[.ca] World Soccer Winning Eleven 9

Get ready to scream with annoyance:
Konami so nearly have a great game on their hands. Unfortunately, a couple of key things simply ruin this game. The first is the atrocious automatic player selection. You'll be running to make a tackle with one player and it will suddenly switch control to a different player for whom your current controller directions are completely inappropriate, ending up with both players being pulled out of position and often opening a clear path to goal. As the commentators congratulate your opposition you'll be wanting to hurl your controller at the screen. The developers should also have spent time on the critical period where one side has lost the ball and it's up for grabs. The smart thing to do in this brief but key period is to make the team member best positioned to intercept the ball home in on it regardless of what you're doing with the controller for half a second or so, giving you a small interval in which to orient yourself and get ready to take control of that player. Without this there's little chance of you assessing whom you're controlling and reacting sufficiently quickly as to have a decent chance of beating the computer to the ball. This puts the human player at a major disadvantage, leaving your men looking blindingly stupid compared to the computer team. If they'd spent a little extra time getting these features right, they'd have an amazing game on their hands. As things stand, buying WE9 is something I'd recommend only to masochists or to those with no hair to pull out.

Frustrating:
It is a testament to the continual lousiness of EA's Fifa series that Konami's franchise is held in high regard. In truth, both are poor, and indeed there has never been a genuinely fun, playable 3D football game, going all the way back to Actua Soccer a decade ago. Part of the problem is that when you have realistic animations as a core element of the game, you lose the immediacy of being able to execute a swift action because at least half a second has to elapse between pressing a button and having its associated activity execute fully due to the lag of keying up the animation. This leaves the game feeling sluggish and unresponsive, like playing while wearing a pair of gardening gloves. The other serious problem is that because there are at least ten buttons on the controller, the game designers feel compelled to use every one of them, singly AND in combinations, turning the game into a ludicrous memory test if you want to be able to execute all or even a small proportion of the moves available. Couple all of this with an unintelligent player auto-selection algorithm and you're in for many evenings of howling at the screen in annoyance. To cap it all, we get Trevor Brooking telling us that England have "triumphed against the odds" when they beat Senegal or Northern Ireland. Ummm...if you say so, Trev. Fifteen years ago Sensible/Renegade brought us Sensible Soccer for the old 16-bit machines. It had tiny, low detail sprites, eight directions of movement and (on the Amiga/ST) a single button to control passes, shots, headers and tackles. It was ten times as much fun as this technically proficient but virtually unplayable game.

Great engine, awful AI and player selection:
At times, this game is great fun. They have so many things right, and the flow of the game feels like real football. But all the good work is undone by a small number of things that are vital to a good football game. First, intelligent player selection. You have GOT to get this right. Whatever heuristics they are using are not sophisticated stuff. Konami, if you're reading this, try using a system that takes into account the direction the player is pulling on the stick, finds the best intercept direction for all the players near to the ball and gives a strong match weighting to the one that best matches the controller direction. This is really basic stuff. Second, in a game where you can only control one out of eleven members of a team, the other ten have GOT to have good AI. They have to move intelligently off the ball. In particular, they MUST react quickly to a loose ball, not stand back away from it at a distance of three metres for several seconds as though it's about to explode. Again, BASIC stuff. And another issue halfway between these...when defending, you can use one of the buttons to make a nearby teammate (not the player you're controlling) move in to pressure the opposition player with the ball. So who does it select? The player nearest the ball. Seems sensible, yes? No. It's not. It should be the player who has the best chance of making an interception. If the opponent is running at full pace, it is FAR better to have a player ten metres ahead of him move to make the tackle than a player two metres behind him. This is half a good game, but it's an example of one where even if you get 80% of the things right, the other 20% can ruin it.