It’s time to get into FIFA09’s career mode in a big way. I’ve had my few getting-to-know-you weeks. I’ve also spent several days playing PES2009 just to see if things could be like they were between me and PES again (no, they can’t—not at the moment, anyway). It’s time to put my money where my mouth is. Time to walk the walk. I’m heading into Manager Mode, or as I will try to make it: Manager League Mode.

This name reflects that I will be playing with House Rules designed to make the experience as much like PES’s Master League as possible. I know—it’s absolutely crazy that the PES career mode is more realistic in many ways than its supposedly fully-licensed, official, FIFA equivalent, but there you go. Life’s not obliged to be consistent.

I’ll expand on my House Rules for Manager Mode over the coming days and weeks. They’re not that complex. There’ll be no consulting a rulebook every time I want to make a substitution. Most of my House rules will limit my coaching staff upgrades and my acquisition of new players on the transfer market. After 4 seasons in my Manager Mode career on FIFA08, I had Michael Owen, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Jesus Navas playing up front for Coventry City. I won’t let that happen this year.

I’ll be playing again as Coventry City on the PlayStation3 version of the game. Yes, the PS3—the console with the dreaded through-ball bug. It’s still not patched. Doubtless I’ll be moaning my head off incessantly about it until it is patched. I have noticed fewer issues since I switched to manual through-balls, but it’s early days.

I’ve mostly played FIFA09 so far on the Xbox360. The game is—just slightly—a better game on the 360. Better graphics, and better overall pace. Just better. Sadly, my 360 would seem to be on its last legs (after just 14 months, and relatively little use) and it’s not reliable enough for me to trust it. I have little enough time as it is. Constantly restarting after freezes and crashes is not something I can be bothered with.

I’ve been playing as Atletico Madrid in the Spanish league on the 360. I’ve just finished my first season and ended up in 4th place. The whole season was played on Professional difficulty. Early on I switched from all-Assisted controls to a mixed bag of semi-manual, manual, and assisted. This instantly made the game harder for me without having to change the difficulty level.

It turned out to be a rollercoaster of a season. Going over to semi-manual shooting in particular saw my goals dry up, and I slipped down the table. I rallied toward the end of the season and but for a few poor performances I might even have challenged for the title in the closing weeks.

What can I say about my Atletico players? I’ve loved playing with them. Forlan. Aguero. Maxi Rodriguez. And quite a few more. I think I’ve loved this season with Atletico so much because it’s been one of discovery for me. I taught myself how to shoot straight without the game helping me so much. Semi-manual shooting makes even the most straightforward goal something that you really have to work for. For example, this goal—

—is the quintessence of a bread and butter goal. But when using a manual through-ball, and semi-manual shooting, I was grinning as if I’d just netted a 40-yard screamer. The ordinary can feel that good in FIFA09. I can’t wait to see how my Coventry City career shapes up.

For the past five days or so, I’ve been playing PES2008 solely on the PSP. The little handheld console has got its knockers (missus), but I love it. I’ve actually got more games for my PSP than for any other platform. I love it. And I love playing PES on it—particularly the 2008 variety, which is the authentic handheld PES that we ended up having to wait three years for.

The past several days have been unusual for me. Usually I chop and change between the PSP and PS2 version (on my PS3) every day or two. It’s so utterly simple and straightforward to transfer the save file from one machine to the other. Literally the work of seconds. I haven’t really had time to use my PS3 recently, so my PES play has been all on the PSP, in odd moments during transit from home to work and back again, and during breaks, etc.

It’s an amazing luxury to play a proper game of Pro Evo whilst on the move. I often look down at the PSP in my hands, with a full-on football game running on it, and reflect that if I could take this thing back to 1980 or thereabouts, the people back then would think… well, they’d think I was from the future. Ahem.

I powered up my PS3 for the first time in almost a week. First of all I treated myself to a warm-up session on Warhawk and FIFA08. I just fancied a bit of next-gen wizardry before firing up the PS2 disc, with its faithful old chalky visuals. I hadn’t played Warhawk for about 6 months, and I was shocked to discover how expert the regular players have become. Before, I was able to more or less hold my own, but now I was just a walking bullseye.

On FIFA08, I played a couple more games of my Manager Mode career with Dagenham & Redbridge. It’d been a while since I played FIFA08 regularly, so I was just as rusty as I was in Warhawk. After several months now of regular PES2008 play, I’d forgotten how to play FIFA in an attacking sense. I was automatically trying my PES moves and strategies, which simply don’t work.

I went online for a game against a human opponent—my first in 6 months—and came up against a player who chose a four-star Mexican team. In my position, 99.99% of players would have instantly picked Barcelona, but I’d have been embarrassed to be seen as one of them. I flipped through the English Premiership teams and settled on Birmingham City, also a four-star team in FIFA08 (yeah, right).

