PES all day everyday, thats a silly question!
If PES is better, than why does everyone on this forum (an English football manager series forum) like FIFA so much?
Here are the games I've had: World Cup 98, World Cup 2002, Fifa 2004, PES 2008 (although it may have been 2007, I can't remember), PES 2009, and as of two days ago, FIFA 2011 (all for the PC). My perception after I got PES 2008 (I'd never heard of it until my Turkish friends introduced it to me) was that FIFA was a lame, unrealistic, arcade soccer games for Americans who only bought it for the licensing and the nice menus. I loved the version of PES I had, and when I tried 09 I loved it even more. I didn't upgrade in 2010 because I heard it wasn't very good and I had already done a lot of roster modifications. When 2011 rolled around, I didn't upgrade once again, thinking my PC probably wouldn't be able to handle the newest game (after a while it started running my PES '09 poorly). I had also just acquired an old PS2, my first console, and got both PES 2011 and FIFA 2011, but they both were very disappointing. The PES was better though.
I tried out FIFA 2011 on my friend's PS3 and was amazing. It has advanced so much since the early days of FIFA. Maybe I'm only thinking this because I've been playing it on multi-player (I only played single player on PES), but FIFA 11 seems way better than PES 09. A big part of this of course is the 360 degree movement. While PES's 16 direction movement is good, it doesn't feel realistic because the overall gameplay depends a lot on hitting the right one of those 16 directions at the right time...not realistic. In FIFA though, you never even think about that, you just aim in a direction and it goes. Since I figured out how to plug my PS2 controller into my PC, this was a huge plus. And of course there were all the other benefits to an EA Sports game: great presentation, great graphics, and very good sound. I can't stand Jon Champion's commentary in PES, and the Spanish commentators are also terrible. It makes me turn off the commentator volume. And although Martin Tyler sucks in real life, I think he's good for FIFA, and I've heard him commentate so much in real life (he does a lot of the commentary in the US) that it makes it feel more realistic.
I now have FIFA 2011 on my PC, although it runs very poorly (see my thread in the FIFA section) since my PC can't quite handle it. But so far I love the looks of it. The 360 degree movement is great, although I'm unsure of the AI (seems a little generic, arcadey, predictable, and traditionally FIFAish, which is a bad sign). The amount of leagues is great, and I like the manager mode setup so far...I love having youth academy players (my favorite part of manager/career/franchise mode of video games are developing regens, and it's really too bad that FIFA and PES suck in this regard), and the manager mode feels more in-depth than PES 09's career mode. I know you can mod PES to get the licensing and all that, but there are far fewer leagues! And the career mode is lame with only 4 leagues, especially when you have non-league teams in the second division that get promoted (I know you can fix this with roster updates, but I don't like downloading two whole divisions of a league, seems a waste for the very limited space they have for teams), whereas in FIFA they have them all.
There is one HUGE drawback to FIFA that made me want to stick with PES...no Argentine league! It's absolutely ridiculous, they have 4 English leagues, the Korean, Turkish, Swiss, Mexican, US, and Scandinavian leagues, and no Argentina! Unbelievable! This is why I thought I'd stick with PES. But apparently there are people working on a FIFA 2011 Argentine league patch, and it's almost done. So if it works out well, that pretty much kills my motivation to play PES.
If you can convince me that the PC version of PES 11 has superior gameplay, 360 movement, and a better manager mode with more 'regens' (there aren't real regens in these games, just fictional created players, but the more of them the better), than maybe I'll try it out. But I keep hearing people tell me that PES hasn't progressed at all since PES 6, and the fact that many people all over the world still play it as opposed to the newest version tells me something. I did hear though that PES 2012 is supposed to be revolutionary, so I have my hopes up for 2012 and 2013.
Wasn't there a thread on PES vs. FIFA? I could've sworn there was but couldn't find it. Maybe I'll start one.
