drigOrange
League 1
For me, what I have never understood, even to this day, is how PES reached its absolute peak in terms of quality. I’m referring to the PS2 and Xbox 360 generation.
Winning Eleven 2008, especially the J.League version, came very close to perfection.
Fluid gameplay. Challenging CPU. Several game modes. Dozens of stadiums. Rain, snow — everything was there.
When I saw PES 2008 and 2009 on the next-gen platforms (PS3, Xbox 360, and PC), I honestly thought they were some of the worst things I had ever seen.
The player models were bizarre, with huge shorts that made the players look like surfers, and the 360-degree body turns were completely awkward and unnatural. It is almost unbelievable that Konami managed to produce something of such poor quality after having reached such a high standard.
That version, which was released exclusively for the Xbox 360, is the one Konami should have continued using and building upon.
And that is exactly what happened: the essence of the past never came back.
That is why we are still playing these games to this day, whether through emulators or on the original console hardware.
Do you know what happened in 2007 and 2008?
I switched to FIFA. That was when I became a deserter.
I had never, ever played FIFA before, but on PC, I actually enjoyed it because it offered a more realistic Career Mode, the possibility of using mods, and gameplay that had improved considerably — even copying Konami’s exact control scheme.
The interesting thing is that I never owned an Xbox console, so I only know the Xbox versions of PES through YouTube.
Back in mid-2007, that version looked like the basic foundation that everyone expected Konami to further develop and refine for the next generation.
Winning Eleven 2008, especially the J.League version, came very close to perfection.
Fluid gameplay. Challenging CPU. Several game modes. Dozens of stadiums. Rain, snow — everything was there.
When I saw PES 2008 and 2009 on the next-gen platforms (PS3, Xbox 360, and PC), I honestly thought they were some of the worst things I had ever seen.
The player models were bizarre, with huge shorts that made the players look like surfers, and the 360-degree body turns were completely awkward and unnatural. It is almost unbelievable that Konami managed to produce something of such poor quality after having reached such a high standard.
That version, which was released exclusively for the Xbox 360, is the one Konami should have continued using and building upon.
And that is exactly what happened: the essence of the past never came back.
That is why we are still playing these games to this day, whether through emulators or on the original console hardware.
Do you know what happened in 2007 and 2008?
I switched to FIFA. That was when I became a deserter.
I had never, ever played FIFA before, but on PC, I actually enjoyed it because it offered a more realistic Career Mode, the possibility of using mods, and gameplay that had improved considerably — even copying Konami’s exact control scheme.
The interesting thing is that I never owned an Xbox console, so I only know the Xbox versions of PES through YouTube.
Back in mid-2007, that version looked like the basic foundation that everyone expected Konami to further develop and refine for the next generation.
