####Who are ya!!

It's a case of Tomato or Tomato (I realise that doesn't really work without the accent, but please read it again and add the correct phonetics so that it makes sense), when choosing between the best football game, FIFA or Pro Evo.

Since the origins of the game back when Konami called it ISS (International Superstar Soccer), this series of football game has always attracted me more than EA's FIFA titles. Although EA's FIFA games had much better licenses with Players and Clubs meaning that FIFA games could use players' real names and likenesses, Konami's offerings always seemed to be more entertaining and playable. Yes, Pro Evolution players have had to deal with Man Red (Manchester United) and West Midlands Village (Aston Villa), but the array of game play (and the ability to actually run!) meant that even though FIFA games were available for Nintendo Consoles I used to have to get my football fix elsewhere.

Over the last few releases Pro Evo has improved its licenses and now boasts players like Rooney, Henry, Terry and Adriano and is slowly adding more leagues and clubs too.

And, at last Konami has see fit to release its football game on Nintendo Consoles again. Pro Evolution Soccer 6 was released on the Ninetndo DS on Friday 9th February 2006, months after the release on other consoles (27th October on PS2 and Xbox360) due to many non descript delays! As you can probably imagine I was gladder than a man who had just taken 1st place in a Gladdest Man competition.

####It's a funny old game

It may seem a little silly and condescending but Pro Evolution Soccer 6 is a football simulator. I won't go into the detail but if you need to know the rules to football the Instruction Manual will fill you in (seriously, why would you need to explain football to someone buying a football game!).

As I have already mentioned there are a few licensed clubs in the game, in fact there are 57 International teams with everything from Austria to Australia, split into 4 zones. These being Europe, Africa, The Americas and Asia/Oceanic. As well as this are 10 European League Clubs:

Arsenal
Manchester United
Inter
AC Milan
Parma
AS Roma
Bayern Munich
FC Porto
Celtic
Rangers

No room for the smaller clubs like Chelsea or for that matter any Spanish clubs! (See what I mean about the lack of licenses!)

####Game options

There are a decent amount of options available on the main screen so I'll run through then all to give a bit more detail on reach.

~~~Match

This is the quick play option and allows you to choose between and Exhibition Match or a Penalty Shootout. Penalty Shootouts are controlled by the Touch Screen, the goal is divided into 6 squares and you point and click for shooting and saving. This makes penalties easy to take, but it's very limited and doesn't give much options for the kicker.

~~~World Tour

This is the main part of the game. Anyone who has player Pro Evo titles before will be used to the Master League, which does exactly what it says on the tin. In the DS version of the game there is no league at all. Instead you are challenged to take on the brilliantly name Original Team and conquer the world! I'll cover more detail of the Original Team in a few moments as it has its own section. You start in Group K, with the mighty nations of Latvia, Angola, Hungary and Northern Ireland (and a few more). The aim of the game is to win the game. If you draw a game it will go to Extra time and penalties. Once you have beaten all the teams in the group you move on to the next group. The Groups are based on the teams ability (and it seems world rankings), so Group A contains Brazil, Italy, France, England and Spain and so on all the way down to Group K! (No offence to anyone who supports a group K team and yes I am aware of the fact that Northern Ireland have beaten both Spain and England in the last year!)

Your progress is shown in a Success rate percentage and Group dominance is displayed by sections of a football. Win 57 matches and be the world champion, it's that simple.

~~~Network

As you would expect from a football game, there are plenty of options for multi-play. You can play against a friend with a DS who owns the game, or you can play against a friend with a DS who doesn't have the game with the Download Matches Option. You can also trade players with other people who have the game, these options are all for those people within 10 meters of each other.

If like me you don't know anyone within 10 meters of you with a DS, you can use the Wi-Fi option to play against other users around the world. Here you can choose to play Users of Similar Ability, Users from Europe or users who's Friend Codes you have registered. I want to keep this section as short and concise as possible, so again I will come back to this "feature" of the game a little later.

~~~Konami Cup

There really is no Rocket Science involved in this game! In Konami Cup you can create your own cup competition. You choose between 4, 8 or 16 teams to participate. You can specify the teams or let the DS create a randomly generated Cup for you. Again, win either 2, 4 or 8 games and take home the cup.

~~~Original Team

The Original Team mode is central to the game. When you begin, Original Team has a rubbish name, a default strip colour and no flag/emblem.

You can think of a great name, pick from the 8 colours of kit (although Pink, Purple and Grey are a little out of place), then create and emblem. This works exactly like on Mario Kart, you start with a blank grid and you can create whatever image you can from the colours available.

As well as being rubbish in the image department the team is pretty rubbish on the pitch too! The aim of the game really is to get your formations and style of play set up and improve your players as you go along.

Unlike the other Pro Evo titles you can't go into the transfer market and pick out who you want. Instead, after every game you will earn coins and depending on the results you'll receive Silver or Gold coins. These can be used in the Gocha-get. The Gocha-get is one of those machines you see in supermarkets; you put your coin in, turn the knob and out pops a plastic capsule with some tat inside. In Gocha-get you use the touch screen to pick a silver or gold coin, put it in the slot and turn the knob then click the capsule to see what you get. The player you get is random in position and skill levels, although gold coins are more likely to result in star players. Your squad can only contain 41 players so at some point you will have to compare the ones you have to your new recruits and give someone the old heave ho!

