Flipper the Priest
International
- 15 July 2003
I was messing with J-L Winning Eleven 2008 Club Championship lately. Lovely game, the lower stats database of the japanese teams suits 2008 dna quite well (I'd say way better than the purely western one). Did a quick, plain J-League with Vissel Kobe to unlock the six stars, and between the fanstic atmosphere and the super varied gameplay I already had plenty of fun. Since we are talking about old magazines and whatnot, in a lot of ways this game is more or less what I envisioned for Perfect Striker to be when I looked at the preview pictures back in the days.. exotic, fun and a damn good representation of the game. Among the other things, loved what they did with the keeper; I still like Pes 5/WE9 more, but the improvements compared with Pes 6 are gigantic imo. I did a small compilation of saves I particularly enjoyed about my goalie Enomoto:
Also wanted to share this magnificent header CPU scored against me:
I think I can't remember ever being scored against from such a long distance with an header in Ps2 era (or maybe at all, considering any "modern" football game!).
By the way, once I unlocked the 6 stars, I gave a brief look to ML.. and, to my surprise, I discovered there apparently is Fifa Club World Cup.. or at least a fake version of it!?
it only appears, togheter with all the rest of the asian cups when, after entering the ML mode, you select the Japanese League,.. in the European one apparently the structure is the old usual same. Don't know if it was already well known and I discovered the hot water (noticed a youtuber already talked about it two years ago here), but it's kinda big for me.. already fantasizing about a run to bring it all home or something.
It's also a shame and frankly a bit unexplicable they did such a more accurate representation of the whole JL season to the point of including a version of the World Cup for clubs and never thought about implementing something similar in some of the european chapters. Would have loved to death to have it even and maybe mostly in Ps3 era, where ML depth was at the peak.
The J.League games seem to have little perks like that. I've noticed in JLWE9 that among the fake teams they have all the participants from the 2005 Asian Champions League. Why didn't they do that for Europe?!