Reader Reviews
The PlayStation Experience - amongst other things.
Star Review: Winning Eleven 7 (PS2)
by Chris Cohen
It seems nowadays anything is possible in football. Thanks to Mr. "Can I buy your mother?" Abramovich, the footballing world has been turned upside down as tens of millions of pounds exchanged over the past weeks. It seems with all the craziness in the real world of football, the line between video game representations of football and the reality of the game itself has blurred.
However, one game, or I should say, one series of games has consistently recreated all the joy, pain, frustration and satisfaction of the beautiful game. That series, ladies and gentleman, is the Winning Eleven series.
For those of you who aren't fully aware of the Winning Eleven titles, they are the Japanese mother titles of the Pro Evolution catalogue of games over here. The imaginatively named "7" is, in it's essence, Pro Evolution Soccer 3, with crazy Japanese commentators and impossible to negotiate menus. However, this game has brought more heartache and jubilation into my life than an episode of Friends with a bit-part walk on from Richard Whiteley.
As I tracked my package on UPS online tracking... eagerly awaiting the arrival of the brown capped man and his digital clipboard, I scoured through pages and pages of forums of people who literally haven't slept for the past seven months since it was first officially mentioned by developer Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo (KCET). This game has one of the largest followings for any series of games ever produced. There is one simple reason for this: people who love football love Pro Evolution Soccer. They go hand-in-hand. If you can appreciate a well-timed run being picked out by a fizzing through ball that carves open even the tightest of defences, then you can appreciate why so many people choose this game over its FIFA counterpart.
Let's get down to the game then. What's been added since Pro Evo 2? Well, as is always the way with these updates, KCET leaves you feeling initially hard done by as not a significant amount appears to have been altered on first glance. It's only when you have been playing the game for a good few hours or so that all the beautiful touches that you had wished were in the last PES2 have been painstakingly added. Player animations have been updated with hundreds of new motion captures taken to increase the realism of the game. I remember when playing ISS on the N64 a few years back saying, "Wow, if you squint your eyes, it looks like a real game of football." Now you don't even need to squint.
KCET has also added a FIFA-style "trick button". However, to pull off some of the more eye pleasing tricks, you need to be in control of a very skilful player, and have a good deal of skill yourself. From Zidane's double reverse turn, to crafty stepovers and one touch passes, KCET has truly mastered what other developers couldn't... realism. There's even a sweet little move that allows a ball coming into a player at chest height to be flicked cheekily over the player's head with the outside of his boot, allowing him to turn quickly and mount an attack on the unsuspecting defence. There are also visible injuries now, with players adopting white bandages round mutilated limbs. Handballs have been added (a la Sony's "This Is Football") and referees now even play advantage on occasion, with a little yellow symbol appearing at the top left of your screen to notify you that play will continue. Genius!
One of the few gripes of earlier PES games was the difficulty in pulling off volleys. Whilst slamming home a 20-yard bicycle kick was never that easy in real life, fans of the genre thought that it should, at least on occasion, be a possibility in the game. WE7 delivers yet again with stunning volleys and acrobatics made not only easier to produce, but more likely to score...
The game itself has differed only slightly. Master League still exists, but this time the league is divided into four regions, each with two divisions. Transfers are still present and negotiations must take place before you can sign your latest million-dollar striker. Training mode has been improved on, and there are now five levels of each training exercise, be it free kicks, a quick one-two then shot, dribbling around cones, passing etc, etc. The player edit mode has also been improved, with a huge range of facial features for you to tinker with.
The newest edition to the series however is the WEN point system. I'm guessing this name will be changed for the European release, but it basically allows you to win points by completing cups, doing well in training etc and then spend your hard earned... umm... Wens... on new kits, hidden teams, new player attributes and facial hair - how odd... but how addictive...
In short [ha! -Ed], Konami has done it again. It always looks as though there is nothing Konami can do to improve on this already unparalleled football experience, but every eight months or so, they come along and prove us wrong. If this were a footballer it would be Gianfranco Zola. No matter what team you support or indeed whether you like football at all, you can't help but be astounded by his technical mastery and beautiful football.
It still delivers that same buzz when you bury a low drive into beyond the outreached hands of Fabien Barthez. That same head-in-hands disappointment as you let your guard down in the dying minutes of a nil-nil draw with Brazil to let the perfectly recreated Ronaldo slam home a 20-yard drive - it just delivers all this in more style. Go on... buy the game, score a goal against your mate then do that annoying "I'm the best and you're the worst" dance in front of him. You know you want to.