The other day I was browsing through Facebook as you do, and came across one of my chums asking, via her status, what football game she should buy this year. What followed was a couple of hours of various exchanges of suggestions from people who didn’t necessarily know each other, but the general gist was the same: if you like pretty graphics, get FIFA, if you like gameplay then Pro Evo is your bag. Now this is not strictly true these days of course what with EA having upped the bar considerably in the last couple of years, but footy fans and rabid Pro Evo fanboys (of which there are plenty, trust me, and I will address this later) still maintain that Konami have the edge when it comes to the footy part of the show.

Right, first things first – let’s cast FIFA aside for the time being and review Pro Evo 2009 as a standalone product free from comparison. Anyone who played the 2008 iteration and had to put up with horrible framerate issues, unreliable online play and goalkeepers with about as much ability as a paralytic sloth will no doubt be pleased to know that, yes, things have been rounded off and smoothed out this year, and yes – the football itself is enjoyable. So enjoyable, in fact, that you can quite easily find yourself playing game after game instead of doing more important things like, for example, sitting down and reviewing the thing.

The first thing you notice when things hit the pitch is that 2009 is, despite feeling slightly slower than 2008, still lightning quick and super smooth. Players feel responsive and you can often perform more intricate runs and passes into space than you would have thought possible, and pinging the ball around intelligently will still create pockets of space in which you can begin to drive home your advantage. Another pleasing thing is that working the ball through the middle isn’t necessarily the best tactic out there as wing play can be devastatingly effective on regular occasion, so you have the whole width of the pitch and a whole number of attacking possibilities to consider.

It isn’t perfect by any means, of course – passing still seems somewhat inexact at times and can frustrate, and your team AI often refuses to make intelligent forward runs to which you can play a nifty through ball, even if a five-year old can see it as a blaringly obvious opportunity. They’re not crushingly major problems, of course, but they can act as little niggles that occasionally break the flow at awkward moments.

Still, there’s a lot more to be positive about this season as compensation – the first being that the ‘keepers are now actually relatively competent and will give you a bit of a hard time. Shooting is still as curious a science as it ever has been, but it is something that you begin to naturally pick up the more you play and pretty quickly you’ll instinctively know what types of shot will have which results in certain situations, whilst you’ll also pick up nifty little tactics like using the R2 button to add a little finesse to your shots in an attempt to place them rather than blast them.

The natural flow of the game is something to behold, too, with AI teams intelligently pushing you toward ever-closing pockets of room in an attempt to win the ball back rather than ganging up and all bundling toward you like a crowd of zombies. This is occasionally bought to a stop by the referees, mind, who for some reason often let mistimed slide tackles off the hook but then penalise slight body checks, which becomes rather annoying if it deprives you of a goal scoring opportunity. Ho hum.

Having put those FIFA comparisons to one side a moment ago, it’s only appropriate that a few evaluations are made. One thing that I especially noticed is that, whilst FIFA plays very much like an English Premier League game would with more physical contact and pressing, Pro Evo is more of a Spanish Premera Division affair that rewards passing and good use of the space that the opposition allow you. Which you prefer is pretty much down to you as an individual, of course, and it’s hard to really say that one is technically better than the other.

Of course, on-pitch antics are only part of the bigger picture when it comes to footy titles, and it’s in the presentation and modes sections that Konami seem to continually slip on a virtual banana skin. 2009 only partly rectifies this, sadly, and quite soon you’ll get used to having only a selection of licensed club teams (Man Utd and Liverpool, for you Premier League fans) slotted in against the might of The Potteries and such with out-of-date player rosters, whilst the horrible background music, menu systems and commentary make their usual annual return.

