Initial signs from Winning Eleven in Japan indicated Konami's series had continued to evolve, but in subtler ways than the previous game, which redressed the alarming change in the game's balance while retaining the bits that made Pro Evolution Soccer 2 better than the first.

There is little point discussing the reasons for PES' superiority since day one, though it is worth pointing out that the feat was accomplished without analogue control, without motion capture and without comprehensive use of the right control stick.

Even what FIFA brought to right stick ¨C off the ball and on ¨C was always to be found in PES, but there it was in the form of that intuitive, simple to master, automated system of context sensitivity.

It would be fair enough to expect that EA Canada's new first-touch control would prove to be another FIFA feature that did little more than make laborious and unpredictable what you could always do in PES. It's not, though it can initially feel that way. We've given both games enough time to appreciate where they stand, and while most people online are still too shy to experiment, we can tell you that the first touch system has lived up to our expectations and helped turn FIFA 2005 into the best football game of all.

The first touch system isn't yet as complex as we expect it will be in future games. As with PES, results are context-sensitive. What your player does is dependent on the height of the ball, how he is moving and his position relative to others. Yes, it sounds very familiar and you can do much of the same stuff in PES3, not to mention 4, but in this already more visually realistic game, first touch has helped to make the passing game what it should be. You can break open defenses here like no other game, and you will feel as deserving of your accomplishments as you would elsewhere. And in a game that finally makes scoreless matches a common thing, the significance of this for gameplay satisfaction cannot be understated.

There's more that makes FIFA special. Manual passing, executed while holding the left trigger, makes the game look more life-like than any other sports game ever. Thankfully, computer players react as they should, changing responsibility for receiving passes just as you intended, or even beyond what you had envisiaged, and opening the game wide open when assisted passes would close it down. Again, you can find this feature in PES but the control method is unnecessarily difficult and the results less impressive.

It's a common saying that PES makes you feel you deserved your goals. It's true that FIFA still has that sense of detachment can make scoring against the computer more of a hand-out for intelligent play than something you actually did, but rarely against human opponents where goalkeeper control allows players to deal with the shot and avoids the guaranteed goal.

You can even score with the right control stick in a moment of first-touch genius. In fact, there's little you can't do with the right stick and, combined with the rest of the controls, football finally looks and plays the way it does in real life.

Those with Football Manager 2005 can also import their matches and play them out in FIFA. With FIFA 2005 this feature now gets the level of player immersion warranted for such a video game partnership, as the arcade-style FIFA of old is replaced by a deep, many featured experience whose popularity is bound to extend as players become accustomed to the differences in the new game.

During online play, laggy matches are rare but they do require extra attention to player control as FIFA 2005 matches PES4 with the degree to which you can input controls ahead of time. This should not be mistaken for a restiction of motion capture ¨C new technology at EA Canada has allowed the game to respond as quickly as hand-animation always has. A PES-style action cancel button would have been helpful in this situation, but even in PES it's not always effective.

The camera angles in FIFA 2005 can add another dimension of realism to play, thanks to the implementation of the broadcast cam. However, this view does not suit single-screen multiplayer matches involving more than two players. Without a system link feature, here the game is a little lacking and online play also prevents more than one person playing on the same team.