FIFA08 online really does play as smoothly as offline (read ‘em and weep, Seabass). There was no lag, no teleporting, none of that stuff. I took the lead with a pretty soft goal in the second half and got to the last few minutes by defending well. My opponent persevered, however, and scored in the 89th minute with a fine 25-yard shot straight into the top corner. I was gutted. I hardly ever win anything online. You should have seen my one (and so far only) attempt to play Halo3 online. Not pretty. Not pretty at all.

The match went to extra time. I rashly conceded a penalty during the second period. He converted it and that’s how the game ended, 2-1 to him. Yes, gutted is the word.

And so to PES2008.

It seemed that my time away from the bigger console had cost me dear. I couldn’t re-adjust back to a properly-sized controller. The extra two shoulder buttons seemed weird. Playing PES on the big screen seemed weird. I played three league games and drew them all 0-0. That happens in PES from time to time. Even after you’ve been playing a version for months on end, you’ll stumble into strange spells of scoring no goals and conceding no goals. I quite like it that this happens. I just couldn’t understand why I was finding the transition back to the PS3 so weird after only a few continuous days on the PSP.

Things picked up in Europe. After my Treble-winning antics of last season I didn’t have to qualify for the Champions League-equivalent, so the main group stage came around in the usual Week 9 or so. I played Almela, whose presence in the group took me slightly aback. Weren’t they a minnow team? How did they get into this competition? Anyway, whatever, I finally scored a goal—a scruffy affair from Camacho—and won it 1-0. Phew.

Then, to round off a busy night of gaming, I played a league game against Real Madrid and lost 3-1. Saviola was rampant—he’s good in PES2008, at least for the CPU. That result left me slightly out of touch in fifth place in the league, seven points adrift of the leaders Valencia. But there’s a long way to go.

I’ve zoomed all the way to mid-season 2015. I find that I’m doing this a lot on PES2008. I’m playing so many games so quickly that I could feasibly get through a full season every three days or so. Or every two days.

I was never this speedy in times gone by. The culprit here is the PSP version, specifically the transferability of a Master League career from the PSP to the PS3 and vice versa. I’ve been playing the game everywhere: on buses, on lunchbreaks, at random snatched moments around the house, in bed before going to sleep… The PSP’s sleep-mode enables you to play a match and pause it indefinitely while you do something else (there’s something else to do?), then resume the match exactly where you left off, at your convenience.

The overspill is starting to affect areas of my life that were previously safe from being ‘infected’ by PES. The other night, Tuesday night, I settled down to watch the second leg of the Champions League semi-final between Man Utd and Barcelona on television. I love watching big TV matches that have a lot riding them—short of the final itself, Man Utd-Barcelona was a pretty big game. But I took my PSP to the couch wth me. And what did I end up doing? That’s right, I played PES2008 and watched the match on TV at the same time—with the result that I never really watched the match on TV at all, because I was too preoccupied with PES2008. That’s just one example of a much wider phenomenon. I’m really going to have to make the effort to take that UMD out of my PSP…

 And so I’ve got to Week 15. I’m still gunning for the league title, and I’m still unbeaten—I could be on track for my first unbeaten Master League season in three PES years.

Real Madrid have emerged from the chasing pack as my main challengers. They’re currently shadowing me, always just a few points behind. It’d be very easy to slip up and lose my grasp on the title. I’m being ultra-careful in every league game. I’m concentrating hard, taking nothing for granted—you know what I mean. If I hadn’t drawn so many games I’d be a long way out in front. (Sorry for the blurriness of the photo, by the way. It’s a PSP screenshot—they’re never the best quality with my mobile phone but for some reason this one turned out particularly bad. And the eagle-eyed will notice that it’s a screenshot from Week 16 anyway, a week after the supposed timeframe of the current post. I forgot to take a screenie after Week 15.)

I coasted through the rest of my WEFA Championship qualifying group - Played 6, Won 5, Drew 1, Lost 0. The draw came in the last game against Spartak, who couldn’t qualify but were all over me anyway. I was lucky to get a draw from that game. I found AC Milan and Barcelona to be surprisingly easy to beat in our fixtures. Maybe I was just on form, I don’t know.

I scored a great goal with Giggs in a D1 Cup game (I’m through to the Quarter Finals, of course). Giggs is quietly emerging as my current squad’s most outstanding individual player. I don’t mean he’s necessarily better than Bradley, Camacho, Schwarz, et al; just that he’s consistently getting crucial goals and making dangerous runs when I most need them. When I struck this shot I thought I’d hit it much too hard and it was going over. But no, Giggs being Giggs there was some spin on the ball and it looped deliciously down into the net: