I bought an XBox 360 back in the Spring. Fabulous machine, and has got me playing games again after a short age of disinterest.

I’ve always been a FIFA Soccer man, but plumped for a change. Pro Evolution Soccer was one of the first buys and probably the most played game I’ve got.

There’s something notably odd about it though. Which is that, frankly, the game is shockingly awful in many, many respects and yet still manages to be outstandingly good.

When you first run the game, the music, menus and incessant requests to choose a storage device have you genuinely worried that defecting from FIFA might’ve been a terrible mistake. The lack of official licenses for most teams would be OK, were the alternate club names actually decipherable. The tactics editor is clumsy, the in-game stats inaccessible. The number of stadia included is under-whelming and when you get into the game the graphics aren’t really very good, either.

But yet when you play, this game really does feel like football. The pace is just right, the way the players respond to the weight of your movements, the way they trap the ball on chest, head or foot and move smoothly with it. The way so much of the subtlety of the play can be felt, intuitively. All its horrid presentational faults, all the pre-match apprehension just fades away as you start to realise how beautiful playing the game really is.

It’s like it’s the anti-FIFA. FIFA 2007 has the slick presentation: As games and menus are loading you run Ronaldino around a training pitch, blasting a ball around for pre-match entertainment; the menus all have a trendy isometric slant and the graphics are pretty fabulous. But it plays like a turd. The players jerk around, run too fast and kick the ball clumsily too far. FIFA reinvents its gameplay every few years as time after time they fail to achieve the subtle brilliance of Pro Evo.

And it’s that which I love. That in a day an age of hi-definition graphics, 5.1 surround sound and multi-gazillion dollar product placements and celebrity tie ins, Pro Evo is made to look like a second rate player, left behind by commercial advances. But all the while, it’s the best playing football game on the planet.

I’ve got one bigger quibble, specific to the XBox 360 edition. The XBox has a fantastic, inter-game high score system called Gamerscore — you can even see my modest score on the internets. In every single game you buy for the 360, you can complete ‘Achievements’ and be rewarded with Gamerscore points. You might receive some for collecting power-ups, for pulling off a difficult special move, completing levels within certain time limits. They’re an interesting extra incentive to work through the games and sometimes go off the path of the principal plot to pick extra bonuses.

FIFA 2007 has some really neat achievements: Score 10 goals in a match, maintain a 60 game winning streak, claim man of the match awards for players in each position, win a fair play award. All quite subtle and separate to the main game aims of just winning matches, league and cup competitions.

By comparison, Pro Evo 6 is utterly shockingly unimaginative. They go something like this: Win the English league, the French league, the Italian league, the American league, the African league, the International league. And, Win the African cup, the European cup, the International cup, the American cup… Each one is 40 points each. Leagues are tedious to complete. You’ll play one and never want to do it again, so I’ve got a achievement scored for winning the English league. I have no desire to do that again for every other league in the game. Worse, during a league season there’s also an integrated cup competition. You don’t get an achievement for that one. You don’t get an achievement for doing the double, either. It’s just… frustrating.

Why not give me an achievement for scoring difficult goals? For running the length of the field from one penalty area to the other and scoring? Scoring a free kick (which is shittingly difficult). Reward doing the double in any league. I think sports games have a lot of interesting opportunities to reward unusual behaviour, and Pro Evo falls flat on its arse with its implementation. A little effort for Pro Evo 7 would be appreciated.

I did mention that it was still the best football game ever though, didn’t I?