As ever, Sunday is other football game day on PES Chronicles. Except… apart from a token few matches on next-gen FIFA08, I haven’t really played any other football games this week.

I’m currently going through a dark time with next-gen PES2008. It turns out that my draconian House Rules (well, I think they’re draconian) might not be tough enough. Once again I find myself more or less going through the motions in far too many games. This might be down to me being very busy with other stuff away from PES over the past week or so. I’ve got a few days off work next week so I’ll see how the leisure time affects my play.

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Dagenham & Redbridge are near the top of Coca Cola League 2 in my second next-gen FIFA08 manager mode career. Playing this game so infrequently nowadays means that I’m struggling to do anything except draw 0-0 or 1-1. My previous two games were both 0-0, then it looked like the last game of the session was going to end 1-1. Not good enough really, and it was all going to cost me in the end. If I slipped down to fourth place and missed out on promotion I’d probably quit the entire manager mode career and go back to my Coventry City galacticos.

Ah, but in the last minute of stoppage time, Huckerby popped up in the box:

A fine looping header over the keeper. I know that I keep saying it about FIFA08, but this goal was another rarity. Most of my headers fly past the post or over the bar for no apparent reason. Did the game want me to score that goal? Are football video gamers amongst the most paranoid people on earth?

Apart from these three games on FIFA08, I haven’t touched any other football game.

I’m still waiting to get a new PC on which to play Football Manager 2008. That’ll be sometime in the summer.

I’ve still to play LMA Manager 2007 on the Xbox360. Maybe I’ll give that a whirl sometime this week.

Sensible Soccer might as well not exist for me. It was the most pointless £7 (or whatever it was) that I’ve ever spent on a game. I’m sure Sensi is a lot of fun for its dedicated fans, but as I said a few weeks ago I missed out on the game the first time around—in the mid-90s—and it’s possibly too late for me to get into it now. I will definitely give it another try for at least a couple of continuous hours. (So far I’ve only managed short bursts of twenty minutes here, half an hour there.) That will be the last test. Sensible Soccer is drinking in the Last Chance Saloon. At least it won’t be short of company at the bar…

Maybe I’ll finally lose my patience with next-gen PES2008 and admit defeat and just get the vastly superior (it now seems clear) PS2 version. I know that at least one reader of this blog will be nodding and thinking I told him so…

Every Sunday on PES Chronicles is devoted to Other Football Games. It’s been another week without much action on that front. While I’m wrapped up in a PES Master League there’s never much action on any other computer games, never mind other footie games.

On my shelf at the moment I have all of these games, partly played or completely unplayed: Halo3, Mass Effect, Oblivion, Assassin’s Creed, Call of Duty 4, Crackdown, Command & Conquer: Tiberium Wars, and others. There are loads of old PS2 games (including the really-must-be-played-soon titles God of War 2 and Okami) that are in a similar suspended state. Football games account for 99% of my gaming life.

Sadly, I don’t think I am ever going to learn to love—or even like—Sensible Soccer on Xbox Live Arcade. Every play session goes much the same way. I start out full of good intentions. I am going to get into this classic game, I think. And for twenty minutes or so, I do get into it. I can fully see why the game earned its reputation. Goals are plentiful and, bizarrely for a retro game with simplistic graphics, the gameplay is deep. Sensible Soccer is more difficult (for me anyway) than either PES or FIFA.

But then I start to lose interest and engagement. It may be too late for me to get into Sensible Soccer. Perhaps you had to be there the first time around in the mid-90s. And I almost hesitate to say it, but fun is not enough for me. I look for something more (or less?) than fun in a computer game. If fun was the sole value criterion for a computer game, then something like Sonic the Hedgehog would be the greatest game ever made, and it’s not.

The frequent periods when next-gen FIFA08 is decidedly not fun are why I keep coming back to it. In the past few weeks I’ve been PES-ing all the way, so my time has been limited on EA’s much-discussed new iteration in its justly-lambasted series (has there ever been a FIFA that’s got the PES community buzzing like this one has?).

I’ve played another handful of games in my Manager Mode career with Dagenham & Redbridge in the Coca Cola League 2. This week I’ve dropped the difficulty level down a notch. Dare I say it, but World Class was proving to be so tough with the players at my disposal that I was spending most of every game just chasing the ball. It was not fun…

Back down to Professional, then, and the games pick up. I have more of the ball, spend more time taking my time and indulging in the gameplay that I have come to admire and respect. And love? Possibly.

Here’s a couple of goals from this week’s play:

The first goal in the clip is an example of the bad in next-gen FIFA08. I get a shot away with Baiano that hits the crossbar and loops into the air. As it comes down I vaguely challenge the keeper for the ball, and it rebounds off his hands into the net. The game credited Baiano with the goal. Groan. It’s just one of many little niggling faults with the game.

The second goal in the clip is one of my favourites. An extended dribble down half the pitch, holding off the defender at my heels, and then an arrowed shot into the corner of the net. Remarkably, in FIFA08 such goals are a rarity.

