Winning Eleven 9 : First Impressions - NO QUESTIONS HERE

Animations great, new gameplay seems ok, some really good touches. Feels a bit crap going back to last year's kits, but that's Konami. Selection of balls is stupid as usual - apart from the Finale, you don't see ANY of these balls in European leagues... but then I guess that's an Adidas / sponsorship thing. Not a massive change from WE8LE, overall, as far as I can tell, just in specific things like shooting - but if the last thing you played was PES4, then it will feel very different indeed.

One massive gripe though: this vanishing crowd on wide angle is PATHETIC.

The only way to play WE is on wide angle, if you want to get a proper view of the pitch... this just kills it. it's not so bad somewhere like the Riazor, where you just see a few of the front row seats at the side are empty (which is realistic anyway), but try playing at Highbury! If there's a foul near the corner flag, the camera lifts up a little and shows you that there is NO ONE IN THE WHOLE STADIUM. And yet you hear them cheering, and when it switches back to the view for the free kick, they're all back again!

It sounds like a small thing, but believe me, you play at one of the tight, closed-in stadia and you'll see it's a really big deal. The whole POINT of those stadia is that you see/feel the crowd near to the pitch... this is probably the single shittest thing Konami have ever pulled in terms of cheapskate programming. It's 2005, and they're releasing a computer football game that can't even generate a crowd properly!!!

At the moment this is annoying me too much for me to enjoy the game... I'd better go and play in some stadium where you don't see the crowd, so I can forget it for now. But this is really fucking lame.
 
I am playing WE9, my first glance on this game is the angle is a little bit different from before. the pass system has changed to more reality. but the long shot is easier to kick it high, hard to control. Stronger players are more easier to win the ball, even in the air. Press L1 + X, goalkeeper can flow the ball to player more far than before.
 
Man I don't even know what this whole WB/SB/SMF argument is I keep saying discussed here by people.. and some people whining. But basically what Loco said. Wingbacks are used when played with 3 defenders usually and their job is to float positions between SB and SMF... so they do have quite a bit of defensive duties as well because they are LAST line of defence for when ball is on sides.. so they can't be all attacking all the time.. nor can they be defending all the time because then the team doesn't have good attacking width down the lines.

So their job is more difficult than SB and SMF who at least have cover in a way or two but these guys need high stamina because they kinda do running of both SMF and SB.

Now I can get into it in a deeper level and from a tactical point of view but I feel what I, Loco and god knows how many other people have said is sufficient for now .. so lets stop this whole WB discussion and move on to better and bigger things about gameplay.
 
The manual-ness controls of gameplay in WE9 is awesome,I'm loving it.Ouh yah,shirts can get untucked during games if your player goes in for a tackle but it will be tucked in back once the second half starts.Coolness.
 
rexrex said:
Isn't that the way all games work? If you try really hard, a few times you'll succeed?
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Guess you're right ;-) but this is much easier than I got used to through the previous installments! I was not winning so easily, especially in WE8LE which was much more difficult! That doesn't affect the overall pleasure, but it had to be specified!
 
Pere Ubu said:
Animations great, new gameplay seems ok, some really good touches. Feels a bit crap going back to last year's kits, but that's Konami. Selection of balls is stupid as usual - apart from the Finale, you don't see ANY of these balls in European leagues... but then I guess that's an Adidas / sponsorship thing. Not a massive change from WE8LE, overall, as far as I can tell, just in specific things like shooting - but if the last thing you played was PES4, then it will feel very different indeed.

One massive gripe though: this vanishing crowd on wide angle is PATHETIC.

The only way to play WE is on wide angle, if you want to get a proper view of the pitch... this just kills it. it's not so bad somewhere like the Riazor, where you just see a few of the front row seats at the side are empty (which is realistic anyway), but try playing at Highbury! If there's a foul near the corner flag, the camera lifts up a little and shows you that there is NO ONE IN THE WHOLE STADIUM. And yet you hear them cheering, and when it switches back to the view for the free kick, they're all back again!

It sounds like a small thing, but believe me, you play at one of the tight, closed-in stadia and you'll see it's a really big deal. The whole POINT of those stadia is that you see/feel the crowd near to the pitch... this is probably the single shittest thing Konami have ever pulled in terms of cheapskate programming. It's 2005, and they're releasing a computer football game that can't even generate a crowd properly!!!

At the moment this is annoying me too much for me to enjoy the game... I'd better go and play in some stadium where you don't see the crowd, so I can forget it for now. But this is really fucking lame.
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it's true the crowd DOES vanish on widecam BUT I feel it only looks bad when you're playing in stadiums with the seating close other than that pretty good
 
man...i cant believe some of the moaning in here, ok THE ONE moaner.

for heavens sake man be grateful you've got the game at all, be grateful you are priviledged to play and own your own ps2 and have the freedom to enjoy yourself, man theres people out there who havent got nothing.

