I play have at least one instance of this kind of thing. Some games have several. Some other games have dozens, as I said. I’ve conceded penalties and free kicks and missed easy tap-in goals galore because of it.

PES2008 is a really great game - even with slowdown, I can see that - but for those of us who have yet to play more than two games in a row without potentially game-wrecking slowdown, it’s a great game with serious issues right now.

And maybe I’m even one of the lucky ones. My slowdown is not as bad as some others I’ve heard about. Some people testify that their games are ‘crippled’. Their framerate drops so low so often that the game is totally unplayable. I believe them.

Even at this early stage - today is the official release day - there are suggested solutions to the problem. I’ll recap the main ones:

• Turn off Stadium Effects (in the game’s System Settings)
• Turn off Entrance scenes (in the game’s System Settings)
• Install the game data to the PS3 hard disk (in the game’s System Settings)
• Change your PS3’s output resolution to 720p (in the PS3’s XMB Display Settings)
• Switch off various in-game display options, such as Player Name Bar and the like (from the in-game menu)
• Use the Normal Long camera (in-game Camera menu)

I know, I know. We bought a games console for a reason. Having to tweak this setting, and alter that gizmo, and check the other widget, and so forth, is uncomfortably like PC gaming.

I have tried all of the above and some of them have made a difference. Only two had no effect: changing the camera and changing my PS3’s resolution to 720p - these actually seemed to make things slightly worse for me.

But, using the other measures, my slowdown is about 50% of what it was at first. I can go longer periods without slowdown, and indeed sometimes play entire games without slowdown. But then in the next game, it’ll be back. It’s like toothache: it hurts, and there are periods of respite, but you can never feel totally at ease while you know it’s there, waiting to happen again.

Different stadiums in the game are worse than others. If I could, I would choose to play all of my games at the ‘good’ stadiums. But I cannot choose. In every game mode but Exhibition, the game chooses the stadium for me. And, as Sod’s infamous Law would have it, the game often seems to favour the ‘bad’ stadiums. I played the entire group stage of a tournament at some bad stadiums this morning. It was not pretty.

Grief-stricken would be too strong a term to describe my feelings right now. Away from PES I do have a full and active life. (Honest!) But I do feel something like grief. I also feel betrayed. I have spent so long looking forward to this - the first next-gen PES! on HDTV! - that the corresponding feeling of let-down is intense.

What has not improved my mood is hearing that the Xbox360 version of the game is problem-free. This does not surprise me, having played the 360’s demo a couple of times. I found it to be excellent in almost all respects. Vibrant colours. Good graphics. Smooth gameplay. Only its replays seemed to be afflicted by very minor slowdown. I saw none in-game.

So now I am straining at the leash to go out and get an Xbox360 to play PES2008. But why should I have to do that? I have a perfectly fine next-gen console in the PS3. It is supposed to be the superior console, technically-speaking. The game’s developers must have had it to work on for over a year now. So what has gone wrong?

Perhaps the fault lies not with Konami but with some element of our individual setups. Perhaps some TVs are less compatible with the game than others. Quite how this would be I have no idea. In fact, I think it’s pretty unlikely. Every other game I have on my PS3 runs smoothly without any issues at all times. Oblivion, Resistance, Warhawk, FIFA08(!), and many more - none of them have ever given me a moment’s trouble. FIFA08 in particular represents a kick in the teeth for Konami. It shows that there is really no excuse for even a single framerate drop in a football game.

So there’s no real conclusion to this so far. Konami is reported to be working on a patch for the PS3 game that will arrive ‘in weeks rather than months’. That’s some good news. I hope that they understand just how important this is to the game’s fans on the PS3.

For now I will continue to play the game. I will continue to watch out for news and tips about how to cope with the problems. There is nothing else I can do right now.

What I will never do is do what some well-meaning but misguided people suggest. I will never simply buckle down and get used to it. I will get an Xbox360, or throw myself off a cliff, or both, before I ever just meekly get used to it. If I ever find myself playing the game and trying to take the slowdown into account when making decisions, I will instantly switch off. Permanently.

[EDIT, Saturday 27th October 2007. Late last night I came across a list of settings to tinker with on the PS3. Having nothing to lose, I went ahead and changed them. The result? The end of slowdown! Well, the end of 99% of slowdown. Have a look at the list and try it out if you're at your wits' end as I was.

