T-minus 6 days… Comments Off
Now I’m not saying it’s definite that I’ll be getting the PS2 version of PES2008 and playing it for the rest of the PES year and swapping my ML career back and forth between it and the PSP, and all of that malarkey. But it is almost definite.
I’m still playing the PSP version every day with great enjoyment. Another few days should confirm for me whether or not my first impressions—that this is the quintessence of PES, and the game that the next-gen version should have been—are lasting impressions.
I’m going to give it until Tuesday of next week and then make the final decision. That’s another 6 days, and it’ll make it 11 days in total that I’ve played the PSP version. That’s plenty of time to determine whether the last-gen version has the depth and longevity that I need. (If I decide against it then I won’t have a PES game at all this year.)
I disagree with some people—on PESfan and elsewhere—who say that PES2008 on the PSP is basically just PES6 with new box art. I notice dozens of differences—some subtle, some not-so-subtle.
For me the biggest changes have come in shooting and in AI aggressiveness. There are at least as many differences as there have been between successive games in the past. I was never one who complained too much (really!) about the changes, or alleged lack of them, between PES4/PES5, PES5/PES6. Yes, I can see how many people thought that each of those games were only minor updates to each other; that the cumulative changes were not big enough to justify whole new games; that we were being taken for a ride by the corporate whores of Konami. Maybe we were. But it was a ride I very much wanted to be on at the time.
The same goes for PES2008 on PSP (and, presumably, PS2). Yes, in many ways it is PES6 with a lick of paint and new menus. But I played PES6 on this console just last week, and the game is different—different enough, in my opinion, to warrant the new name.
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An acknowledgement of yesterday’s crass mistake: I said that I was in a 12-team division in the PSP version. Of course, Division 2 in the PSP Master League is an 8-team division, not 12. My bad.
I don’t know how I made such a mistake. I have been paying attention to the game’s menu screens, honest. Perhaps it was because I finished rock bottom in my first ML season and I’m not doing too much better in my second season: maybe I want there to be 12 teams in the division and for me not to look so bad? Who knows.