Reviews// Pro Evolution Soccer 2010

So, has Shingo "Seabass" Takatsuka and his team managed to take on and beat the hugely acclaimed – despite the recently announced uber-patched – FIFA 10? Basically, no they haven't.

What made PES the great game it once was rather than the adequate game that it now is, was the on-the-field action and Master League. The latter has always maintained the best of both management and virtual football kicking without shouting too loudly about it. You could, and I did, obsess about taking your team of no-hopers, old warhorses, injury-prone prima donnas, and the one gem (I always stuck with Eddington) to league cup dominance.

When it started out as Winning Eleven, gamers were awed by its realism and fluidity in comparison (in my case at least) to Actua Soccer. Glancing back at that now is very much like looking at Galaxians and remembering how awesome it looked compared to Space Invaders.

FIFA was simply too damned fiddly, with its step-overs and button mashing; its apparently infinite lag when attempting a through-ball.

But then something got lost along the way, or in the case of FIFA a new team game along and a great deal was gained. If analogies have to be drawn, EA Sports' outing last year saw the kind of fillip provided by Sir Bobby Robson to Ipswich Town in the late 1970s and early 1980s… or Sir Alex Ferguson at Manchester United in the mid-1990s.

So, if the question is "Should you buy FIFA 10 or PES 2010?” the answer remains a mixed response.

As a game of football on console, Konami's latest effort is perfectly adequate. In a world of no choices, you wouldn't be too upset to be playing PES 2010. The addition of 360-degree movement is a welcome one - even if it really does require a return to the D-Pad for precision. The on-field play is, however, now brutally obviously, well, latent. No matter how hard you try, and no matter how much Konami says it's got rid of it, you will still find players taking ball to byline… and over it. I don't just mean players from the early rounds of Master League, I mean Ronaldinho.

Goalies, on the other hand do indeed appear to be slightly less thick than in years gone by. Sure, some people will argue that keepers are a strangely perverse breed in reality so why mess with their desire not to throw the ball directly to the player you have indicated? Why alter reality? Well, in the modern age of the professional player, not only should keepers not hold onto the ball when it's clear that a quick chuck to the wing-back (yes, I said 'wing-back') would instigate an incisive attack, they should not bounce it. They should, in fact, be able to saunter up the pitch in a total football style, and slot the ball home. In fact, I have even trained my second-string, Master League net custodian to do that. He's now a rubbish custodian.