The battle for football gaming supremacy reaches fever pitch later this week, when the next installment of Pro-Evolution Soccer is released. PES2010 arrives in shops on Friday just weeks after its main rival, FIFA10, and has the usual bunch of updates and tweaks to the formula to ensure that it remains at the top of the gaming league.

Earlier this year, Umbro’s England kit was made available for players of PES2009 to download onto their consoles at the same time as it was revealed to the public, and proved to be a massive success around the world with hundreds of thousands of downloads taking place. We’ve done a breakdown of the stats looked into the breakdown of the stats and after the UK, the kit was surprisingly most popular in France, Italy and Spain. Perhaps they wanted to try and beat an England team in the current kit!

PES2010 will feature the iconic Umbro England kit from the start, Umbro footballs and Speciali boots on the feet of players such as John Terry and David James. We were lucky enough here at Umbro to get the chance to play the game ahead of its launch, and we’ve been impressed with what we’ve seen so far. Graphically, the players look incredibly realistic, whilst the introduction of a 360 degree control system has improved things on the pitch, making the game flow much better. The addition of an official UEFA Europa League section alongside the existing UEFA Champions League mode also means you can play for the big prizes with all the official music, balls and kit for an authentic experience – could come in handy if your team gets knocked out early on.

We haven’t really had chance to test the online or management capacities yet, but there’s plenty of talk from Konami, the game’s producers, to suggest that there’ll also be improvements in these areas. All in all, it adds up to a great year for Pro Evo fans.

As regular readers of the blog are no doubt aware, we have some big fans of Pro Evolution Soccer in the office.  So we got very excited when we got the fist renders of the new Umbro Speciali boots in the game (below).  Konami send over the designs to check that they look realistic to the actual boots.  The boot will be available as part of a wider DLC (downloadable content pack) that will be available in November (date TBC). The DLC will download automatically to users whose consoles are connected to the Xbox Live / PSN networks.

Thanks to everyone that entered our Pro Evolution Soccer Goals Competition over the last two weeks. Here are the finalists. You can vote for your favourite below and the one with the most votes at midnight on Thursday 2nd July wins an Umbro shirt of their choice.

The next round and next chance to win a shirt will close on Friday 10th July. Pease title your movies with ‘Umbro PES2009 July’. Good luck!

Goal 1 The7thAdidas

Goal 2 SuperAdidas17

Goal 3 kingrise2ati

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Congratulations to RangerChalk4 on winning our PES 2009 competition for the last two weeks with the goal below.  Don’t forget, you can enter this weeks competition to win an Umbro shirt of your choice by recording your goals and uploading them to youtube with ‘Umbro PES2009 June2′ in the title.

Thanks to everyone that entered our Pro Evolution Soccer Goals Competition over the last two weeks.   Here are the finalists.  You can vote for your favourite below and the one with the most votes at midnight on Thursday 18th June wins an Umbro shirt of their choice. 

The next round and next chance to win a shirt will close on Friday 26th June.  Pease title your movies ith ‘Umbro PES2009 June2′.  Good luck! 

Goal 1 RangerChalk4

Goal 2 swordfishakanose

Goal 3 The7thAdidas

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Its Pro Evo goals competition time again.  Thanks to everyone that entered this week.  We are trying to make the judging process a little fairer this week.  I have picked my best three and added a voting system to this post.  Please vote for your favourite below.  The goal with the most votes on Thursday 4th June at midnight will win the shirt of their choice.

The contenders are:

Goal 1: legendkiller360

Goal 2: Sighchev

Goal 3: jamesmodi (goal 4 – volley top right)

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The next round to be in with a chance of winning an Umbro shirt will be judged on Friday 12th June 2009.  Please tag your goals this week with ‘Umbro PES2009 June’ so we can find them!  I have also created a youtube group where I will also update information of the winners.

It’s Friday afternoon and it’s Pro Evo goals competition time again!  We have spent some time going through all of the entries today and some excellent goals among them.  I have had some assistance from our resident Pro Evo expert (and also sometimes product designer) Lee this week in judging the goals.  We both decided that this week’s shirt goes to youabby for this Aguero 360 display. 

Special mention though to kingrise2ati for this compilation, some of these goals are pure class!

Also to legendkiller360 for this Rooney free kick.  We have no idea how you managed to curl the ball like that!

Lee also had a go himself (although this isn’t entered into the competition of course!).  He managed to get his keeper to score this goal.  What you can’t see is that he had actually put Wayne Rooney in nets!

Thanks to everyone that entered and as always we welcome your feedback on these goals.  The next competition winner will be announced on the 29th May.  Please tag your goals this week with ‘Umbro PES2009 May2’ so we can find them!

