Football Gamer - Pro Evo & FIFA on the XBOX 360

PES 2009 is the best football game to have made. I keep saying this because I truly think so. The game did have its share of disappointments in terms of animations, transfers, commentary and such stuff. But when it came to gameplay, there is no equal to this masterpiece. Yes, some of you must be raising your eyebrows. I hear you saying ‘masterpiece? gimme a break, fanboy!’

No PES is ever complete without the patches and tweaks. With FIFA, even patches and tweaks won’t make them quite complete. Because, with patches and tweaks, PES would be the next immediate thing to real football while FIFA would still be a long way behind. The core gameplay of PES 2009 is a splendid piece of work. Don’t complain about the game being fast or slow or stuff like that. Those are all editable stuff. You can edit almost everything and they will all have an impact on the game. The part that is the raw basic game that is not touched by the edits is what I call the core gameplay. That’s where PES2009 rules over FIFA 09. Also, editing PES is always fun.

What I’m talking here is about a realism patch. This is basically tweaks of the player attribute values in the option file. Here are the ingredients I had, to create the realism patch: XBOX 360, Datel Max Transfer Kit, 64MB Memory Card, PES 2009 editor v2.8, Exploder_resigner program. If you don’t have some of these, please google it yourself to find them.

Here are the tweaks that I made:

Agility Tweak: Reduce agility by 30% to 35% – The players in PES2009 turn all too quickly. With not enough animations to back that kind of agility, it looks very unrealistic and impossible. Even otherwise, the agility values seemed to be very high which made it look like a pure arcade game. Reduce it by 30% or 35% or 40% and you’ll see less of clumsy and cluttered moves.

Speed Tweak: Reduce top speed by 15% to 20% – The game is still a bit faster though this is one of the slowest PES’ ever. I’d love to see the speed drop a bit so it’s very very close to real football. After this tweak, you realy have time on the ball and gameplay is that of real football’s speed. You’ll love the fact that you can really build up your attack with the gameplay freedom that PES2009 offers.

Stamina tweak: Increase stamina by 10% | Improve condition/fitness by 1 – The default stamina values are little low for professional footballers. They should generally be able to play competitively for all 90 minutes and they should be able to play 3 matches in a week. With all the slower gameplay and less agility, you don’t want your players to lose stamina and crawl across the pitch. Give them more stamina while you have taken away the agility and speed. Helps to balance the work rate on the pitch.

If you have done these tweaks, PES 2009 will be the game for you! Amazingly close to real life football. The game gets lot more tactical and intelligent. You can set up your game so beautifully to your heart’s content. Also, the difference between teams and players will be much more visible now. On the whole, the tweaks will re-invent PES 2009 for you. Try them and let me know.