PES heading to Windows Phone 7

Titanic football series Pro Evolution Soccer

I see what you did there...

Good game on a good platform but I can't help but feel this will be shit. Reason being on screen analogue sticks.

As a WP7S user, I'm interested (especially in a matsers league) but let's see the prices first.

@OnlyMe: to be fair, it's only another edition or so away from returning to critical acclaim. 2011 got something of a bashing but it's a far more accomplished representation of how football is actually played, how footballers behave and how tactics affect the course of a match, than FIFA 11.

Mainstream game review sites aren't really equipped to judge this in reviews,

(a) because they spend a brief amount of time with the game compared to the year you'll have with it,
(b) because any glitches or bugs seem to be completely ignored (1Up was the only site I know that actually mentioned this in the FIFA 10 review), and
(c) because the games reviewer is not employed for their understanding of football, and may be given the job of reviewing the title just because they watch Match Of The Day and/or play football games most frequently.

As such they aren't in a position to appreciate the depth in such a title, or they may see FIFA 11 as a slog because of pro passing but falsely identify the problem as the game being too realistic as a result, rather than spotting that the problem is actually that pro passing is not implemented in a realistic way at all - it doesn't make the passing less accurate (as in real life, as in PES), it just makes passes slower and more easily chased by the superhuman sprint pressuring. The passing in real football is much faster and the momentum of players much more significant, making it a lot easier to keep the ball through crafty dribbling and passing.

As such, FIFA 11 is seen as being negligibly more realistic than FIFA 10 by its community, and yet will now have to face a FIFA 12 that quite likely will have been influenced by half baked reviews such as EG's that marked the game down for being too much of a sim, rather than identifying what the actual problems are.

@MrGammyHand

It's a shame I can't +1 more than once. I totally agree.

Yep, and me.

(although I can't even give you a 1 yet as I'm using the iPhone app)

FIFA might be the more "realistic" and "authentic" version of the two games (but anyone who thinks ANY football game can or ever will ever actually play like the real sport is an idiot) but PES does a better job of capturing the feel, the excitement and the unpredictability that makes the real thing so exciting. Even if they are sometimes down to the little bugs and kinks in the engine.

Onelove - I don't even think FIFA is more 'realistic'. It may be in certain areas, particularly the look of it and most of the ball physics, but understanding how things like passing speed, shooting body stance, momentum, dribbling, weaker footedness, heading, pressuring vs jockeying etc all work and counterbalance is something you can't ignore when making a sim. That's not even including the tactics and formation setup, which in PES is good enough for Arrigo Sacchi to to suddenly get his erection back. Some of the stuff I've been able to pull from real world knowledge and implement to beat allstar teams in MLO with a squad of decent but not special players has had me shocked.

While I prefer PES over FIFA for the consoles I have to say that the FIFA 11 iPad version is pretty decent. With a physical suction thumb stick coming out soon it should be an even better experience for 'on the road' matches.