I’ve got Dagenham and Redbridge up to 4th in League 2. A notorious bug in next-gen FIFA08 (a stupid oversight, really) means that there are no division playoffs, so I’ll have to finish in the top 3 to go up to League 1.

Promotion is a certainty unless I buckle and put the difficulty back up to World Class—which I’ll probably do, come to think of it. It won’t be fun trying to re-learn the game at that level (especially as I’m spending 95% of my time on PES2008), but it will be challenging. That’s what I like in a computer game.

Every Sunday on PES Chronicles is Other Football Game Sunday—a special day when I take time out from my hectic PES2008 schedule to report on my experiences with any other football games that I’ve played during the past week.

Today’s OFG news is… not much news, really. I’ve gone back to my usual behaviour of playing PES2008 pretty much 95% of the time.

I’m still plugging away with the PSP version of PES6 during bus journeys to work and lunchtimes etc.

The first goal in the clip is from my very occasional PSP Master League career with Barcelona. I just wanted to see what it was like to play with Barcelona. I’m anti-Barcelona. But 90% of PES players aren’t, and I wanted to see how the other half 90% live.

It’s okay really, but not very challenging. I seem to score a wonder goal with Ronaldinho in every other game.

The second goal is one that I found lurking on the memory stick. It’s been a very long time indeed since I played with International teams in PES6 on the PSP . So the goal must be from the first few days after I got the game—November 2006. It’s a long-range screamer from… Wayne Bridge.

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I did play a game-week in Football Manager 2008 as Coventry City (naturally).

I signed Malcolm Christie and David Thompson, both good additions to a mediocre squad. I played a pre-season friendly against Falkirk that I won 2-0, using a narrow 4-1-2-1-2 formation that has always worked excellently well for me in past versions.

During the 2D match highlights my PC started making the kind of asthmatic noises that signal an imminent shutdown. I got through the rest of the game, but I know my PC of old and I quit the game to avoid a reboot. It looks as if I won’t be playing FM2008 in full until I get a new PC sometime later this year when I can afford it. A few weeks ago I bought an Xbox360 and it more or less depleted my emergency fund (that’s the spare cash I keep lying around in case I have to go on the run from the authorities at a moment’s notice. Everybody has one of those funds. Right?).

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Speaking of the Xbox360… I haven’t had the chance to play Sensible Soccer at all this week. It’s a shame, as I was just getting into it—I was just starting to see what all the fuss was about—when I started playing Bioshock.

After that, well, the console might just as well be renamed the Bioshock360. All my Xbox time this week and most of last has been devoted to completing that sublime game. And having completed it, I’m itching to play it again on Hard, and in a different way (evilly), collecting all of the plasmids and seeing all the stuff I was too enraptured to see the first time around.

I will play Sensible Soccer for an extended period—for a couple of days, or a week—very soon. Before I start a league career I want to get good at the game, then play with the mid-1990s Coventry City squad. It should be interesting. Hopefully I’ll have something to report next Sunday.

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I only played a grand total of three matches on next-gen FIFA08 this week. This year’s FIFA on the PS3 and Xbox360 really is an oddity—a slow, almost stiff hyper-simulation of football. We have never seen its like on a games console before, to my knowledge.

One of the games was in my fledgling Manager Mode career with the lowly Dagenham & Redbridge in the Coca Cola League 2.

One of the major criticisms that PES players have of FIFA08 is that there is too little difference between all of the players. It’s a valid criticism. In PES2008, my dashing young AMF, Camacho, is a palpably different player at the age of 20 than he was at the age of 18. In FIFA08, all the players feel much the same, all the time. Of course, after a long time with the game, you start to notice that there are differences, but Michael Owen might just as well be Micah Richards, and vice versa, a lot of the time.

It’s only when you play with seriously inferior players in the lower leagues that you can feel a great difference. My Dagenham & Redbridge players are awful. They can’t run, they can’t pass, they can’t shoot. In the August transfer window I did get a few good players—Darren Huckerby, Bianchi, and a couple of midfield journeymen from the Free Agents list—but the bulk of my players are still FIFA08’s equivalents of the PES Default donkeys.

I played that one game and then scurried back to my ongoing Coventry City career, with my team of galacticos. For the first time in a few months FIFA08 annoyed me.

It seemed awkward and relatively dull compared to the fireworks and drama of my current PES2008 ML career. It’s only to be expected. You can’t swap between two radically different football games, as these two are, and expect to be able to translate your style of gameplay from one to the other—as a few too many PES players expect (or even demand) to do when they try out next-gen FIFA08.

Here’s a couple of goals from those three games on next-gen FIFA08 this week. The first is from the Dagenham & Redbridge game. The second goal is a super-duper-long-range strike from Van Persie (in my CCFC team):

I was going to say a few words today about the parlous state of FIFA’s online ‘community’ but I haven’t had time. Maybe that’ll be another one for next Sunday.