Im off to play WE8le until mine arrives but it sounds postive and the keepers sound great, thanks for your comments people much appreciated. :)
 
Take it you mean filthydani not me as the moaner, mate... although I'd defend him if it wasn;t for the fact that I disagree about the dribbling anyway.

Half the point of this thread is to warn people about the bad points, just as much as cheering the good stuff.

GOOD:

AI in your OWN team is better, lots of criss-crossing runs and overlaps, more passing options

More kinds of shot - different volleys, long shots, chips, side foot etc



Individual player animations - Ronaldinho's funny bouncing run and penalty taking is the best one I've seen so far.

More responsive player selection - I was just cutting inside with Cafu, he knocked the ball too far ahead of him, I pressed player select and Ze Roberto ran onto it before a defender and hit it first time

Penalties are still lousy, but at least there's more variation in where the ball goes now. Not always the exact same sector of the goal...

Free kicks are less impossible again - first goal I scored in WE9 was a free kick, in fact, taken by Totti. Not a curler either - he just ran up and blasted it like Stuart Pearce used to, over the wall and just under the bar. Wasn't even in the corner, it just beat the keeper with pace. This was only from just outside the box. And once you figure it out, the L2-and-X way of laying off free kicks is MUCH better than the old push on R3.

The menu screens, fonts etc have had a long-awaited update, and now actually look like menus from a PS2 game, not something off the Megadrive lol

Curl on shots! Yes! It's still sort of beta, though, we can expect a lot of little modifications to the shooting system if there's a WE9 FE, I think

CPU defenders don't stand off you when you're winding up for a long shot, they step in to block

New licensed kits look a bit better - the back numbers look nicer than patched ones, borders on names etc, no blurring or tearing of curves in the number fonts

New stadia are ok - not so much for what they look like, but because they can be edited into different stadia :) The new Jap stadium (forgot the name) is sort of part Dragao, part Nantes stadium, and it could pass as a few Premiership grounds as well... best is Newlands, which will make a much more convincing Bernabeu than either Yokohama or Boca stadium, once we make the rugby posts transparent and put in the ads (it's high-sided, without a gap in the stands, and the stands are sort of built into a stone structure... not exactly like Bernabeu but it'll do)

BAD:

Vanishing crowd - ARRRGHHH (the upside of this is, TV camera seems easier to play with than in WE8LE, and to be fair they've changed Wide angle anyway, so the perspective is all strange, and you often lose long passes to the far side of the field)

The F50 balls look shit - really tacky and untextured in close up, and like a beach ball from a distance

Adboards don't revolve. Pathetic.

It's a bit cheeky that it now loads the entrance scene, plays it, then goes to ANOTHER loading screen before the game starts...

It feels slightly faster than WE8LE to me, which is bad, but then I've been using PLF Data which slows the game down a bit, so it might just be that

Already seen the return of the comedy goalkeeper - coming off his line to catch a bouncing overhit pass, waiting till the ball comes down to hand-height... then leaping up in the air, patting it about a foot away, and falling over. This was GONE in WE8LE... how did it come back?

Last year's teams, sigh... I mean, they've got the new Arsenal and Chelsea kits in (Arsenal's looks really really good, although the "shiny" effect on the numbers is crap, but the Chelsea kit is dull and shoddy compared to Kel's new Chelsea for WE8LE), so they obviously hadn't finished the game before the end of the 2004-05 season, for God's sake. Oh yeah, and you know how they claimed it had "real number fonts for licensed teams"? Well yes if you're talking about Barcelona, Milan, Real Madrid etc. What about the custom fonts for Real Zaragoza, or Sampdoria, or Espanol, or any other team that isn't in the Champions League? Are they in? Ha, what do you think??

Snow can be set from the exhibition match menu, but it does turn up at random in cups and leagues. Look forward to the opening day of La Liga played in the snow, or the world's first World Cup final with ice round the pitch... oh, and when there's snow the ball select automatically chooses the orange Finale, which will irritate the purists when we're playing as a Nike team...

Riazor looks kind of crappy, really. There's some sloppiness in the 3D model - the main stand at the side cuts off too abruptly and looks strange, especially when it's lit for a night game, for instance. It'll be better when it's patched, but considering Konami's record on new stadium designs, they'll probably just make it symmetrical again, one side mirroring the other, so half the stuff we patch in will come out backwards :(
 
no pere not you mate. i think the keyword here is constructive criticism, rather than swearing your way through the same point.

i agree i want to hear the good and the bad but both constructive which your posts do and always have done :)
 
My first impressions are a bit hit and miss, I can't get used to the new pass/dribble system, but I guess it will take time to settle in and move away from the style that im used to playing in previous games.
 
I love this game, to my opinion it's the best footy game ever(till now).
I think everything is already mentioned in earlier posts, but I want to share one thing:
During the game I made a foul, the ref gives advantage and at the same time I see a blue square with a "!" in the upper left corner, after about 10 seconds the ref blows his whistle and runs to a player who is injured on the ground, the player is carried from the pitch and the ref continues the play with referee ball(I don't know how it's called exactly but the ref keeps the ball in his hand and drops it on the ground between two players)
 
polakis said:
They put out Aek Athens.......
Hahahahaha.
What a loosers konami......
Pitty....
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retarded motherfuckers as if they are out of space...
 
