@slamsoze: If I recall it properly, Eddie Johnson was also a very promising young player on a retro-PES game, probably circa PES6. Aris Salonika's management was playing too much retro-PES at that point...sounds like Brazilian team Coritiba in 2017, when they joined Anderson and the mighty Baumjohann on the same roster, two classic PES5 wonderkids. That particular experience was so successful that the team ended up relegated...
-
After my absence I've been reading the thread and your story is really interesting
@shareq01. A very young guy who grew up with modern football games but who has found more enjoyment on games released almost before he was born. It is easy for us old farts to adore these retro titles because we lived on that era and realized how much more impressive the PES series particularly was back then compared to how decadent it is now; seeing younger folks like you and
@ryudek playing these classics gives me hope for the future of retro-PES. One day the old farts will be gone and someone will have to carry this torch...
-
Thanks to
@Flipper the Priest's suggestion and tireless help (
@geeeeee himself had first told me about this a while ago), I have...ahem...unlocked the full potential of my PS2. On the glorious debut of its now enlightened version, I had a session that is only partially relevant for our retro-PES "temple", comprised of Football Kingdom and PES1. I had played the former using the emulator but its performance was horrible compared to how smooth it is supposed to run; as for the latter, shockingly, I had never played it. My first-ever PS2 game was PES2 and, frankly, probably the reason I didn't get PES1 was because I was still completely immersed in my beloved ISS Pro Evo, which I remember dominated most of my time dedicated to the PS1 - my PS1 was more of a ISS PE Machine than anything else really. Only very recently, thanks to
@Meazza84's wonderful videos, I witnessed how interesting the game looked - even in our retro-PES circle, this game is rarely if ever mentioned - and made me want to play it. So I went for an Iberian derby, me of course as Portugal vs. Spain. So far I played just this match but I loved it, even if I lost 1-4 (at halftime, Spain had 11 shots to Portugal's...0). It is to early to give an informed opinion; yet so far, what I like the most about it is the pace, which seems significantly slower than PES2 - similar to that of ISS PE, which is a great thing. All I could think about while I was playing was how the hell were these magicians able to create something so brilliant 20 goddamn years ago. It's astonishing. This is the first PS2 PES of the golden era I can say for sure that nostalgia doesn't influence my judgement at all, for I played this for the first time in almost 2021; I just jumped in on the action and was immediately hooked, sold on the game. That's the magic of retro-PES right here.
As for Football Kingdom, you will excuse my off-topic, but I had to mention it too for I had a magnificent session with it, playing it for the first time without that horrible lag of the emulator. It's indeed frenetic, arcade-ish action - the perfect palate cleanser for a guy who has been playing nonstop the gritty PES5 for a long while now -, it's buggy (though impressive for that which could have been the inaugural iteration of a series...) but some things are jaw-droppingly impressive, the player animations and ball physics coming to mind. Curiously, it is the kind of game that would, in a matter of years, be easily able to capture the attention of the modern football gaming fun (at the expense of PES and FIFA) because it is, first and foremost, and borrowing
@Saint Angelo's perspective, really fun, sprinkled with some realism here and there.
@breezy: Big Portuguese clubs spent more than a decade spending millions each season on foreign talent, bringing in dozens every year - one of the reasons why they're all technically bankrupt nowadays. Naturally only few of those talents clinched a role on their rosters, while the rest was typically loaned out in ridiculous deals such as Adu being sent to Belenenses. Even if he were the Next Pelé, what would he be able to do in a mid-table Portuguese side playing alongside mediocre talent?
) and once you want to aim, keep down for low center PK and ssssshūto? or sssssshutō? 
