With the World Cup winding down this weekend, I thought it was as good a time as any to go back to the past (if you will) and crack out two of last year’s football titles.
Having originally been a fan of FIFA games when I first started playing on the PC, then on the PS2 and Xbox, I switched my allegiances to Pro Evolution Soccer for a few years, sacrificing the licences of FIFA for the ability to edit my own Sunderland team in PES. After all, it was around this time when Sunderland weren’t in the Premier League, so back in the days when FIFA only featured Premier League sides… you can guess why I switched!
Then came the jump to next generation consoles. Oh boy – FIFA originally sucked big time on the 360, with FIFA 07 having a totally re-designed engine, but with a lot of leagues cut out, Pro Evo won the war for another year. Unfortunately, once PES made the jump to the next generation consoles, things kinda went downhill from there.
As FIFA got accustomed to the new generation of consoles, with the improved graphics that everyone quickly grew to expect, along with the other perks (hard drives to store data, downloadable content and suchlike), FIFA took off. No more were we only able to play as the top flight clubs in each country – now English fans could play as Hartlepool (if they really wanted to), or do games like FC Zwolle vs Reggina if they wanted to. On the Konami side, while we got official leagues, for the UK fans, we were still stuck with Man Red (for the few years that Manchester United weren’t officially licenced), West Midlands Village and Middlebrook as Premier League lookalikes.
For the 2010 iterations of these games (i.e. last year’s models) I didn’t really care about new features. It’s been long enough for these two warring games to get the basics sorted out – things like graphics and sound – but how would they do on the intangibles? Well, PES kinda fell at the first two hurdles.
Graphically, the close-ups are the only next-gen thing about this game. When the game is playing, the graphics feel like they’re only slightly improved on the PS2 – almost to the point where I can believe the only improvements are that they’ve been upscaled. Commentary is also a joke, but for PES, commentary is only background noise, and not a part of the game. O-kay…
Compared to FIFA – well, the graphics are as polished as you’d expect from a next-gen EA game, while the commentary, while tired and repetitive, at least name-checks your players once in a while. In PES 2010 all I heard was “DARREN BENT!” every time he touched the ball. Everyone else just didn’t exist!
Overall, PES2010 just isn’t as enjoyable as FIFA 10 – and coming from someone who was a big fan of option files back in the day to make PES more realistic, that just sucks. Don’t get me wrong, the option files still exist, but these days it’s more of a pain. Using memory sticks to copy over to the PS3, then copy over the edit file, the multitude of graphics used to make the kits more realistic… it took me an hour to do one option file, and then it just didn’t work.
FIFA 11 is planning a new “creation mode”, where you can submit artwork online to be included in your game. Since FIFA has all the licences, this isn’t as required as in PES, but if submitting custom kit art for your game a) doesn’t require moderation, b) can be done via a USB stick instead of online and c) isn’t a pain in the rear, then I can see this being FIFA’s new jewel in the crown.
Konami, after having been overtaken in the past few years, this is your time to step up. Are you up to it?