• [Settings]> [Settings BD (Blu-ray Disc) / DVD]> [Booster DVD]> [No]
• [Settings]> [Settings BD (Blu-ray Disc) / DVD]> [BD 1080p/24 output Hz (HDMI)]> [No]
• [Settings]> [Settings BD (Blu-ray Disc) / DVD]> [format audio output BD / DVD (HDMI)]> [Bitstream]
• [Settings]> [Settings game]> [Revamp PS/PS2]> [No]
• [Settings]> [Settings game]> [Smoothing PS/PS2]> [No]
• [Settings]> [System Settings]> [Message notification]> [Do not show]
• [Settings]> [Network Settings]> [Connecting to multimedia server]> [Disabled]
• [Settings]> [Network Settings]> [Internet]> [Disabled]

PES2008 arrived at 11.00 this morning (Wednesday 24th October). I managed to spend three hours on it before I had to leave - reluctantly, of course - for work. I was very happy to get it two days before the official release date. I’ve got it early in years gone by, but that was in years when the High Street retailers broke the release date, which they haven’t this year so far, so I do feel very fortunate to be one of the lucky ones who got their mail preorders today.

As the game loaded up I also felt happy that I no longer have to sit on the internet for hours, reading and re-reading those reviews and previews that all seem to start the same way: And so we come again to the time of year when the two big guns of the football game world, PES and FIFA, line up facing each other, and blah blah blah... *Shudders*

The loading screen cleared and I sat through the introductory video. It’s my annual custom to watch the entire thing on first load, but then I never watch them again. PES2’s unforgettable, spine-tingling We Will Rock You intro was the sole exception. I watched that one all the way through almost every single time I started up the game. It was one of the greatest-ever videogame intros, in my opinion.

The PES2008 intro video finished (and already forgotten), I found myself in an all-new Menu screen. It was already familiar to me from the 360 demo. I like the new Menu setup in PES2008. I even - get this - quite like the music. Actually, let me qualify that: I don’t dislike it as much as I think I’m supposed to dislike it - you know, if I want to be cool and stuff.

Straight into an Exhibition game, England vs Scotland, as is my tradition. Why England vs. Scotland? Not because I feel any great sense of nationalistic rivalry, but simply because this fixture was a very important annual game when I was growing up, and I looked forward to watching it every year on television. They were usually great games played in a fiercely competitive spirit. People would talk about them for days and weeks afterward. There’s nothing like them today.

My team selection and formation were almost exactly the same as PES6, apart from the necessary omission of Hargreaves. He’s not included in the England squad this time round. I’ll have to edit him back in at some point, but for now - time pressing and all that - I stuck Gerrard at DMF and Lampard on the left. Time to see how my customary 4-3-3 would stand up to PES2008. And to Scotland, of course.

Difficulty: Regular. I always play my first game on a new PES on the default level. In years past it’s taken me a day or two to move up to the top difficulty. I had an awful feeling that I’d be playing and winning on Top Player in PES2008 before the end of this session, but we’ll see.

Kick off, and almost straightaway I’m forced to acknowledge what I don’t want to acknowledge. That the notorious slowdown in the PS3 version of PES2008 is real, is obvious, is painful to see in so many ways, and is going to be a problem for me over time - unless I can implement one of the many workaround solutions that are currently appearing on the internet. Some kind of downloadable patch from Konami would be ideal, but that’s unlikely in the short term. I will speak about slowdown (or the framerate issue, as it probably should be called) in a special post in a day or two, after I have had time to fully absorb it. It’s not a game-wrecking phenomenon (mostly), and it’s the game itself that I want to talk about now.

Kicked off and instantly saw the difference between this game and the 360 demo. It’s so much slower! I don’t know yet if this is solely due to my TV setup. Plenty of other people who got the game today are reporting over on PESfan that the game plays ludicrously fast for them. To me the pace feels just about perfect - slow, but not too slow; fast at times, but not too fast.

Passing is pretty much standard PES. Shooting is the big difference in this year’s instalment. It’s so much heavier. I broke down the left wing with Rooney and cut inside, a move straight out of the PES6 playbook. I ran on for a few yards, then ripped off what I thought would be a howitzer of a shot - and the ball just tamely trickled into touch,yards wide of the goal.

Aiming shots in PES2008 is far more than a simple matter of holding in one particular direction - maybe it never was as simple as that; maybe I’ve been doing it wrong all these years. Aiming seems to be partly touch-sensitive. Hold in one direction and you’re more likely to miss. Press and release in one direction and you can achieve more precision.

I took the lead, a nice goal scored by Rooney just after half time. It was nothing special, but it was my first goal on the full game. I saved it.

Scotland stunned me by exerting an extreme amount of pressure and scoring two goals in quick succession. Boom, boom, and I was 1-2 down. Hmm. This doesn’t usually happen. I can usually rely on Scotland to roll over for me in my first game on PES every year. Something seems different about them this year. I think the makers might have taken into account the real Scotland team’s recent good performances.

I lost the game - on Regular difficulty. Even more humiliatingly, after Scotland took the lead I didn’t have another shot on goal. I could hardly get the ball. When I did get it the CPU blocked off all my efforts to run down the wings and get a cheap goal (I’m not too proud to admit that’s what I was trying to do). Was this Konami’s much-heralded ‘Teamvision’ in action? Or do I just - how do people on the internet put it - suck?

More tomorrow, in a much more ‘review-oriented’ post.