It’s the mid-season 2010 transfer window in my Manager Mode career as Atletico Madrid on the Xbox360 version of FIFA09. (I can’t get over the new Xbox360. With games installed to the hard drive, it runs quieter than the PS3, and is just as reliable. No more freezes.)

I haven’t brought any new players in. As it is, I already have enough. The transfer market in FIFA09 is… not a good gameplay feature. To put it mildly.

As long as you have the money (and it’s easy to get the money if you haven’t got it), you can have any player you want. The transfer market is really a case of picking what players you want from a list. There’s absolutely zero sense of negotiation. This goes for any team in any division in any country. You want ‘em, you got ‘em.

The same rule applies in reverse to players you want rid of. Want to sell a player? Just put them on the list. After your next game, you’ll get an offer. Sometimes the offer will be for less than their value. If so, just wait another week, and a higher offer will come in. This is how it goes, always. ALWAYS.

Sigh. And the transfer market—if it can even be called that (it really is just picking players from a list!)—is just one of Manager Mode’s problems.

I’m not going to lie and pretend that everything is rosy in FIFA09-land. It’s not. I’ve got a big problem with Manager Mode, and the problem’s not going to go away.

When it comes to FIFA09’s core gameplay, everything is still pretty rosy. I still think it’s a superb football game. I have misgivings about its speed (even on Slow, it’s a bit too fast) and about the way it’s a bit too easy to dispossess the AI (leading to tiresome passages of ping-pong in midfield). But overall, the rest of the game stands up.

However. Turns out there’s more to a football game than its gameplay. It’s what you do with that gameplay that counts.

I only ever play a football game’s career mode. That’s how it is for me and I don’t think anything will ever change it. Online play is a very occasional pursuit—if online play ceased to exist I really wouldn’t miss it. I still haven’t even glanced at either FIFA09’s Be A Pro or PES2009’s Become A Legend modes, although I hear great things about both.

Looking back, I should have named this blog Master League Chronicles. That’s the game I’ve been playing for the past several years. That’s what I became addicted to. Not PES as such. Master League. When I started liking PES2009 over the past few weeks, I was actually liking Master League. One of the reasons I loathed next-gen PES2008 so much was that its low difficulty wrecked Master League. You couldn’t help but ‘complete’ your Master League after a few seasons.

Over the past few days of playing Manager Mode, something has become clear to me. There is no contest between FIFA09 and PES2009 for me. No. FIFA09 wins, and PES2009 loses. Yah boo sucks to Seabass, and all the rest of it.

Where the two games conflict, and where I am conflicted, is in the game modes. Master League is currently more attractive for me, by some considerable distance, than Manager Mode. In fact, I’d go as far as saying that I struggle to take Manager Mode at all seriously. It lacks too much that Master League has been doing for several years. A proper transfer market. Variations of time of day and weather (don’t underestimate the power this has to pull you along through season after season).

It’s crazy that FIFA09’s fully-licensed career mode feels primitive and somewhat empty next to PES2009’s fantasy-world equivalent. Even Master League’s menus are ridiculous. And the less said about that notorious dog the better…

But the only thing that Manager Mode really has going for it, in my opinion, is FIFA09 itself. The better core gameplay. Is that enough to sustain me through an inferior career mode? I don’t know yet.

What’s becoming clear to me now, today, is that in the medium-to-long term, it might not matter to me that FIFA09 is the superior football game (and it certainly is that). What’ll matter to me is which career mode of the two on offer—Master League or Manager Mode—I most want to play. I certainly won’t force myself to play Manager Mode if it goes on feeling pretty hollow, as it is doing at the moment.

Today’s post is the final one for the month of November 2008—and it has been a strange old month. At the start of it I was playing FIFA09 and Manager Mode exclusively, and PES2009 was an unwanted guest. If you’d told me on November 1st that by the end of the month I’d be playing PES2009 with great enjoyment—and without having to force it—I would have laughed, or said you were crazy, or done whatever else it is that people do in these “If you had told me…” constructions.