This angers me slightly, and here’s the reason: it’s an easy fix. Okay, okay – EA have the rights to the Premier League, but a few of the other licenses that Konami have lost or not picked up (i.e. the Spanish one) are up for grabs and have just been allowed to lapse, as if Konami are trying to plead poverty. Sure, the modern consoles make editing the names and such easier (the edit mode is actually pretty comprehensive, and allows you to snap your own ugly mug and paste it into the game) and also uploading option files to share, but we shouldn’t really be having to do things like that. Likewise, clumsy menus have been around for years now and are not seemingly getting looked into, whilst the commentary from the otherwise excellent Jon Champion and the gratingly annoying Mark Lawrenson seems horribly stiff and adds to the lack of proper match atmosphere. Oh, yeah, and the background music is still the usual range of terrible sounding pop and jazz.

Having spent so long fine-tuning the hard part, i.e. simulating the actual sport itself, it simply stinks of laziness on Konami’s part. It’s as if they have realised that they now have a massive gaggle of fanboys who would still buy the thing if it projected vomit out of the disc tray as soon as the opposition scored a goal and thought ‘hey, you know what, it’ll still sell anyway’. The saddest part of the whole thing is that they are right, and it will. Hopefully some day the bright sparks who still take the FIFA vs. Pro Evo thing as if it were actually World War 3 will wake and/or grow up and realise that you aren’t being disloyal by criticising things that need to be fixed. I do it enough with Dirk Kuyt, trust me.

Away from continued aesthetical displeasure, the game does try its best to add in more modes to keep you entertained. Having attained the Champions League license, you can now take part in a relatively authentic Champions League competition as one of the teams competing, although not all are licensed so the sense of realism is punctured slightly. The knackered old Master League mode also lumbers back into the picture boasting but a single tweak – a loyalty metre for players. Yeah, hardly thrill-a-minute stuff eh?

Possibly the most interesting – and fun – new mode is that Become a Legend mode which has been floating around for a good while over in Japan and has come to Europe as Pro Evo’s answer to FIFA’s Be a Pro mode. In this you take control of a young player starting out on the rocky road to footy fame by playing a match for some ridiculously named junior team, your performance in which supposedly affects who offers you a contract (although subsequent testing suggested you still get the same three offers in any case).

Thereafter you climb through the ranks playing as that one player, boosting your stats as you go. Problem is, whereas EA’s effort has a few pointers and guides throughout as to your performance in the form of positional indicators and plus and negatives marks depending on your actions, Become a Legend just leaves you alone to wander around the pitch without as much as an indication as to what you should be doing to maximise your position. You can’t ask teammates to pass to you or to have shots either, so you feel slightly less involved as well. Whereas on FIFA’s equivalent you can learn what it takes to make the most of whatever position you are playing and thus turn yourself into an effective team player, Become a Legend seems to encourage (and reward) simply getting involved as much as you can, giving it the feeling of being more similar to a playground kick around,

As an offshoot to this mode, you can go and take your player online with three other human players on the same team to take on an AI squad, which is slightly less impressive than the 10 vs. 10 online offering that EA offer and somehow slightly more laggy and unreliable too. Another problem with this mode is that you get little score indicators for completing passes and the like which pop up in the form of huge shapes in the bottom right of the screen, completely obscuring your view of that part of the pitch. Not particularly clever, eh? Those who enjoy simply hooking up for a standard game of classic Pro Evo against an online opponent are catered for, so don’t worry.

When taken as a game of football, Pro Evo does shine up remarkably well, despite the niggling on-pitch issues. It’s fast, it’s fluid and it feels genuine enough with moves creating space and goals often being real works of art. For all that, though, it’s the outside elements – the graphical prowess, the match atmosphere, the menus and the music – which still let the side down, and no matter how many people tell you that these are not important, they most certainly are. If it had been a case of Konami trying different things and missing the mark when it come to the off-the-pitch stuff then you could perhaps have forgiven them, but as it is the obvious lack of enthusiasm on their part to rectify the problems that have blighted the series for years finds no excuses to fall back on. This year, as last, Pro Evo is still a case of being a tasty nut encased in a slightly rotting shell.