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.

Suddenly, my first Master League season has gone the proverbial tits-up. I’m two-thirds of the way through the season and I am resolutely bottom of the league. I don’t think it’s possible for me to be more bottom of the league than I am right now. This is the most ideally bottom of the league I think I have ever been in any PES.

Here’s my record - it’s shocking. It’s something like Won 5, Drawn 7, Lost 3425. Goals for: 15. Goals against: 433,926. There is now no way I’ll be getting promoted in my first season.

It happened not long after the game where I scored the two wonder goals with Ruskin. I’m not superstitious enough to lay all the blame at Ruskin’s door. It’s not as if there’s some kind of set allocation of amazingness and good fortune that I used up all in one go with those two goals. I don’t think so, anyway…

Whereas previously I was holding my own and picking up solid results, all of a sudden I couldn’t score goals and I couldn’t prevent the CPU teams scoring goals against me.

The rot set in a few games before the mid-season negotiation period. I was eliminated from the Division 2 Cup. I lost the first leg at home 0-1, unluckily I thought, and drew the second leg 0-0. I was disappointed - but not too much. Being out of the Cup meant a few less games to tire my players while I went after the main objective - promotion. But I suddenly went on the mother of all losing streaks. I lost every game until the negotiation period.

Falling over that dividing line into the negotiation period was a great relief. Now, I thought, was the time to get my season back on track. Four new players was my target. I had 12000-odd points and my estimated end-of-season salary costs would be 9000-odd. I looked long and hard at my squad and knew that I should easily be able to trade in the dead wood, and even purchase some players outright with that spare couple of thousand points. I thought.

My first target was a certain player called Mathieu… I will write more about this PES phenomenon another time, probably when I finally get him. My PES Master Leagues only really seem to start when I get Mathieu.

In the first negotiation week (1 of 4) I tried to get Mathieu by trading Castolo. (No real loss to my team, as it has been a good few PESes since Castolo was really any good. I think PES3 was the last time, when he was called Castello.) Refused. The next week I tried to trade Gutierrez for Mathieu. Refused. In the third week I tried to buy Mathieu outright for 5000-odd points. Refused. In the final week I offered 7000 points, more than was sensible to risk a Game Over at season’s end for. Refused. Damn.

PES2008’s negotiation periods are affected by the team’s league position and overall prestige like no other before it. Being near the bottom of Division 2 (as I then was) perhaps counted against me. Whatever. I wasn’t too fussed, to be honest. While I was trying to snap up Mathieu I was also bidding for other players.

Which shouldn’t have been a problem, right? Wrong. I won’t recount all the gory details. To be honest I don’t really remember them. It was a case of Advanced Searching for medium-quality defenders, midfielders, and attackers (better by miles than any of my current squad) and placing a trade-in bid. All were refused.

By the last week of the negotiation period I had signed ZERO new players. I started to panic. I had a look at the Youth players under Search by Group, and saw three youngsters - 17-year-olds - whose key stats for their positions were almost all in the yellow or heading that way. I’ve got no chance of these, I thought, but I offered them contracts anyway.

Two of the three youth players were PES stalwarts: Schwarz and Shimizu. The other was some defender called Mattsson.

Luckily for me - I thought - they all accepted my contract offers. I went into the second half of the season with them in my squad. Having got rid of precisely zero players, I now had a somewhat bloated roster of about 30 players. Ouch. I’d easily be able to cover their wages at the end of the season - I’d spent nothing from my 12000 kitty, remember. And I could have lots of fun going for trade-ins all over the place in the full negotiation period.

But I still came out of the mid-season negotiation period thinking I had completely wasted it. Schwarz and Shimizu notwithstanding.

I put all three youngsters straight into my First XI. Here’s the new line-up:

I dropped Iouga and moved Jaric to DMF. Zamenhof is actually a better keeper than Ivarov, so he went in. I brought in Baumann at CB as well. Mattsson went straight into the other CB slot. Shimizu fits in nicely as the right-sided AMF, and can play as a nippy CF on the right when called for. Schwarz is a natural CF, and currently belongs in the centre, in my opinion. I’ll try him out on the left in a few seasons’ time.

The new boys have done me no good. 17-year-olds have poor stamina. Schwarz and Shimizu play perhaps one game in three. Mattsson is a different prospect. He plays one full game in two, on average - he’s also pretty good, mopping up and clearing balls far more than any of my other CBs are capable of doing. Mattsson is actually the pick of the three right now.

Shimizu and Schwarz are too easily shrugged off the ball, too easily tackled, too easily outpaced. Neither have scored a goal as yet. Shimizu has one assist. Coventry City have plunged to the bottom of Division 2 and are going to stay there until the end of the season.

Regardless, I am still playing the three 17-year-olds in every game I can. It’ll bulk out their stats and hopefully give them a flying start to the next season, when they’ll be 18 and just starting to really show their potential.

So the first season is mostly a write-off. I have about eight games left to play. Now it’s just a matter of getting to the end, having a great negotiation period, and starting again.

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.