Head to Head, FIFA 11 vs PES 11

With Africa’s 1^st World Cup over, another battle biggest soccer spectacle is just about to begin, planning of which started long before the world cup in SA. Two rival giants both stretch their teams to the limit for the ultimate clash.

Pro evolution and FIFA are considered the kings when it comes to football gaming. With both games always being highly anticipated people always show a great sense of urgency to find out what improvements each game will have.

Zimbabweans  are not considered a gaming people,we have never had a local blog or site that talked about gaming or games in general. This genre of gaming was kind of a preserve for the geeks and the so called “junkies” (well that’s what most people say anyway), where CDs and DVDs are traded on street corners, or schools (basically any informal place that you can think of).  But the winds of change swept across the land in the past couple of years, and we have seen a lot of outlets that sell gaming consoles, PC gaming regalia and exciting games.

The prices in and around Harare for games range from $20 to $50 per game depending on the title, these being “claimed to be original ”, and of course there is a dark side to everything so I’ll also note that I’ve heard of a place they go for $8 in town.

Most gamers either use gaming consoles (PS. PS2, PS3, Xbox, Nintendo, etc.) and others settle for PCs (me included). The reasons vary from cost to performance etc. I will cover the prices of these consoles in future articles.

Having said that lets go back to the battle that we introduced at the beginning of this article.

Pro Evolution Soccer

Deep in the heart of Tokyo Japan at the Konami, offices developers of the Pro Evolution Soccer 2011, are working on the final touches of their game offering for this year, to please (frankly speaking you can never please that lot) a much anticipating crowd of gamers and geeks. This year’s product the Pro Evolution Soccer 2011 (officially abbreviated as PES 2011 and known as World Soccer: Winning Eleven 2011 in Asia) is the latest game in the Pro Evolution Soccer series being developed and published by Konami with production assistance from the Blue Sky Team.

The game was announced on 9 February 2010 and is set to be released on 8th October 2010 on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. With Nintendo Wii, PC, PlayStation 2 and PSP being released soon after, in October to November. The game will also see the return of Lionel Messi as its cover star.

FIFA 11

Meanwhile in Canada, the same frenzy is going on with the Electronic Arts Canada team, for EA FIFA 11 (FIFA Soccer 11 in North America) will be the 18th title in Electronic Arts’ FIFA series of football games. Developed by EA Canada, it will be published by Electronic Arts worldwide under the EA Sports label on 28 September 2010 in North America, 30 September 2010 in Australia, and 1 October 2010 in Europe for all platforms, except the Wii.

The Wii version will be released on 3 October 2010 in North America and Europe. The Windows version of FIFA 11 will be the first in the series to use the same game engine as the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions. FIFA 11 will feature different players on the cover in each region.

Kaká will be featured on the cover globally, with the addition of Wayne Rooney in the United Kingdom and Ireland, Rooney and Tim Cahill in Australia,and Carlos Vela and Landon Donovan in North America. The German cover of the game features MesutÖzil and Rene Adler while the Italian version will feature Kaká with Juventus’s defender Giorgio Chiellini, and the Spanish cover will feature Kaká and Andres Iniesta.

A FIFA 11 demo will be available to download on 15 September 2010 for PS3 and Xbox 360 and on 16 September 2010 for PC.

Ok now that we have the release dates, we look at what’s hot and what’s not in each of these games as per the claims by the developers. In the next article we dig deeper into the main improvements in each of these games before the actual products hit the market.