Long read: The beauty and drama of video games and their clouds

"It's a little bit hard to work out without knowing the altitude of that dragon..."

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Pro Evo 4 PC demo rolls around

You take the big demo with commentary, you wake up next to Peter Brackley, and believe whatever you want to believe...

"That's a terrific clearance," he says, as someone scores, or a condor flies into the ball singing the Burmese national anthem, and someone's head explodes, or something. "His touch let him down there."

With the PC demo of Pro Evolution Soccer 4, that's the main difference between a 74MB download and a 200MB version - you get a couple of talking heads chiming in with ill-fitting ruminations on the state of the game at various intervals. It's cute for a few minutes, then slightly irritating, then painful.

PES4 itself however is as good a game of football as you will find on the PC for all sorts of reasons outlined in last week's PC review. Its multiplayer options may be a bit on the cheap-and-tacky side, but you can't argue with the quality of the underlying game.

Or at least if you do you ought to play it first and then get delusional. And thanks to the abovementioned demo you can; this one allows you to play five-minute exhibition matches between a mixture of England, Sweden, Spain and Italy in a choice of two stadiums.

PES4 is due out on the PC this Friday. It's already out on the PS2 (sans multiplayer) of course, and the Xbox Live enabled version will also be with us on Friday. We hope to bring you more on that later in the week. We're sure it's a terrific long ball upfield.