But after getting the sack in a FIFA09 career and—yes—feeling more than a little ‘FIFA fatigued’, I decided to have a few sessions on PES2009. I still mostly disliked the game at the time, although I was intrigued by the peculiar way that PES2009 actually plays a slower and often more considered game of football than the supposed uber-simulation of FIFA09.

The rest of November has been a great surprise to me. I found a lot to like about PES2009, and one thing led to another, and before I knew it PES2009 and me were all over each other. I found something worth pursuing in PES2009, a chink of light, and plunged into it. I never expected it to happen, or even particularly wanted it to happen. PES2008 accumulated a lot of bad karma for Konami and Seabass. I was ready to see PES fail.

The topic of PES2009 and ‘fun’ has cropped up from time to time over the past month. It’s a wearily constant refrain on the pro-PES forums (”PES is fun; FIFA is not fun; PES is great because it’s fun”, etc.). There’s a hell of a lot of assumption in this standpoint. Was the only reason anybody played ISS/PES for ten years because of fun? I really don’t think so.

Hand on heart, I don’t like PES2009 because I think it’s ‘fun’. From my perspective, I’m playing it for the same reasons that I ever played any ISS/PES game—because it involves me and fascinates me and challenges me. Somewhere in the mix, there is something called ‘fun’, but it’s not the prime element of the strange alchemy that makes a good PES game—as I think PES2009 is.

The rise of PES2009 in my estimation hasn’t seen a corresponding fall in my admiration for FIFA09. Yes, FIFA09 has faults, some of them glaring. They’re all well-documented and much-discussed on a dozen different forums. But ‘no game is perfect’ is one of the great truisms of gaming. And FIFA09’s faults don’t prevent if from being, in my opinion, the superior football game. The gap isn’t as huge as I thought it was back in October, but it’s still there.

If I was forced to come up with review-style scores for both football games right now, I’d give PES2009 an 8.5 and FIFA09 a 9. A month ago those figures would have stood at 7 and 9.5 respectively. What will they be a month from now? I can feel a regular monthly feature coming on.

———————–

Back in PES2009 itself, I was at the tail-end of season number 5 in the lower division. One of the more-ish things about PES2009 for me is how tough I’ve found it, particularly after last year’s (non-)effort.

Spending more than three seasons in Division 2 is unprecedented. Only now, in season FIVE, am I finally scrapping for a promotion spot.

I was second in the table with four games to go, one point behind the leaders. My next opponents were those leaders: Middlesbrough—a team who, a bit like FC Bosphorus of old, always seem to prove tough.

The menu screen was in no doubt what the big game represented:

Eh? The title decider? With three more games to go afterwards? Not quite a decider, I’d say. Good old eccentric captioning—a new PES tradition.

I won the Middlesbrough game 1-0. And took possibly the blurriest mobile phone photo ever taken with my trembling hand. I defended well and snatched a scrambled goal with Kim Cyun Hi in the second half. Lots of my games are ending 1-0 or 2-1 at the moment. I’m having a mini golden age of defending.

After the final whistle there was a brief celebration by my players on the pitch. This made me tense up, because I thought the game was about to award me the D2 Championship three games too early. What a monster bug that would have been. But no, the celebrations were only about promotion. The victory had mathematically ensured promotion. I’d done it! After five long, mostly hard seasons. Promotion to Division 1. Whew.

After this, of course, I was top of the league. All I had to do was keep winning and the title would be mine. I wanted that Championship—I could taste it. I can’t remember that last time I went up to D1 as D2 Champions in any Master League.

Sadly, I drew one of my last three games. The CPU has a knack of scoring late heartbreakers this year (more than any other), and it got one, and I lost the title because it. So much for that Middlesbrough game being a title decider.

Here’s the final table:

My bogey team, AIK Athens, are going up with me to Division 1. Good. I owe them a beating or two.

Hopefully that’s the last I’ll see of Division 2 in this career. Although, now that I’m moving up to Top Player difficulty, and PES2009 remains overall a tough game for me, and I’m going to go off and play FIFA09 for a while, who knows what could happen? Never say never. I nearly got relegated last year. It could happen again.

