Brought to you by pelaajalehti.com. I would really appreciate anyone who rips this text and copy/pastes it somewhere, to mention that.
Flew to an undisclosed location in Europe to play PES5 on Friday night.
First up. I haven’t touched PES4 since the release of Winning Eleven 8 Liveware Evolution. To my mind, at first LE was a slight disapointtment. I thought it was way too difficult to hold on to the ball and it was very difficult to dribble around players. After a few weeks of constant playing, you got used to it and now the game seems near perfect. No going back to earlier versions for me. I love it. If only one could score from free kicks and corner kicks.
The reason I’m saying that I haven’t played PES4 at all since WE8LE is that you know that I’m comparing WE9/PES5 to WE8LE and NOT PES4, of which I don’t remember much of in terms of nuances. I played a few matches of PES4 now that I got back and while the main menu looks totally different to PES5, the ML menus are very similair. Gameplay does feel markedly different.
Bad news first. I was not allowed to distribute new screenshots/photos I took due to various legal reasons and the fact that Konami wants to unveil something at the PlayStation Festival in Japan related to WE9. Also, the negotiations regarding club teams Are ongoing for PES5. Chelsea, Arsenal and Porto were licensed in the version I played and the jerseys looked great. The players faces are certainly improved over WE8LE. Gilberto Silva, “Cesc” Fabregas and Senderos for example looked superb. The faces are very accurate.
Sorry about no photos of players, stats etc, I will post some when I get the okay. But, yes, Fortune’s stats are finally lower and Lampard’s are much, much improved…and the boy Zlatan’s much improved as was Robben’s. My man, Liverpool’s defensive rock, Sami Hyypiä Finally looks like himself too. He’s stats are realistically low too. Have you seen him playing in the Finnish national team? We obviously need Carragher alongside him to perform.
Btw, Gunners-fans, I want to know what you think about Viera leaving? Getting that much money for a 29-year old player who put in stellar service for nine years, is free to try out new things in my opinion and I don’t think anyone can feel betrayed that he left. He gave nine years, that’s certainly enough. Were does this leave Arsenal’s midfield…I SO wish Edu would still be in the team now. I saw Cesc Fabregas playing in Helsinki a few years ago at the under 16 World Cup and he was amazing even then, but he isn’t Viera, at least not yet. Anyway, like Snoop said “back to the lecture at hand”.
Ok, so earlier in the week I got the call, on Friday I flew to an undisclosed location to play what I thought would be the near-final version of Winning Eleven 9. I was able to spend a good 3-4 hours with the code. To my surprise the code I got to play was the very first “draft” of Pro Evolution Soccer 5 instead. So everything was in English, you had your 60Hz option and some Japanese left from the translation. So for all intents and purposes this was WE9. However, I couldn’t find no Nippon Challenge mode. An image of the main menu of WE9 has been posted at various PES-sites and the Nippon Challenge is the bottom option. This was removed in PES5 but other than that, the interface is *exactly* the same as WE9.
Now keep in mind this code was not final and even small changes can effect a WE/PES game a lot. IF, like me, you’ve played WE8LE a lot, then PES5 will be a déjà vu. The interface, the layout, how the Master League looks, is nigh on similair. There’s hardly any changes in that sense. This feels like a repeat. Not a bad thing, but I would’ve expected a whole lot more. I’m really curious what the Japanese consumers and games media will say about this. Then again, I only played one match in ML and didn’t check the various menus, so I don’t know what kind of changes have been done.
First up, the main menu has, which we already know, the Network mode, which I couldn’t try out. But it’s been no secret for months that PES5 will have online gameplay on the PS2 in Europe. The real kicker is an very funky option in the Options screen that I briefly saw. Seabass did hint about this in interview I did with him last fall, but it’s been very quiet since on this topic. Now it frustrates me a lot, but I cannot say what this option is since it’s a feature Konami will unveil at the PlayStation Festival (apparently). Konami's swore me not to tell and I'd probably get Seabass's hit squad after me, if I told you.
Needless to say, as soon as I can tell what it is, I will. I will be really pissed off if someone scoops me to it.
Ok so the match menus are pretty much the same as before but one exeption is that teams are divided into Euro 1, Euro 2, Asia/Oseania, America, South Africa. So there are plenty of new (I think, I don’t exactly remember) national teams like Costa Rica, Ecuador, Tunisia (Jaidi!), Chile and so on. Not exactly sure if this is a very exciting feature, but there’s certainly a dozen new national teams available. It was hard to tell if there were new club teams since the names were the usual mumbo-jumbo. Didn’t feel like there was new club teams, but I’m not sure. Again, compared to WE8LE.
I didn’t find Santos or Robinho, but this will probably fixed for the final version of PES5 but not in WE9 due to timing. A nice thing is that all the team emblems in the team selection screens are much bigger than before, so you can actually make out the things. As I browsed through the La Liga and Serie A selections, you can easily tell the teams from their emblems. Small, but nice detail.
Customizing options and editing looked to be exactly like in WE8LE, but switching players from team to another, was a tad easier. Still don’t know why some players cannot be transferred from their national teams into a club team. Gotta ask Seabass. Boots can be edited in a separate editor. Looked like only Adidas models were available. There’s things like bracelets you can put on players wrists and these neck-warmer things. So yeah, there’s more stuff in the editors. You can choose from various running, celebration, free kick and penalty animations! Interface is the same as in WE8LE.