It's poor that they are taking teams out at this stage. However at the end of the day you can always use the editor and there are patches. There is nothing we can do about the poor goalkeeper animations or "auto-sidestep" issue, or the crowd bug which is even more disgraceful.
 
Perky Intruder said:
It's poor that they are taking teams out at this stage. However at the end of the day you can always use the editor and there are patches. There is nothing we can do about the poor goalkeeper animations or "auto-sidestep" issue, or the crowd bug which is even more disgraceful.
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So would you prefer to be able to see cardboard cut outs in the stand that cause stupid slowdown for people? The crowd don't affect the game, slowdown does. Christ get a grip man :lol:
 
Actually mattster i dont give a shit about the croud because i play normal cam, just saying it will annoy some ppl.

The thing that does annoy me the most is the goalkeeper animation.
 
Yeh I agree on the keeper animations, there not really any better. Also the sidestep thing is a used too much I feel aswell.

But people keep calling this crowd thing a bug lol. Konami did it on purpose to help people who play on wide cam. The crowd is there in other cam modes, and anyone who who would prefer to have a crowd that causes slowdown needs their head testing lol
 
Yeh that's fair enough, I know they did it deliberately. If you look back I was the first person to say "I wonder if this is their strategy to remove slowdown", strangely enough I was actually speaking in jest. :s

Keeper animation really bug me because they effect everything, what is the point of having amazing shooting animations and systems if the goalkeepers are about as realistic as Sunderland winning the premiership this year? It just spoils it, not totally, but still a pity.
 
The great thing about this game is that even though its hard to dribble, there are rare occasions where you'll see an opening and its possible to burst forward with the ball how some skilful players do like Ronaldinho.

But you could do this a bit too often in PES4.
 
Taking out the crowd to fix slowdown (and there was virtually NO slowdown in WE8LE) is pathetic, though. It's just a ridiculous thing to think of, let alone do. Don't tell me there was no other way they could have done it...

Taking teams out is stupid as well. Have you seen the size of the WE9 iso? 1.3 GB. I recently made an iso of Smash Court Tennis 2, which is not even a new game, and it's 4.3 GB...
 
Slowdowns again???? I can't believe it! Why do these stupid guys release a game with slowdowns? I hoped they would solve this problem, it was the only reason why I was waiting the new release..
I bet that if they forgot those useless and stupid crowd animations the game would have no slowdowns at all...
 
MY 2 cents:

Well after reading through 8 pages of this thread, most of the new things have been said. Let me just add that after playing about 10 games on wide cam I much prefer to have no crowd in the background than have the damn slowdown, as someone else mentioned. Furthermore, if you got time to be looking at crowds during gameplay I must commend you as that takes skill - I have enough trouble looking on pitch/radar. Speaking of which, the WideCam being higher up is awesome as you can see more of the pitch. When PS3 comes out they will have 3-D crowds rendered and all will be happy.

The gameplay is awesome. FreeKicks are now done right - it is possible to get some in once in awhile as opposed to WE8LE when I scored once every 50 games. So far I've scored one and hit the bar a couple of times and the new animations for FKs are spot on. Dribbling will take some serious getting used to as it has changed so much IMO. It is harder to control, yet smoother and more realistic. Clear chances on goal are now few and far between in that defenders now block every goddamn thing once they are in the vicinity to do so. If you do not wrong foot them before trying to get a shot off forget about it. Heading seems easier to pull off once you get a decent cross in this time around.

Everything else has pretty much been mentioned before so I won't continue.

Overall, the game kicks major ass. The presentation is fluid and the little touches such as being able to change the color of the radar dots is long overdue.

Great Konami!
 
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This game seems SICK... I cannot wait till my copy arrives so I can show my mate the sickness in the game... Sorry I hav the sick bug too.

*jumps on bandwagon - yea fuck dani... those comments is bullshiznit for sure -*

Na im jus playin... Will be interesting to see this dribble thing though. Better go wait by the letterbox.

*Walks away*
 
WOW!!!!!!!! LOZZZZZZZ!!!!!!!!!

I love the dribbling in WE9. I have to be honest and say it's easily the best by far.

I also love the new wingback positions.

Awesome.
 
Argh, I can't believe they still haven't sorted out diagonal balls toward the touchline, though. The number of times these have needlessly gone out for throw-ins...

And also I wish they'd cut down on the number of outside the foot passes. It's toned down from WE8, but it's still too prevalent, I feel.
 
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number of outside the foot passes
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Ahh, knew I had left something out of my review. That was really bugging me as well, it seems like it has gone UP since WE8:LE. There are some times when the outside of the foot looks realistic, other times it just looks gimmicky and unnecessary like the player was trying to show off or something. :lmao:
 
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