Musings on the state of digital football

Ronaldinho actually looks like Ronaldinho. That's a start!

If you’re in the States of A, you probably got the Bioshock demo yesterday and the FIFA 09 demo last week. You might’ve liked Bioshock, was a tad scary for me though. But say you’re itching for some football (soccer) that doesn’t feel like ass when you play it. Well, brotha i gotchu. Sign into the PSN with your alternate EU account, access their PS Store and DL the PES 09 demo they received yesterday. I haven’t tried it yet myself, but i tried FIFA last week, almost falling for all this “FIFA’s finally better than PES!” crap and came away as disappointed as ever.

EA makes soccer games like they make their Madden — big, heavy, lumbering brutes running across a field, waiting for the occassional juke or high-step to look cool. Futbol isn’t supposed to play like football. Futbol is pretty, balletic; players moving around with finesse. In football, players are constantly attacking with their bodies, slamming each other to the ground. FIFA, the two most recent years at least, is feeling too much like they’ve adopted the Madden engine. Maybe that’s how the MLS plays, but sorry, no. Futbol (at least everywhere else in the world) is a sport of carefully crafted beauty executed at just the right moment. It’s like tennis, but with a lot more guys and only one changeover.

Despite the framerate issues of last year’s Winning Eleven, which seem to have been addressed this year, FIFA is still far from the top. You can talk about features and online leagues and whatnot, but it’s the gameplay, stupids.

I don’t mean to harp too much on the “America is dumb for not liking soccer enough” meme, it’s just a question of the games displaying their real-world counterparts well. I’m gonna feel like an ass if the PES demo sucks.