Pro Evolution Soccer
The Pro Evolution Soccer (also known as Winning Eleven) football video game series developed by KCET is one of the most popular sports franchises ever.
Originally a PlayStation spin-off from Konami's International Superstar Soccer, the first game in the series released outside Japan, ISS: Pro Evolution (based on Winning Eleven 4) was released in 2000, and later that year the American market would get ESPN MLS Gamenight, using Winning Eleven 2000 as the base. The same game was released in the rest of the world as ISS: Pro Evolution 2 (2001).
In the same year, Japanese PlayStation 2 owners saw Winning Eleven 5 released, the first in the series for the new Sony Console, and the definite split between PES and ISS games was done with the release of Pro Evolution Soccer in Europe, released as ESPN MLS Extratime in North America.
The "final assault" on EA Sports' FIFA Series crown was with the 2002 top-selling title Pro Evolution Soccer 2, based on Winning Eleven 6. For the first time, a Winning Eleven title was also released in North America, dropping the previous ESPN and MLS licenses.
However, altough the series dominated the PlayStation 2 scene (over competitors FIFA and This Is Football), it was not released on other platforms, with the exceptions of Winning Eleven 6:Final Evolution (Nintendo GameCube) and ESPN MLS ExtraTime 2002 for the Microsoft Xbox. When Winning Eleven 7 was released, Konami announced that the upcoming Pro Evolution Soccer 3 was also set to be released on Personal computers, featuring Italian superstar referee Pierluigi Collina on the cover. The game fixed most parts of the previous game that needing tweaking. The PC version, however, required top-quality hardware, which hampered sales in comparison with the still low-end FIFA series, and lacked on-line game modes, which would appear on the 2004 installement, Winning Eleven 8/Pro Evolution Soccer 4. The game does not improve greatly over PES3, but focus on better dribble control and adds three licensed leagues (Italy, Netherlands and Spain).
Altough acclaimed unanimously by the gaming press, the series have their own share of criticisms – a very steep learning curve, lack of effort to acquire licenses (many players and teams lack real names, a very common feature on early nineties games), altough later games feature an increasing number of licensed teams and more recently, the lack of on-line mode in the PS2 version of PES4, and the poor mode of the Xbox Live mode (players were not penalized for quitting games until a patch was released in January 2005, for instance).
There is always much confusion between Japanese (Winning Eleven) and European (Pro Evolution Soccer) titles; Altough only one title is released outside Japan, the same game can be released two times with minor changes there, usually after fixes done for the European releases. Winning Eleven 6, for instance, had the initial release and a Final Evolution version, released after PES2.
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Categories: Soccer computer games | PlayStation 2 games