Steven, I see what you’re saying, my experience of pro evo isn’t far removed from your own. I’ve been a huge fan of the pro evolution series and it’s predecessors for a long time, but the developers seem to have gotten lazy. Pro evo 5 was, for me, the ultimate football gaming experience in the year it was released, and I never really got bored of the game. However, from pro evo 6 onwards the rot seems to have set in, and fifa has somehow become the most realistic football game on the market.

The major problem with pro evo is that it is best mastered by learning how to exploit and work around the in-game flaws. For instance, you can throw rash challenges about in the eighteen yard box and you’ll probably be safe. Also, there are certain shooting ‘hot-spots’, and you can still win matches with just one player (Yes, people can bang on about players doing this in real life, but even Lionel Messi’s antics in real life don’t quite match up to what you can do with him on Pro). The worst thing is that when you play with weaker teams you might as well forget about through balls. Apparently only a select two hundred players in the whole world can play a through ball.

Anyhow, rant over. I can’t see how the pro evo developers will let yet another year pass by as a wasted opportunity. Pro evo needs massive gameplay alterations to be able to claim the superiority that it once had, and I think this has become clear. Let’s just hope that Konami delivers on its promise this year.

I was more annoyed at Konami than I was impressed at Fifa because it had slowly built up a fan base to then charge us £40 for a game that was worse than its predecessor. Clearly they don’t think enough of us fans as all the previous media releases claimed to fix the bugs from ‘08 which were never addressed. I’ve always been loyal to Pro Evo but it’s unlikely that they’ll fix every bug and match Fifa come this October. The series is at least 3 years behind Fifa’s unless they work around the clock to design a revolutionary playing system (unlikely).

I doubt Pro Evo will redesign the system, even if we believe their press releases. It’s like Arsenal; living off past glories.