I won’t resume this ML career until about this time next week. When I do, I’ll have a lot to talk about. There’s a massive flaw in the all-new ML transfer market that had me seething with rage. In PES2009 you get scout reports that tell you why some players won’t sign for your club. One of the reasons is ‘He won’t come to Division 2′. That’s fair enough when you’re in Division 2… but what about when you’ve just won promotion to Division 1? It wouldn’t apply then, right? Right?!

Wrong. This is PES. This is Konami, and Seabass. The game treated me as if I was a Division 2 team all the way through pre-season negotiations. Even the pre-season friendlies were billed as ‘Division 2 pre-season friendlies’. Grrrrrrr. The crazy thing is that isn’t really a bug. It’s due to the way seasons in Master League are organised. But I’ll talk about this in more depth when I return to PES2009.

The natural break will do me good. The first signs of PES2009 fatigue might just have started to appear, with me trying to ‘auto-pilot’ my way through large chunks of matches. So a quick hop over the aisle to FIFA09 is called for on a number of levels.

Monday will see me return to play regular daily sessions of FIFA09 for the first time in almost a month. At the time of writing I’ve already had my first session—and I still think the game is glorious. And—dare I say it—it’s a lot of FUN. Yes, the faults are there, but when a football game plays as good as FIFA09 does, you can overlook the faults, or even manage to forget them. It’s a bit like PES2009 in that respect. But I’ll save all my gushing for next week.

Last night I had a few games on FIFA09. They were my first games on FIFA09 for about ten days. And I had a great time. It was on the Xbox360 (I’m still waiting for the PS3 patch). I only meant to have one quick game, just to see, but ended up playing two Exhibition games and two games in my Atletico Madrid MM career. I was amazed and enraptured all over again by just how good a football game FIFA09 is. But I was most surprised by being able to slip back into the FIFA09 style of gameplay so easily after all this time playing PES2009.

Several weeks ago when I first tried to switch from one game to the other, I was worried about ‘contamination’ in both directions. Trying to play PES2009 as if it’s FIFA09 and FIFA09 as if it’s PES2009 does both games a great disservice. But last night I barely tried to ‘PES it up’ at all. Later on I did, but that was when I was behind late on in a match, and getting frustrated. I think all of us who ‘grew up’ on ISS/PES will never be able to stop ‘PESing about’ to some degree for the rest of our natural lives, in any football game. (We’ll probably still try to play Space Soccer 2023, or whatever, with our fingers firmly gripping R1…)

FIFA09 is a sublime game. I’m really looking forward to playing it regularly again on my PS3 when the patch comes. And it looks now as if I will be able to play FIFA and PES, together, this year. That initial period of strangeness when it felt impossible for me to play both games might be over.

In a very peculiar and unexpected way, this year might be one of the best possible years to be a football gamer. How strange is that? The win-win thing, finally. It’s still early days yet (I’m thinking about January again) but how strange, and how great, would that be?

——————-

Season 2010-2011 in my PES2009 Master League has come to an inglorious end. After picking up those few extra players in the mid-season negotations, I won a couple of games and things looked rosy. But I haven’t won a game since. The season dribbled to a close with a couple of feeble draws and a final shattering run of six consecutive defeats.

And so I’ll spend another season at least in Division 2. Maybe in the dim and distant ML past I’ve had worse starts to a career, but if I did I don’t remember them. I think this is the worst I’ve ever done. For that reason alone, PES2009 is already a remarkable game.

The one crumb of comfort I can take from this new failure of a season is that my youngsters are starting to blossom. Jackson is turning into a reliable player at CB. His current development isn’t that great, but it’s still coming along nicely. Another season or two and he’ll be a proper defensive giant.

And then there’s Dietrich. A young superstar-in-waiting DMF, he’s just about to start bossing midfields in the manner of great PES DMFs of the past (Mathieu & Bradley & Prieto & co.). I’m expecting great things from him in the future (a few goals would be particularly nice). Here’s a fairly gratuitous picture of Dietrich, appropriately bathed in a celestial glow:

And now here’s this season’s final league table. Yes, it was another bad season, but who’s that team in bottom place?

It’s not COVENTRY CITY in 12th place, that’s for sure. At least I’m off the bottom and things are moving in the right direction. The only way is up…