Football unites people from around the world and so do video games. I am 27 years old and I live in Johannesburg, South Africa. It is a world away from the home base of this blog and from you fine people reading this article. Yet we share a common language, a common love and that love is PES. It is the magical conjunction between the love of Football and love of video games. I have been playing PES since the ISS PRO DELUXE days on the SNES. It was my baptism into the Konami footballing dynasty and I haven’t changed my religion since. I have fond memories growing up and purchasing Winning Eleven games from Japan in August before PES got released in Europe, still to date my best ever football game is WINNING ELEVEN 7 INTERNATIONAL.
The bottom line is we all love football. I read once on a video game forum, “we are football fans above anything else.” This is so true especially when people ask me why it is that I love PES so much, or even why I still play it. They say to me, “It has limited graphics, it is so outdated technically and to boot it has hardly any licenses.” I simply tell them that PES might not look the best or smoothest recreation of the beautiful currently out there. But it is the only game that plays like real football.
For me a football game is something that needs a football brain to have an edge, not the fastest finger first. A game where possession play and tactical savvy get rewarded. A game where a minnow can trump a top team if that team plays the better football. A game where the team that has the fastest players doesn’t always win. A game that has it’s stadium recreated properly and the only game out there that can do this is PES. This is because despite all the short comings that PES has, Konami have always put core gameplay first and have put gameplay innovation above online modes.
What drew me to PES and what I loved so much about it in the past was the wow and awe factor it gave us. It has special heart and soul; it had characteristics that gave the user a special feeling when playing it. Whether it was the star above the badge on your team’s kit in PES1 if you won a master league season. Or the fact that if you had a retiring player, playing at the end of a season and you took him off early in the last game, you would see a special cut scene for him. Or that Enricho Chiesa had a one step penalty animation way back in PES3 when individuality wasn’t even a thought in video games yet.
It is all these things that give PES an aura about it that makes it special. It is better than the sum of its parts. I’ve got a feeling inside of me that PES2014 will bring us the wow factor back! And get us anxiously excited to switch on our consoles and delve deep into an amazing looking and amazingly playable game again. PES always had gameplay that was as deep as an ocean. Now we have graphics and a state of the art technical engine with the FOX engine to power it home. Mix that with the inclusion of Havok technology for physics and we have a special time ahead of us on the horizon.
Let me share a secret with you. PES2014 is not going to be the perfect game. I don’t think it will need to be either, it’s a huge step in the right direction, and it seems to be a game we have to relearn and have an open mind about. For too long we’ve been waiting for a football game to do this. For a PES rejuvenation and it is finally upon us. It is exciting times ahead for us PES lovers, with the demo on a door step and the release day less than 50 days away. It’s a good time to be a PES fan and a football fan.
“PES is the drug and I need to score.”
RockyJJP