Well after an exciting morning of watching all of the Pro Evolution goals entered into our Pro Evo Competition over the last two weeks, we have eventually decided on a winner!

Congratulations to NeoKubrick for this awesome compilation of goals.  It was the Rhonaldiho flick goal which caught our attention and won the competition.  Although, either of the two free kicks would have also been worthy winners.  A shirt of your choice will be on its way to you soon NeoKubrick!

The standard of the competition was really high and I think we have to give a mention to some of the others that almost made it.  This one with Marlon King scoring for Hull against Barcelona is amazing.  We have been trying to work out how you volleyed from a header, well done to leomac5!

This goal is also worth a mention.  I am not sure what the keeper is doing so far off his line but it’s great vision by ScouseLFC09!

We are going to continue with this competition with the next winner being announced on 15th May.  This time please could you add ‘Umbro PES2009 May’ into the movie title so that it is easy for use to find.

I am going to try and find some kind of voting system for this blog (Wordpress – anyone got any recommendations?) so that next time you can vote on the winner.

In the meantime let us know what you think of the competition, perhaps we should extend it to include goals from the park / back garden?

As you probably know we worked with Konami to release the England kit in Pro-Evolution Soccer 2009 on the 28th March, the same day as the ‘real’ kit was released at Wembley against Slovakia.  The download was a first to be offered outside of the transfer windows and it seems to have been favourably received.  Some of the tweets:

New England kit free to download for Pro Evo 2009

New England kit free to download for Pro Evo 2009: As you conjure up enough cash to prise the recession-proof ne..

Check out notw.co.uk/go/gaming for my exclusive pic of the new England kit for Pro Evo 9. Download it for FREE on PS3, Xbox 360 and PC.

@AdamWoodyatt Apparently you can download the new England kit on PES09 as soon as the game ends on Saturday.

We like Pro-Evo and we wanted to try and do something fun with it.   We love the goals that people create in Pro-Evo (see examples on youtube) and they seem popular so we thought that holding a weekly competition for the best goals created in Pro-Evo would be good.  So that’s what we’re going to do.

How to enter:

1. Record the goals!  As it’s quite hard to get the goals in video format from the Xbox and Wii and Playstation3 and other games platforms you can just shoot the replay of your goals using your mobile phone (if it has video mode) or camera – we’re not too bothered about the quality of the video, it’s the quality of the goals that matter.

2. Upload to youtube.  When you’re uploading use the tag / keyword “Umbro PES2009″ in the title so we can find it.

3. Once every two weeks we’ll post links to the best from the blog here and we will judge a winner.

4. When we put up the next weeks goals we’ll announce the winner from the previous week.

5. The winner will receive any current Umbro football shirt of their choice.

What do you think?

We’ll start this today and the first winner will be announced next Friday 1st May.  From then on the competition will run every other Friday.

Here are some of the best we (Alex) created in the office:

Virtual England

In amongst all the excitement around the launch of the New England kit, one thing was bothering me. It was going to be at least 24 hours from kick off before I would be able to download the new kit onto my virtual England team in Pro Evo 2009.

Sad I know.

I have bored people rigid, in the office and at home, with talk of what an exciting moment this would be for gamers, and it quickly became one of my favourite bits of the campaign.

I was very lucky to be present at Wembley last Saturday to watch a Rooney inspired England thrash Slovakia, but if I’m honest I would have loved to have been in front of my XBOX 360 as soon as the final whistle blew downloading the kit update.

A notch up on the sad-o-meter.

The next day on the train back north I planned how I could convince my wife that despite being in London on her birthday, I had to ‘work’ on a Sunday night. My ‘work’ would of course be playing Pro Evo as England, in the new kit, for as long as I could get away with it.

I arrived back early afternoon, played the dutiful husband for six hours then made my move. Sat in front of my XBOX 360 (albeit 24 hours later than I’d have liked) I downloaded the New England kit patch, the process was smoother than the Rooney’s finish for the 2nd goal the day before.

Still sad, but now not bothered.

The time had come to play my first game of Pro Evo as England in the new kit. I was brave and decided to go straight into a game on Xbox Live, me against someone called ‘The Destroyer’, England v Portugal.

Everything went according to plan an early goal from Terry put me 1-0 up, my virtual 11 clearly benefiting from the new confident look. Lampard struck the 2nd and then a moment of brilliance from Walcott put Rooney through to score a wonderful 3rd. The rout was completed by Gerrard and another Lampard strike and England had won 5-0.

Sad?

Probably but I’ll go off the scale when I work out how to share the replay of my Rooney goal on Youtube.