This time between the release of FIFA09 and the release of PES2009 feels pretty damn peculiar to me. For the many PES fans who are still PES through-and-through—”we don’t need no stinkin’ FEEFA”—it’s just the annual agony of impatience for the new PES game. I remember how that feels and I still feel it myself, in my own way.

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.

Well, ’twas the day before the demo of FIFA09, at least…

I had planned to post today about a little experiment that I’ve been running. The other day I got the much-reviled next-gen PES2008 out of mothballs and put it back in my PS3. I played it for the first time since January. Back then, I swore never to play this dismal excuse for a PES game again. But never say never, as they say. Whoever they are.

Pre-PES2009, I wanted to give last year’s infamous rush-job one last go. Just for completeness’ sake—to round off the football game year, and deliver one more, probably devastating verdict on the game that nearly killed PES for good (In my opinion.)

I was going to make that post today. I was anticipating that the PES2009 demo would appear for download tomorrow, as heavily rumoured in various places. Alas, it seems now that the rumours were false. The demo likely won’t be out until the end of the month. So I’ll postpone my little epilogue to next-gen PES2008 until closer to the actual release of the PES2009 demo. For now, I’ll just say that PES2008 does have some surface playability—last year I did think it was a good game for the first month, after all. But overall, it just feels more unfinished than ever. It feels even less like a true PES game, after my several months of playing the PS2/PSP version. I’m angrier than ever that it was published in that state. Curse you, Seabass.

For today, I’m very excited about getting my hands on the FIFA09 demo tomorrow. Hopefully it’ll appear on the Xbox Marketplace in the early morning. I expect the PSN version will pop up around late afternoon. (Although, casting my mind back a whole year, I think I recall FIFA08 appearing on PSN around the 10 a.m. mark, which was as unusual then as it would be now. So we’ll see.)

My expectations for FIFA09 have actually dipped slightly. Oh, expectations are still high; but until the last week or so, they were mega-high. That’s not a healthy state to be in. There has never yet been a perfect football game and there never will be one. Seeing a few lukewarm previews and reviews of FIFA09 has helped to dampen the fire somewhat. A consensus seems to have emerged that those of us who skipped UEFA2008 should find FIFA09 to be genuinely revolutionary, fresh, and compelling; those who have played UEFA2008, on the other hand, might be relatively underwhelmed. I’m in the former camp. I’ve only ever played the UEFA2008 demo. I refused to purchase a game that only features international teams and game modes.

Of course, all that UEFA2008-related chitter-chatter might just be this year’s ‘thing to say’ for the anti-FIFA lobby. They’ll doubtless be as prominent this year as last. My favourite ‘thing to say’ from last year, which still crops up from time to time, is that the loading time one-on-one sequences in the Arena are more enjoyable than the game itself. It was interesting to see that one appear and spread like a virus. It’s one of the memes of the new FIFA, from a PES point of view at least. It will be back in new colours this season, oh yes. It’ll be just one facet of a mighty backlash against FIFA09, I predict. Within an hour of the demo’s appearance, there’ll also be posters on FIFA forums declaring they’re going back to FIFA08 and staying there. It’s all part of the annual fun.

My wishlist for FIFA09 contains surprisingly few items. I would love the shooting to be better than FIFA08’s—more intuitive and less fussy, especially from distance. Yes, I’ll say it: I’d actually love the shooting mechanic in FIFA09 to be similar to PES’s shooting mechanic. Oh, I know now how arcadey that is, but I could always switch to semi-assisted or manual settings if it proved too easy. The rest of my wishlist is mainly stocked with things that I won’t be able to check up on until the full game comes out: the transfer market in Manager Mode, and things like that.

Tomorrow will be all about checking out the most important thing in FIFA09. The gameplay.

I’ll post a quick ‘First impressions’ post tomorrow evening after I’ve (hopefully) played the FIFA09 demo for an hour or two. I’ll then follow up with a more considered reaction on Saturday or Sunday.

It’s time now on this blog for me officially to say goodbye to a great game. Well, not so much ‘goodbye’ as ’see you later, probably’. I’m talking about the PS2/PSP version of PES2008, which I have been playing, more or less continuously, since March of this year. For the benefit of any new readers (randomly Googling ‘PES2009′ as the nights draw in), a few paragraphs of back-story are in order.

Gary Neville>Pele? What the - ?

It’s been almost a year since I started playing the much-anticipated ‘next-gen’ PES2008 on my then brand-new, sparkling PlayStation3. I think every PES fan knows how that one turned out. I have to admit that for a month or so I thought the game was absolutely fine. Really I did. Yes, it was lacking in so many areas but it’d do, I thought. Then I discovered the notorious ‘wonder dribble’, as I came to call it—the ability to dribble the full length of the pitch, with almost any player, on the hardest difficulty level, and score goals at will.

I had never played PES like that before. I had always been a pass-and-move player. It was a rare day that I dribbled for more than a few yards or went past more than one player. I wasn’t used to dribbling entire pitches and beating entire teams. I completely despised the PS3 version of PES2008 for letting me do that without even trying, and I still do.

There were lots of other reasons to despise it, of course. The slowdown for one. The lack of pre-game kit selection for two. The horrific nature of online multiplayer for three. (I wasn’t much of an online player. Thanks to PES2008, that’s how I’ve stayed.) The goalkeepers for four… The list is long and shameful.

