It’s the game every football fan waits for each year and last week saw the release of the demo for Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 on both the Xbox Live Marketplace and also the Playstation Online Network.

After having several games with all teams available on the demo I’ve got to admit I was extremely impressed. The play is fast, flowing and fluid and it makes for lots of exciting end to end matches. The only problem is not every match in real football of course is played at such a fast tempo but the fast tempo in game isn’t such a bad thing.

Graphics wise, the game has had a major facelift, there are now improved animations and as well as this the players are much more recognisable than in PES 6.

I wasn’t a fan of the pitch used on the demo (Picky huh?), looks quite poor but obviously in the full game they’ll be 30+ stadiums probably, and there were of course screenshots released a couple of months back showing a Stadium Builder although whether this makes it into the final game remains to be seen.

Overall I’m extremely impressed so far, I was a huge fan of PES 6 but its looking like PES 2008 will be even better.

The real winners would have to be overwhelmingly us the consumers. In the home console market we have 3 very viable good systems, competitively priced. The mobile market is every growing and there are all kinds of gaming systems again with competitive prices. So not only do we have lots of choices we have lots of new and exciting things to look forward to.
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With Microsoft releasing a new IM solution to the Xbox 360, I thought it might be fun to talk about it some in a non-formal manner. I don’t think its going to have a huge impact in the way we communicate with our peers, but I think it’s a step in the right direction. At night I might not always want to “talk” to people with my head set so Live IM on Xbox will be nice for me, but I will still use my PC 99% of the time when I want to talk to people.
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