It’s been another week with precious little action on other football games besides PES2008. Every Sunday is supposed to be Other Football Game Sunday on PES Chronicles, but I often have little or nothing to write about.
It’s getting too common for me to spend Sunday listing the other football games I could have played and saying why I didn’t play them all week. Or why I only played them for half a minute before running back to PES. If this keeps up then I might have to abandon OFG Sunday altogether—and all the signs are that it will indeed keep up. I’m still loving my Master League and I’m still loving the PSP/PS2 version of PES2008 (as I loved all of its predecessors; hence the blog). If I have time enough to play a football game then I want it to be PES2008, not one of the pretenders.
The pretenders, in case anyone is wondering, are all the football games that I’ve liked enough to have played and written about over the past 6 months—but not liked them enough to keep me away from PES for any length of time.
I feel an odd sense of guilt about neglecting some of them. Next-gen FIFA08, for one. I have really got to get back to my twin Manager Mode careers in that game, and soon—otherwise, inevitably, I won’t ever go back to it at all. And that would be a real shame. FIFA08 was and is a significant game in the history of console football games, mark my words. Nothing can be the same after next-gen FIFA08, for better or worse.
So I feel a nagging sense of guilt about not playing it. But when it comes to AGG (Abandoned Games Guilt), nothing can touch the monumental guilt that I feel about Football Manager Live.
FMLive—an MMOG spin on the single-player classic—is still in closed Beta and likely to stay that way for the forseeable future. I received an invite about a month ago and I was absolutely delighted. I never usually get asked to do things like that. After several days of intense play, I started to get very busy with a lot of very important stuff in my real, non-gaming life (there really is such a thing, it turns out). Something had to give, either PES time or some (or all) of my Other Football Game time—and I chose to sacrifice OFG time.
Before anyone poses the question, no, the FMLive Beta accounts are not transferable. I’ll be keeping my account. I might even look in and play it from time to time. But I can’t help but feel that I’m missing a great opportunity. It’s a shame, and I feel guilty.
From now on, I’ll only do an OFG Sunday if I’ve actually played another football game enough for it to be worthwhile. I don’t anticipate there being many OFG Sundays between now and September and the release of FIFA09.
But hey, there’s a whole PES-flavoured summer to get through first. Those seasons aren’t going to play themselves…