It’s Day 2 of FIFA08 week on peschronicles - a week that’s guaranteed to anger, aggravate and alienate a sizeable number of the PES-playin’ public. Never let it be said that I like to play things safe on this blog.

Before we hit the main action tomorrow, today’s post is a look back (with some anger, naturally) at my bumpy history with the FIFA franchise.

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At the end of the 1980s I swapped my ZX Spectrum and a stack of games for an acoustic guitar. Then I grew my hair long. It was all done to impress a girl. She remained unimpressed, but that’s another story.

I never learned to play the guitar, and eventually I got my hair cut. But I never went back to gaming. 10 years passed. I lived a little. I read a lot.

In 1998, I was unemployed. One week I randomly blew all of my dole money on a pre-owned MegaDrive and a stack of games. Two of those games were FIFA96 and FIFA97.

FIFA96 was the first to go into the Mega Drive’s capacious slot. It was my first experience of a computer football game since Match Day 2 on the Spectrum all those years ago.

I was impressed with FIFA96. After just a few games I was bending the ball into the net from all angles and distances. Aftertouch. What a game concept.

An hour or two later I felt strangely restless. Almost bored. So I stuck FIFA97 in the slot.

It was the same game, but it was different. The graphics were a little sharper. There were a few new features. Gameplay was subtly altered. I couldn’t say how, I just knew it was different.

(Hands up everyone who loved FIFA97’s indoor football 5-a-side and wonders why no one has ever replicated it since? Okay, hands down, people.)

I drifted away from the FIFA games and started in on the rest of my new MegaDrive games. Cannon Fodder was superb. I became addicted to PGA European Tour II. (To this day I rate it the best golf game I have ever played.)

FIFA96 and FIFA97 simply gathered dust. I still played them occasionally. But not for very long. The gameplay was repetitive. There was only a formal resemblance to the real-world game of football. Where was the enjoyment in repeatedly beating the computer 8-0? [Curse you Seabass!]

A year or so later, I’d found a job. I could afford one of those sleek PlayStation things that had been around for a few years. To hell with paying off my Poll Tax arrears.

I picked up five games with my PlayStation. Tomb Raider (of course). Wipeout 3: Special Edition. Civilization II (a neglected console classic, IMO). International Superstar Soccer Pro. The fifth game was FIFA99.

I played FIFA first. I had two matches, and then I tried ISS.

The rest is history.

Whenever I tried to play FIFA99 after playing ISS, I switched off in disgust before the first half was over. What were these players supposed to be? What was this shooting all about? Why all the music and frills and so forth, when the gameplay was so utterly poor in comparison to its shabbier, more cheerful cousin - ISS?

I never played FIFA99 again. It was ISS all the way. ISS98 came along in due course (£10 from the local GameStation - bargain). It took over my life.

Time passed, and in mid-2002 a PlayStation2 appeared on the shelf in my bedroom. (It wasn’t magic. I bought it.)

PES. PES2. PES3. PES4. PES5. PES6. You know the drill. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t.

All this time, FIFA was seen by every right-thinking PES-player as a brainless, arcadey, kid-oriented shoot-’em-up that may have been themed along the lines of football, but had little or no resemblance to the actual game. PES had it in the bag, every year. There was no competition.

I did try out FIFA2003 at one point. I played a demo and thought it seemed, well, okay. Having an alternative football game to play to fill odd periods of PES-fatigue would be a very good thing. I went out and bought the full game.

I took FIFA2003 back to the shop the very next day. This was at a time when you could return games and get your money back without a murmur from the shop staff. Happy days.

I remember going into work and telling a colleague that that was it as far as me and FIFA were concerned. I would never, ever be fooled into buying a FIFA game ever again. He was a PES fanatic too. (There’s lots of us about. We’re everywhere.) He simply nodded slowly. It was not even worth discussing. PES good. FIFA bad.

More time passed. FIFAs came and went. Then along came FIFA06. A couple of posters on PESfan commented that they had played the PS2 demo and it was uncannily like PES. You could even alter the controls to your liking. Square to shoot. Circle to cross. Just as God intended. No more shooting when you meant to cross, or crossing when you meant to shoot. Hmmm, I thought.

I got hold of the demo, played it, liked what I found, and went out to get the game.

Overall, it was another disappointment. Not as crushing a disappointment as FIFA2003 had been, but it was still lacking. The players moved like spiders, springing this way and that in an utterly gamey fashion. The ball flew through the air as if it was on the end of a rubber band.

Still, it was a massive improvement on previous efforts. I played it for a few weeks and then traded it in.

FIFA07 came out in 2006, and was surprisingly well-received by the PES-leaning press and public. I tended to agree.

