With all these inconveniences, what kept me playing? And why didn’t I fire up my PlayStation 4 or PC and play one of the football games from 2020 instead? There is some nostalgia involved here, of course – both for the game and the 2005/06 football season – but there are so many things that should have driven me away: the graphics are rough round the edges, the game mechanics are unrefined, and the emulator stutters and occasionally refuses to let me run right until I reconnect my controller. To my surprise, I once again became addicted, and played Master League matches on a daily basis for the rest of the break. I wasted a huge number of hours playing this game as a teenager, and wanted to see how it held up 15 years and three console generations later.
In my efforts to stave off boredom in the gap between Christmas and the new year, I installed an emulator and grabbed a copy of Pro Evolution Soccer 5 to play. Like everyone else, I didn’t have a normal Christmas holiday this year. This isn’t something I’ve ever done before on this blog – but don’t worry, I won’t be doing this all the time and my focus will still be cyber security! I just might dig up a retro game or two from time to time for and write a bit of a deep dive when the inspiration strikes me. I hope that at the very least this will stir up some nostalgia that inspire others to dig out their copies for a match or two. Of course, there are many reviews out there from 2005 that cover its gameplay, features, and so on, but in this post I have attempted to capture what made it so perfectly balanced and special to many fans. Pro Evolution Soccer 5 has always been an all-time favourite of mine, but it is only now, 15 years after its initial release, that I have found the inspiration to do it justice in words.
Design in football games doesn’t get much attention, as the focus is normally on comparisons to the real game, so I thought this would be an interesting area to explore in a little more detail than I’ve seen before. I have a rare off-topic post for you this month – something of an essay about the structure of the classic Pro Evolution Soccer Master League, the differences in its modern-day equivalents, and a discussion about the delicate balance between realism and gameplay in video games more widely.
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