Re: PES 2009 News, Discussion and Rumours
I just had a session to see what this is about. I have bigger issues with the toe poke that goes at shoulder height passed the keeper or the sliding shot that can be executed with immense power. But I thoroughly enjoyed my match Arsenal vs Newcastle finished 2-1 to me.
Why do people hate pes2008 so much? I mean sure it has it's flaws and lack of license but it is still a great game. I mean in one highlight Owen latched onto a loose ball that he slipped passed Almunia but Clichy was on hand to slide about a meter away from the goal line. In another instance Van Persie had a shot blocked that rolled towards the middle of the field, I immediately noticed Flamini lurking in an open space about 35+meters from the goal and ran onto the loose ball to give it an almighty thump without stopping to control. The ball whizzed at a magnificent pace towards the goal but swerved a few feet wide. THIS IS FOOTBALL MAN!!
You just described football in the broadest of senses. The devil is in the details.
Think about the differences between, say, FIFA 99 and ISS pro evo 2: Everybody agreed that the animations and graphics of FIFA were better but that the graphically inferior ISS Pro evo 2 had far better gameplay.
I think that is incomplete.
It's sort of like someone, commenting on playing a recent build of PES2009, saying "it's alot more fluid this year". It has absolutely no meaning. Most of us can sort of infer some meaning into the description, but does it tell us that the game is any good? The ultimate fluid football game is if the players just slide around without even moving, always moving and never standing still. Now that's fluid.
Why not just say "animations are better linked together this year, which means that you don't get apparent transitions between different actions", or something like that, if that is what you mean by "fluid".
But anyways, about your comment.
What do you mean when you say that everybody thought FIFA's animations were better? Did they have a higher resolution, so that they contained many animation frames and thus were alot more even when played in slow-motion?
Like I said, it's not just animations, it's how the players move and interact with eachother and the ball.
Take a look at this video for example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3aOoafgujQ
First of all, I would dispute anyone who thinks those animations are nice. They go from stationary to moving quickly in no-time, the ball is constantly being shifted to adapt to the move the player is doing, feet are sliding like crazy. They have the "ISS" problem, in that the players can move the ball in different directions without actually touching it with the feet. When they turn they don't need to use their legs to help balance their weight as the centrifugal force should be unbalancing them. Nice animations? There's so many essential animations missing for a realistic experience it's not even funny.
Sure, they have a couple of "drag ball behind leg when turning" moves, but that doesn't qualify it as nice. Just look @1:24 in the video as the player in white is running to the right of the screen, and then turns downwards. It looks like he might aswell be running without the ball, since he doesn't hit it once when turning. It's not nice animations, because they don't work.
ISS PES2, which I've played alooot on the PS1, was far better animated than FIFA99. Players weren't sliding around, players were paced well, etc. They had the basic movements down alot more solidly than FIFA99. WHen a player turned with the ball, he would first shuffle the ball with his leg in the direction he was turning, and then would also push into the ground to push his body in the direction aswell. When players were running you could feel each foot as it was planted into the ground, in FIFA99 they just drift around, they don't bob up and down as they transfer weight from one leg to the next, and there's no sense of actually watching an actuall human, so the experience is inferior.
FIFA games also had big problems with the ball physics, ball speeds (shots were sometimes absurdly fast), ball trajectories, there were very little randomizing for accuracy and such, and if you took a shot from any angle or point you could guarantee that the ball would pass within 3 meters from a post or bar. No misshits, no realistic thinking.
In other words, the ball wasn't interacting with the players realistically, it was mechanical.
All this I mentioned as being part of the gameplay (kinetics, ball physics, ball-human interactions etc). Animations in themselves can be sweet-looking, but if the foot isn't touching the ball when you're turning, or is constantly automatically moved along the ground to be in the "correct" place for the player to be able to turn...
