Digital Sportspage Blog

All sorts of impressions up at the Winning Eleven Blog. It’s worth a look if you want a lot of information on this title. First impressions seem positive. A quick rundown:

- More deliberate game speed, much more simulation than arcade style gameplay
- Much better balance between speedy dribblers and defenders
- Reminded players a lot of PES 5 (aka Winning Eleven 9).
- Addition of “Become a Legend” mode, which is essentially Fantastia mode from the J-League version of the game. Also, there is an online version of this, though it might be you and your buddies against the CPU, not human versus human multiplayer.
- Much better ball physics
- Rain effects gameplay better
- Better grass textures
- Better manual passing with right stick
- Skill moves now done with left stick/analog pad
- As for edit mode, I’ll quote the PESFan report:

PES 2009 improves on this again with the return of emblem editing, which will make the team selection screen much easier for me! You can either use the Pixel Paint method unveiled in the press release, or you can import a jpg file off the hard drive for the badge. The kit editing has also been improved upon with new template designs, as well as the ability to import jpg files off the hard drive for sponsor and manufacturer logos with enough room for 40 team’s images to be saved. There’s enough room on the shirts for one badge and one ‘logo’ design to be displayed at once so the people in the editing section should be able to make some top notch designs! Boot editing misses out again but with a plethora of designs and colours to choose from, PES players with a boot fetish should be satisfied with the amount on offer. The standard player editing options still exist, as do the team options. One added extra is the ability to import your own crowd chants, so all the scousers can finally replicate famous European nights with ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ being belted out by the home fans in the dying minutes of a game.

And with all this good news, it looks like EA now has the exclusive license for La Liga. Though there’s no information as to whether that affects PES 2009.