What is to be done?

So, around the turn of the year, I abandoned the game. I’d tried playing with custom rules designed to limit the regular 6-3 scorelines, but my mounting disgust just got too much. Whatever else that game was, it wasn’t a PES game. It left me in a quandary: for the first time in a decade, I didn’t have an ISS/PES game to play all year. Oh, and I’d only gone and chosen this year, of all years, to start a blog about my daily PES-playing habit… Whoops.

It was nearly Subbuteo

I dallied with various other games. Football Manager. Sensible Soccer. FIFA08 looked as if it would become my main game, and that I would spend the remainder of the year on it. That would have been no bad thing. Ah, but then I decided I might as well try out the last-gen version of PES2008 before finally moving on.

And I was glad I did. My posts from that time record my delight with the game, my happiness with the classic gameplay, my relief at finding a PES to play for the rest of the 2008 season. Yes, granted, as time went on I experienced the usual frustrations with in-game scripting (it exists and no one and nothing will ever persuade me otherwise). But at its core it was the gameplay I had come to know and love and regard as being part of my daily life.

My first post about the PSP version of PES2008 was gushing, but cautious. I’d been burned so badly by the next-gen version that I was paranoid and suspicious. As if I expected the game to turn back into a pumpkin at midnight. I didn’t want to get hurt again.

Time passed, and I decided to pick up the PS2 version. I hated the idea of giving Konami and Seabass another penny after their uber-cynical, premature release of an unfinished, broken game, so I picked it up cheap from a bargain bucket. I loved having a ‘proper’ PES playing on my TV screen again.

I started a new Master League career and struggled for several seasons. I didn’t win a single game in my first season. I only won a handful of games in the seasons immediately after. Then the old routine kicked in. After acquiring a certain amount of decent and good players, I started winning. Promotion soon followed. Up in the big division, it took me a few seasons to find my form. Then league titles and cups rolled in. Then the Treble. Over time I had a squad of galacticos, one of the best squads I think I’ve ever had in any PES. The game was still diverting, but no longer really challenging. And so we come to today.

Footballers’ apostrophes

Right now in my Master League, it’s season 2022. I picked up a young Kaka’ in the pre-season negotiations, to add to my already staggering squad. I didn’t need him. I just wanted him, is all. It’s Kaka’! Incidentally, is the apostrophe in his name the most peculiar footballer’s apostrophe since that of Stephane Guivarc’h? I think that it is.

The End of Days

It’s the end of the 2008 season as far as football games go. In less than a week from today, next-gen gamers will have their hands on the demo version of FIFA09—and PES2009 (I heard this evening, after typing up most of this post. I love rewriting, me!). Thursday September 11th 2008 is one of the most keenly-awaited days of the gaming year so far—for football gamers, at least. And so I’ve decided that, as of now, it’s time to move on. At least as far as the blog is concerned I’ll be dealing exclusively with the next-gen 2009 set of games from now on.

As for the PS2/PSP version of PES2008… What’s my final verdict? Not that it really matters what I think of it. I’m under no illusions there. But I’ve played it as intensively as any other version of the game, albeit over a shorter timescale. After several months’ continuous play, where does it stand in my personal list of favourite PES instalments?

Psssst

(I should add here that although I’m treating them as the same game, there are enough differences between the PS2 and PSP versions for them possibly to warrant separate treatment. The PSP has major control issues—lacks the second shoulder buttons, and it has a cramped face buttons setup, etc. The PS2 version, played on a big screen with the full-sized controller, is a qualitatively different experience. But I talk too much as it is and don’t want to type the extra 500 words that treating them separately would require.)

The all-important, world-shattering final verdict

Here’s where PES2008, on the PlayStation2 and PSP, stands for me. I don’t like it as much as I remember liking PES5. So I have to be strict and leave PES5 where I have consistently claimed it is—at the top of my list of favourites.

After PES5 would come PES3. I always meant to get around to replaying PES3 this year, but never had time. (Maybe—no, definitely—next year. At some point.)

And after PES3 comes PES2008. Just ahead of PES6, which I know is many people’s pick for Best PES Game Ever.

After PES6 comes PES2, then PES4, then poor old PES1 trails in last. (I won’t offer next-gen PES2008 any kind of place on this personal ranking. As far as I’m concerned it doesn’t even deserve to be considered a PES game.)

Now. Most reviews—and my blogging about the game constitutes a year-long review, of sorts—end with a score. A rating out of 10 or 100, or a percentage. That kind of thing.

I won’t beat around any more bushes. I’m giving the PS2 and PSP version of PES2008, jointly, a strong 9/10 score. For me, an 8/10 would be too low, and 10/10 ridiculously too high. The game just became too easy, in the long run, to warrant a fat 10. But in terms of its more-ish playability, it’s right up there with any of my other favourite versions.

I’ll be back, Osasuna…

None of this means that I am saying a final goodbye to PES2008. My bringing-down-the-curtain finality of tone is misleading. PES2008 will almost certainly remain my sole portable football game for the next year. I doubt very much that I will get the PSP version of PES2009. I will certainly return to my ML career and take my team on towards 2030 and beyond.

And I’ll mention it on the blog from time to time.