The first needless stumbling block you encounter is the complete absence of a team edit mode. Contrary to what has become one of life’s basic needs, the ability to transfer players between clubs has been removed, along with, of course, modifying team names and emblems. This, at the very least, leads to a moment of sheer panic and psychosis. As if that wasn’t serious enough, the usually reliable player edit mode has also been toned down to such an extent that they might as well have given up altogether. The level of progress hasn’t simply remained static, but has actually taken several steps back as you become increasingly infuriated by the inability to change Sun Jihai’s goal celebration or the fact that Cristiano Ronaldo never plays with his shirt tucked in. And there’s even more to get on your wick. In previous versions, if you wanted to make a substitution on the main formation setting screen, you simply select the player you want to remove, press right on the d-pad, and voila – the list scrolls immediately to your set of substitutes. Not here. Having disabled the right-press on the d-pad, you now have to select the player you want to remove, then hold ‘down’ on the d-pad to scroll past your entire first-team squad to get to your substitutes. By that stage, you may change your mind, and so you have to scroll all the way back up (instead of just pressing left), cancel/review your original selection and start the process all over again. That, on any games console (21st century or otherwise), is unacceptable. Oh, and there’s more. The Quick Setting option has been removed so you can no longer specify a quick fire formation – such as ‘all attack’ or ‘all defend’ – in the dying minutes of a match, and the catastrophic slowdown during some corner kicks when players are bunched up in the box while using the wide angle view. Meanwhile, the volume of the commentary appears to have been toned down to the extent that despite turning it up to maximum level, Brackley and Brooking can barely be heard. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, of course. Indeed, by simply drowning it out so people can’t actually hear any of it even if they wanted to, it’s actually quite a novel approach for masking something which hasn’t received any improvement whatsoever.

In the end, what Konami have given us is a PES with all the toys missing. In some ways, this wouldn’t be such a big issue if things were compensated in other areas – take, for instance, a dynamic, deformable pitch system; proper, influential weather effects; or significantly improved animation. But that just hasn’t been the case. At this emotional stage, it would be all too predictable to give PES6 a 2/10 for merely existing. Even in light of all these flaws, the fact that it still plays like a dream is testament to its fundamental strengths. For the time you’re actually playing a match and not fiddling stats, team emblems, Sun JiHai’s celebration, or Cristiano Ronaldo’s shirt, PES6 is nothing but a joy to play. It’s still nowhere near as intelligent or difficult as some players want, but the AI certainly appears to have been notched up a few pegs: the computer actually seems to do a reasonable job at trying to stop you from scoring. Scoring from free kicks and crosses is also harder than ever. The only telling drawbacks are (still) the relatively predictable attack patterns and a greater tendency for late goals to be scored as a result of player fatigue. Other than that, the gameplay is arguably the best yet, especially when complemented by the 360’s online facilities. Only after the match do you wonder why everything else is missing.

And what of PES’s arch nemesis, FIFA ‘07, you might ask? Well, that’s even worse. A lot worse, in fact. The 360 version is so bad (or funny, depending on your view of things) that all the players look like gargoyles – an element that is slightly humorous for a brief moment if you didn’t pay for the game, but fires up all sorts of blasphemy and hatred if you did. And why stop here? EA have gone a stage further by canning the promising gameplay system they developed in recent prequels and replaced it with a woolly mess. But let’s save that for another review. The main message here is that if you dislike PES6, then you’ll hate FIFA. You’ll hate EA even more for subjecting you to it and making you pay your hard earned cash for the privilege. On a more general note, PES6 on 360 does draw attention to some salient points. It seems that instead of improving games in ways a normal person might expect, developers seem to be taking us, gamers, for a ride. For game reviewers, rather than trying to explain the strengths of a game, it now becomes a task of spotting all the flaws and wondering why in hell they didn’t bother to fix any of them. And rather than fixing these flaws to make the game better, developers are taking the game’s strengths and merely spreading them around in each iteration so that the whole thing looks and feels different, but we don’t actually get any more content. You can bet your cat that in the next version on 360, we’ll get the edit modes, we’ll get the ‘right button quick press substitution menu interface’, hell, we might even get ‘improved and audible commentary’ if we’re really lucky, but then we should have had that all along. Then in the version after that, they’ll take out the edit mode again and put in a few extra stadiums to make us think how lucky we all are. And so it goes, on and on, and no one will know any better. It’s like someone trying to make a pizza with only so much topping – there’s not enough to go around, but they try desperately hard to spread it and make the thing look ‘right’, but no matter what they do, there’ll be parts without any cheese or tomato. But if you’re trying to make the best pizza in the world to satisfy a pizza-loving person, you should offer as much topping as that person demands. Luckily, Konami aren’t in the pizza making business. They’re in the business of making one of the best football games in the world, and a very successful one to boot. But they need to move on. They need to elevate PES to the next stage of its life that it so deserves, and the only way they can do that is to give players more of what they want rather than take from them.