I don't understand the love that PES 6 tends to get from a lot of players. The game is bugged beyond belief:
- Lobbing doesn't work
- You can't score any free kick (with the shot button at least), yet you can score every third corner kick or so, when really it should be more or less the other way around
- Long shots are ridiculously accurate and when you compare how helpless they make the goalie with the robotically perfect saves of the free kicks, it really makes you wonder whether the goalkeeper is actually the same person in both situations
- The pass-then-shoot-without-moving bug allows you to score about 80% of time whenever you perform that trick, in fact it was banned in multiplayer in some leagues
- You can just run around the penalty box, wait for some space and then shoot from one of the edges of the box and that often results in a goal as well, it may actually be just as effective as the previous method
You can easily win most matches on the highest difficulty by 3-5 goals just by abusing those features. PES 6 is a fun arcade game, until you get bored of it. In terms of realism, it's really no better than the PC edition FIFA 07, which obviously has its own problems (also stupid goalies - see below).
PES 4 is the best PS2-era PES for me, followed by PES 5. Both have unbalanced free kicks though - in the former game, you can hardly ever score, whereas in the latter you score 90% of the time. Repeating Sinisa Mihajlovic's feat of scoring a free-kick-only hat-trick is really no problem in this game. It's still unrealistic, but more fun than PES 6. It's better to err on this side, in my opinion anyway.
Stupid goalies were a real problem to me in some editions of PES. The goals I conceded in PES 2008 and PES 2010 due to my goalkeeper's lack of brain really made me rage sometimes, and so did the way the GK rushes the strikers in PES 5 (when you press L1, that is), uncovering the goal and letting the opponent score for free.