Games

[another god]

Compared to other people, I'm not a big Pro Evo player. It's a game where obsessive people obsess over an obsessive videogame version of an obsessive sport. I don't obsess, though I wouldn't mind trying.

My first experience with Pro Evo was in the form of Winning Eleven 8 on the original XBox. WE being the original Japanese and American name. I was living in a house with five other guys in college. It was like Tri Lambda, kinda, except the amount of ass gotten went down instead of up. Winning Eleven 8 may have contributed to the apathy of it, but at the time I didn't care. Soccer is pretty exciting to me, a person open to things that suck, and WE was a fucking good soccer game. My non-videogame playing friends played it with me, and they played it like videogame (read: obsessive) players played games.

I came home to see my roommate bandaging his knees. Sliding in shorts on rugs is apparently a little harsher than sliding in shinguards on grass.

Fast forward to now. I have two versions of Winning Eleven sitting in my living room. One version for Wii, and one version for PS2. I bought the Wii version off Amazon and immediately regretted it. You controlled not one player but an entire team with the Wii Remote and nunchuck. What if it didn't play the same? So I bought the PS2 version as well. I heard it was "pretty much the same since Pro Evo 6".

Well, after I got Pro Evo 08 for the PS2 I played it for maybe an hour. I haven't touched it since. But Pro Evo 08 for the Wii came in yesterday, and I think I've racked up six hours. I also changed all the English League's team names to the proper names (thanks wikipedia). It's not that the game is that good, it's just that it's interesting. What really makes me curious to know is if the Wii version is much like the PS2 version in terms of... playing like a proper Pro Evo game. Unfortunately I don't know because I don't know what PE is really like.

I'd like to write more about the games because this is the kind of game that inspires interesting people to play games. I consider it my "games that I'm not ashamed to admit to smart girls" genre of game. Anyways, since this is a pretty international forum, and it's not Gamefaqs, I thought some of you might have input.

[icycalm]

http://insomnia.ac/reviews/wii/winninge ... maker2008/

[another god]

PES2008[Wii] PLAY MAKER'S Guide Defense version.(unofficial)
PES2008[Wii] PLAY MAKER's Guide Offense version.(unofficial)

This is why PES is awesome.

[icycalm]

The dude is Japanese too. Strange that he'd go to all that trouble to make a video in English.

I really have to play this game. Together with Kororinpa, it looks like the best use of the Wii yet. Unfortunately, it's still full price at Play-Asia:

http://www.play-asia.com/paOS-13-71-z3- ... -2ha4.html

[eae]

Tha funny thing is that the same gameplay could be easily done on pc with keyboard+mouse (and it would probably work even better thanks to the superior precision of the mouse), but nobody ever tried to make a pc football game like this one.

[icycalm]

That's a good point, but I wouldn't say it would necessarily work better with the mouse. The advantage of the remote is that you can instantly point it from one end of the screen to the other. The mouse has to TRAVEL all the way there.

Still, when all is said and done, I agree that the mouse would work better overall, because of its higher accuracy. I doubt Konami would consider a PC port, but if EA makes a FIFA rip off next year, who knows.

[another god]

The reason why new interfaces like Wii or Microsoft's Surface program are interesting is because they totally eliminate any 1:1 issues with human movement like Icy just explained. Sure we can get accustomed to moving a mouse like we move our hand, but we still have to learn how to do it.

Also, the Wii provides analog controls that you just can't get from a keyboard/mouse setup. If you're trying to get the shot blasted to the back of the net, you can't just jerk the Wii remote as hard as you can - you'll end up losing accuracy on your shot. The same goes for lofting it just over the goalie's head - you'll end up booting the ball way over the goal. I can't imagine how you'd translate varying degrees of nunchuk/remote motion to keyboard mouse controls.

[icycalm]

I googled that Surface gizmo. It's freaking awesome. I have to do a blog post about that.