On to the gameplay. Some players now have the “Middle Shoot” special skill or it was called something like that. Lampard has it, Adriano of course has it, Beckham has it (who played a great pre-season match for Real Madrid lastnight), Gerrard has it, Veron has it and so on. Way back in the days of PS one WE-games I remember Edgar Davids having a super high shot rating and we used to try to score with him from like 40 to 30 metres from goal. Maybe not so realistic, but simply put, fun gameplay.
You can now unleash stunning piledriver shots from far outside the box, if you got a player with the Middle shoot skill, space around you, time your running and kick right. I tried this with Lampard, when I found an opening a good 30-35 metres (I think, could be less) outside the goal and struck a stunning shot that hit the underside of the crossbar and went in. I cannot state enough how cool this was. The ball felt heavier than in WE8LE and it traveled with greater speed. The goalies reaction’s were great too. Didn’t feel like a cheap goal that the goalie gava away.
I played my first match with Real Madrid against Inter on four stars. Guess who scored first? Of course, ex-Real Madrid man Esteban Cambiasso with a sweetly struck left foot strike to the bottom left corner of the goal from a superb Veron pass. I played about 6-7 matches against the CPU on 4-stars and while I was able to dominate, I had a difficult time carving open the defense and score. I managed to equalize with an Raul volley, but at that point I was down 2-1 after a superb Adriano header, which utilized new heading animation where the player really puts his body weight behind the ball…looks really cool. The defenders also head the ball out of their own box in very realistic looking ways.
The gameplay is a step up from WE8LE, but similair. Physics play a big part. The pace feels slower and more deliberate. At first it feels difficult to hold on to the ball and dribble around players. Really difficult. You probalby get used to it and there’s much more contact between the players, just as in WE8LE. What I mean is that you don’t have to press X to rough and tackle players since just running alongside them or against them causes fouls. Players might lose their balance, spin, move on or just shake off the hit. There was quite a few nice new animations when a player is tackled. Many times when I was tackled, pressing diagonally resulted in a nice hop over the tackle, or my player rode the tackle and managed to keep the ball and sped on.
The players feel much more alive. AI-controlled Veron kept dribbling and stopping, doing step overs. And when I controlled a skilled player like Ronaldo or Fernando Torres (hmm) and moved around the pitch, the players do various types of dribbles far more often than before. There’s more “small” passing animations too.
AI felt good though it takes umpteen matches to really know. I was impressed how Inter played against my Madrid with their slick passing and slow build up play. The CPU teams FELT like a threat which they don’t feel like in WE8LE.
Someone on the Evo Web boards said the animation looked a bit odd in places and I gotta agree. It looks a bit off with some of the kicks and runs, but there’s loads of new animations for various situations too, so you have that on the positive side. The animation’s are definitely the big change in the game. The gameplay feels more organic through the varied animation, though I felt the ball bounces a bit too much even with players like Del Piero. This was something that bothered me in WE8 at the start.
Goalkeepers…tough to say. They got new animations, can throw the ball almost to the halfway line a’la Peter Schmeichel and Harald Schumacher. Looks cool. My impression was that the goalies spill the ball as often as in WE8LE, but then a few times I had a clean shot in a one on one situation and the goalie just saved the ball without spilling it. After my session I felt the goalies were better than in WE8LE and they dealt better with goal-scramble situations.
Other small details. The HUD is very much configurable and you can have the players staming bar underneath their names, so you can tell how tired they are. Throws are better too. When using the stronger throw, the animation isn’t as frustratingly long as in WE8LE and you can, the same way when shooting, adjust the power of the throw by pressing down the button. This works both for X and O throws. Same with passing.
I really didn’t know what the Memorial Match feature was when I read some of the Japanese previews, but now I know and it’s a feature that’s been long, long overdue. One of those features that EA, Midway and Visual Concepts know you have to have in your sports game…player stats! Now I just have to mention that when I met Seabass last fall, I was telling them we were all wanting a feature like that
For real now. It seems each Option File can be named, so it’s basically your profile. So you go to Exhibition Match and you can select a Memorial Match, which is and Exhibition Match, but your stats get loaded from the memory card and Player 2’s stats get loaded…from memory card 2. So basically, this is about friends taking their memory cards with the option files to your house when you play the game, so you can keep track of your wins, losses and draws. So you play the match and after that you can check out “aggregate stats” where it lists your wins, losses and draws. It also has average rates for things like goals scored, total shots on goal, penalties, free kicks, offsides, fouls, cards and total possession. It’s a bit clumsy in design, but it’s a very, very welcome feature. The problem being that I usually play with two mates, so we are going to have to swap memory cards after every match, which is a bit risky. But I love this feature and I will love watching my played games stat go beyond a few hundred. Sad, but hey!
So yeah, while overall the looks in terms of presentation like WE8LE, there is lots of neat changes. I think we all agree that WE8LE doesn’t require many changes in it’s gameplay, it’s about as perfect as it’s gonna get on current generation. Hmm, which reminds of the next-gen PES…more about that later.
And that’s it. I’ll be honest and say that I have to save most of the details and new features for our magazine Pelaaja’s August issue.
Special shout out to WE fans at Evo Web, Visual Concepts and at Future Publishing, you know who you are!