The players handled better. Cricket scorelines were (mostly) a thing of the past. It was harder to make space for shooting at higher difficulty levels. Clive Tyldseley’s dry asides and outbursts of schoolboy enthusiasm made him arguably the best-ever commentator in a football computer game. (Replacing him with the relatively sedate Martin Tyler for next-gen FIFA08 was a mistake, in my opinion.)

For the first time ever, I find myself still playing a FIFA game now, today, in the calendar year after which it was named. The PS2 version of FIFA07 is gathering dust along with the rest of my old PS2 games….

…but I am still playing the PSP version with great enjoyment. My first controversial assertion of FIFA08 week is that the greatest handheld football game produced thus far is not either PES5 or PES6 on the PSP. It’s FIFA07. I mean it.

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Let me make one thing very clear. When it comes to the big consoles, even the best FIFA so far is not as good as PES6, or PES5, or PES4… or any old-gen PES game, full stop. FIFA08, as much as I like it, is not better than my personal favourite Pro Evo game, PES5.

Is FIFA08 better than PES2008, though? Now there’s something worthy of debate.

In the middle of the year 2007, thousands of PES gamers decided it was time to upgrade their consoles in order to get their hands on the imminent next-gen version of PES. The game was PES2008, and we all know what happened next. A good game, but deeply flawed in so many ways. A profound shock to all our systems. (I’m still in denial. I still can’t quite accept that a PES game was released and it wasn’t brilliant.)

Just before next-gen PES2008, though, there was next-gen FIFA08. And this little beauty — yes, I’m talking about FIFA08 — could well have the power to change everything. Neither FIFA nor PES can ever be the same again after next-gen FIFA08. All will become clear.

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.

Today I spent another few hours on the Xbox360 demo of PES2008. All the reports that are starting to appear on PESfan and elsewhere from people who already have the full game are making me grumpy, so another stint of quality time with the demo is more than called for.

I doubt that I’ll be going back to play PES6 again now. There just isn’t any point. So it’s officially farewell from me to a great game. Granted, PES6 was nowhere near as good as its immediate predecessor, the legendary PES5; nor did it quite match up in my affections to either PES2 or PES3. But it was better than PES4 and the original PES1. (In my opinion, of course.)

Damning PES6 with faint praise? Perhaps. The scripting (or, if you prefer, the ‘AI advantage’) was the most extreme we have ever seen in a PES game, in my opinion. While it didn’t exactly spoil the game, it didn’t enhance it either.

My hopes for PES2008 are sky-high. Playing the demo has really helped to set my mind at ease. I did worry that we were going to get a version of PES6 with next-gen graphics. Some would argue that that is what we’ve got anyway, but I see things differently. The players move differently. The ball behaves differently. You can’t first-time 40-yard shots into the net - or, if you can, it’s not immediately obvious how to do it.

The whole game just feels different from any of its predecessors. Reaching back in my memory for a PES with a similar ‘feel’, only PES3 springs to mind.

During my fresh stint with the PES2008 demo today, I managed to allay another one of my worries. I was very concerned that I wouldn’t be able to score long-range goals with such gay abandon anymore (see my PES5 videos - links on the right - for examples of this).

Recent iterations of PES have featured a long-range shooting mechanic that is one of the most deeply satisfying gameplay components of any game I have ever played. Let me just mention here a certain Mr Mathieu bursting past the halfway line and unleashing one of his left-footed rockets. I love long-range shooting and I have scored most of my memorable goals in that fashion. (Ive said it before and I will say it again: I am emphatically not a dribbler.)

So during my first stint with the PES2008 demo on the Xbox 360 last week I was a bit worried by the fact that every goal I scored - even the hatfuls of goals I scored with the difficulty set to Amateur or Beginner - were all scuffed kinds of shots from close or medium range. Despite making scores of attempts to bag myself a PES5/PES6-style 40-yarder into the postage stamp corner of the goal, none of them went in. Most of them barely even left the ground.

But everything is okay. I needn’t have worried. Playing as Portugal against Brazil on Professional difficulty, things were winding down at the end of yet another 0-0 draw. Then I broke up a Brazilian attack and emerged with Simao. I raced him past the halfway line and turned slightly in toward goal. Two Brazilian defenders moved towards me. I was about 40 yards out…

To hell with it, I thought, and pressed down hard on the shoot button. I flicked the analogue stick slightly toward the top right. Simaos right boot swung at the ball, and it flew through the air, travelling, travelling… and beat the keeper’s graceful dive, billowing the net in style.

The best goal I’ve scored on PES2008 so far (albeit in the demo), and a great fillip in advance of PES2008’s D-Day, later this week.

Speaking of which… Monday’s update will be at around 6pm. I’ll be spending the afternoon in town, looking for PES2008.