PES 2014 - Pro Evolution Soccer

By late 2013 Konami was selling two entirely different games under one name. The PlayStation 3 and 360 version of PES 2014 was the studio's big reset, built on a new engine with a physics system Konami branded TrueBall Tech, and it arrived rough and heavily criticised. The PlayStation 2 version shared the box art and almost nothing else. It ran on the same codebase Konami had been sanding down since the middle of the previous decade, updated with new kits, squads and a fresh menu skin.

That sounds dismissive. It is not, entirely. What the PS2 build inherited was the version of Pro Evolution Soccer that many people still argue was the series at its most legible: weighty, deliberate passing, shots that behave predictably once you understand the animation windows, defenders who commit and can be beaten by a good first touch. There is no contextual dribbling layer sitting between you and the ball. The pass button does what the pass button has always done. Playing it after a decade of modern football sims, the thing that stands out is how few systems are running behind the scenes.

The modes are the familiar spread. Exhibition, cups, a Master League that still asks you to sign ageing journeymen on a shoestring before you can afford anyone with a real name, and the licensing patchwork PES always lived with — a handful of authentic clubs and competitions surrounded by fictionalised stand-ins waiting to be renamed by the player or, more often, by an option file.

The reason this version exists at all is Latin America. Brazil in particular kept the PS2 commercially alive years after it had been retired elsewhere, and Konami kept shipping to it. That gives the disc a slightly strange status: a 2013 football game running on 2000 hardware, sold to an audience that had never been given a reason to leave. It is the last entry in the series to appear on the console, and it goes out without ceremony.

Judged as new football, it is obsolete. Judged as the final, most polished state of an engine that defined a generation of the sport on consoles, it holds up better than the version that got the marketing budget. The PS2 game knew exactly what it was, which is more than could be said for its bigger sibling that year.