Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

Winning Eleven 9

1. Official Site
2. Platform: PS2
3. Publisher: Konami
4. Developer: Konami
5. Release Date: 02/07/06
6. Genre: Sports

by Mitch Youngblood

In 1994, I was fortunate enough to head to the Cotton Bowl with my dad and sister to watch my first live World Cup match and it was an absolute blast. Dallas, Texas is hotter than hell and twice as humid during the summer and that small stadium was packed to overflowing with rowdy soccer fans. Temperatures were soaring and so was the passion of die-hard soccer fans as the World Cup graced the stage in our own backyard. It was beyond cool to see several thousand fans united by their love of an entire sport regardless of who was playing. That marked the point at which I became enraptured by a sport beloved the world over that for whatever reason has historically been a tough sell in the United States.

One thing that shouldn’t be a tough sell for soccer fans is the latest entry in Konami’s long-running sports franchise, Winning Eleven 9. I’m usually not a fan of sports or racing games because I feel they all run together after a while, but this one is a heck of a lot of fun. Then you look under the hood and find so many different things to do just in the menu screens that your mind buckles from the indecision of what to try first.

I genuinely like the heck out of this game, but man is it ugly on the eyes. Watching the players run around during the actual matches made me think of sports games from the SNES days which probably isn’t what Konami had in mind. Playing a soccer game in 2006 on the PS2 should not invoke memories of the original Tecmo Bowl, yet that’s exactly what happened when the first match started. That feeling of "oh wow, this is really old but the release date says it came out last month" does not go away the more you play the game either.

The good news is that the gameplay is rock solid and loads of fun. The bad news is you still have to watch stiff animations and blocky characters go after the ball and each other on a field surrounded by cardboard stand-ups in place of fans. I thought modern video games were long past using black and white silhouettes in place of crowd shots but maybe Konami decided to go for a retro feel. The menus do their job adequately but there is so much information per screen that several of the menus look compressed to fit everything on screen at once. Apparently no one on the design team thought about load balancing because even though there is a ton of information on literally every subject in the game, it could have been organized and presented much better than it was.

I honestly wish there were more sound effects in this game, I truly do. The slight roar of the crowd feels and sounds generic, and I couldn’t hear anything specific that happened on the field. By no means should we hear bones exploding after one player slide-tackles another, cool though that may be, but the game borders on quiet during the matches. It’s a weird feeling to play a game and wonder where all the sound effects are, though that may be more a result of the games our generation plays on a frequent basis.

The play-by-play commentary is very good with neither announcer being grating and annoying like John Madden is. These commentators eloquently report on the game with their own theories of what each team should do, and it's remarkably well-tuned to what happens during a match. For example, I was completely dogging it on defense at one point and the announcers started pointing out that my team needed to pick up the pace to stay in the game. The music that plays over the menu screens is basic techno and the selected pieces don’t seem long enough before their loop kicks in. But that might have just been me thinking the music was weak. You don't pick up a game called Winning Eleven 9 for its soundtrack though, so this is a very minor point.

There are six pages in the Winning Eleven 9 manual devoted to the controls and what buttons do what if that tells you how even something simple can become a complex monster. The upshot to this is that everything is relatively easy to pick up after playing through a few matches. It’s really nothing that we haven’t seen before, but there are an awful lot of subtleties available that really enhance the soccer experience.

The left thumbstick is for player movement while the right thumbstick will manually pass the ball. To maintain ball control, also known as dribbling, the player must use the directional pad once the ball is passed to them then hold down the R2 button. Should an opponent try to slide tackle you, hitting the R2 button will jump up and avoid it. There are also plenty of variants on dribbling and the game gets a lot easier when you know how to handle your ball.

The X button is your friend when it comes to passing. To pass in a certain direction you just hold the appropriate directional button and hit X. Holding down X will add power to the kick, but for long passes you need to hold down the O button. Different combinations are necessary to learn such as the One-Two Pass. Here you hold down the L1 button and press X for a short pass then hit the triangle button immediately before your teammate receives the pass so he will fire off a return pass.

That’s barely scratching the surface of what’s available, so be assured that reading the manual before jumping into one of Winning Eleven 9’s circuit modes will make the difference between life and death.

The first match I played in the game, between the US (me) and Mexico, went into overtime with a score of 0-0. My Fair Lady watched over my left shoulder as I improved with my defensive skills but then she pointed something out that I honestly hadn’t paid attention to. She commented that it looked like my guys were playing tired, almost like real soccer players would if they’d just spent an entire game and a half on the field without a break. My respect for the game increased like crazy right then and there, so much so that I was genuinely aggravated when Mexico scored off a corner kick that I should have blocked.

Despite the truly ugly look of the graphics, this game kicks ass on the field plain and simple. Players have to work for it if they want a goal which is something I wasn’t used to. One of the reasons why I don’t like to play sports games is the ones I have played are way too easy to score in or far too difficult with no middle ground given. Scoring in Winning Eleven 9 is tough but never impossible and that goes for the other team as well. If you play strongly on defense then the keeper will do his job.

In the menu, players can choose from over 100 teams, several different international cup matches, an astonishing amount of customization options from clothes and ball type down to whether or not player fatigue accumulates between matches, and manage a team through an entire season. The management includes searching for players to recruit using a wide variety of criteria to find the best, or the most affordable, players on the market. Player contracts will also expire during the season and if you haven’t been winning enough matches and earning money then some of your top players might find employment elsewhere.

All of this combines to give gamers one heck of a feature packed soccer game. Oh, and gamers can play each other online if they have the required PS2 internet equipment handy. With so many soccer fans worldwide, and PS2s just about everywhere the eye can see, it shouldn’t be too tough to find someone to scrap with online.

If you are even remotely a fan of soccer, or a fan of stat management, then Winning Eleven 9 is absolutely your game. There is a mind-boggling array of customization choices from players to the color and type of shoes they wear, and that’s not even taking the salary cap and trade agreement options into account. With so many different options to choose from on so many different menu screens a player could spend days just messing around with the configuration options and never set foot on the grass.

Of course, all the options in the world won’t help if the heart of the game isn’t any fun but Winning Eleven 9’s soccer matches are very solid experiences. As your players tire, your tactics have to adjust on the fly. Should you risk the red card by slide tackling another player or should you play smart and go for the header? I confess to not playing any of the prior games in this series, but I will be hanging onto version nine for a while to come.

Winning Eleven 9 is a heck of a lot of fun to play when the game is on the field. When you take into account the staggering amount of ways you can customize literally anything and everything in the game then you’re left with very little to complain about outside of the outdated graphics. I’m on record as saying that graphics don’t matter if the gameplay is solid, and I stand by that on this particular game. It would have been nice for the visuals to be sharper overall and I would have preferred more sound effects, but that’s little more than nitpicking a very solid soccer game. If you love the sport, then it is very tough to go wrong with Winning Eleven 9.

Gaming Trend Score

88

1. Graphics: 76
2. Audio: 85
3. Controls: 90
4. Gameplay: 92
5. Value/Replay: 95
6. OVERALL:88