~~~Overall Results

A nicely presented, yet slightly pointless screen displays your win, loses and draws and gives you some much needed statistics as to how good you are! Pointless, but I now know I have scored 316 goals, ah!

~~~Training

As with the rest of this game a watered down version of the Pro Evo's standard training. There is no conditioning of players here, simply a tutorial area with instructions on the bottom screen. You can choose between Free Training and Freekick, but both are equally as uninspiring and useless. The freekick training is especially drab as you can about as much good with a freekick in this game as Steve McClaren can with the English National team! (No Offence Steve if you're reading, but if you are I suggest you stop and get some work done! P.s I'm only being flippant I think you're OK!)

~~~Edit

Yawn! Edit allows you to (shock horror) edit teams and players. So if you are appalled at the lack of Southend United in the game you can rename the team and rename all the players to match the real squad. Although this would take ages and you would lose the original settings.

The range of available options is very limited and unless you are a real die hard fan of a team that isn't present in the game, I doubt this feature will be a major draw for anyone.

~~~Options

The usual set of Options includes:

Match Options (length of half, ball colour etc.)
Sound Settings (There are no sound settings as there are no sounds!)
Button Config
Switch Language
Clear Data (If you did decide to go with Southend United, but missed Angola too much, all is not lost!!)

####Buttons and things

The controls are very simple and despite the loss of a few buttons from the other versions (PS2 has additional shoulder buttons and analogue controls), the controls are pretty comprehensive.

The top screen displays the match and is the main screen for controlling the action. The Touch screen can be used to display either the Formation or the Radar. The Formation shows the layout of your players and their Stamina and condition, whereas the Radar shows the position of all 22 players on the pitch. The Touch Screen also allows you to change the mental attitude of your team from very defensive to neutral to all out attack. This is done by tapping the touch screen on the bottom left or right depending on what you want to achieve. This is a decent feature, but the game really doesn't

Pictures of Pro Evolution Soccer 6 (Nintendo DS)

Menu

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

make use of the Touch screen or even dual screen format.

The game is controlled by the standard buttons well enough, but all the flair tricks that made Pro Evo more fun to play have gone as it simply isn't possible to perform them with the limited number of buttons available. The Shoot, Pass and tackle commands are all easy to perform and it's very easy to pick up the game and get used to the controls in no time at all. The large Radar on the bottom screen is a good feature but doesn't really add much to the game, it just makes you think what else could have been done with the bottom screen.

#### Eat my goal!

Football is as Football does. The basics of football are all here and it is easy to pick up and play anything from one match to a whole Cup in one sitting. The game has 3 difficulty settings that you can change at any time, although this won't stop you winning, it will just reduce the goals you score. The slow motion replays show just how bad the goalkeeping is as many hit and hope shots sails straight through the keepers body. It's not hard to score goals, which isn't a bad thing. The problem is that with the limited teams available and the fact that you can't improve you team with player that you want and instead have to use the Gocha-get system, the game gets very repetitive very quickly. I completed the World Tour and a number of cups within 2 days of getting the game, but now there really is no reason to go back and play the game.

Another disappointing thing is that with all the DS's processing power (yes it's not much compared to the PSP, but we have seen N64 games translated in all their glory!), the graphics are incredibly poor. The graphics are no better than the very 1st Pro Evo games on the N64 and Playstation. I will be the first to stand up and say that graphics don't matter as long as the game is good. Unfortunately, the graphics are very blocky and the game is not much better. At times it is hard to see the gaol from freekick's and penalties, not that being able to see them would do any good as you can't hit a cows bum with a banjo using this game. Although it's not a major issue it is worth mentioning that the sound on the game is terrible. In fact there is no sound, apart from the poor crown noises and the tinny "Goal" every now and again, there isn't even any background music.

The game is also effected by terrible lags when the play slows down. This happens when there is a lot going on in the game, especially a goal mouth scramble, but in the single player game can be forgotten about. The Wi-Fi game is something else. I have had the game for 5 days now and although I have tried for a good 3 or 4 hours I am yet to finish a game on Wi-Fi! The game slows down so much and so regularly that it is very tempting to give up even when you're winning. At time you can wait 30 odd seconds between hitting shoot and the player mis-kicking the ball to the opponent. This is even more annoying when you have played a 10minute game with about 10 minutes for of delay only for your opponent to switch of their DS because they have lost (this has happened so many times I can't explain). Although the game on Wi-Fi is almost unplayable, it is fun to beat opponents online (until they switch off). The Wi-Fi part of the game was one of the features I was most looking forward to and I'm afraid to say fails to deliver incredibly.

####Conclusion

I was looking forward to Pro Evo 6 on the DS so much that even though it is so poor I want to forgive it because I still want it to be great. The Single player game is repetitive and without the availability of teams and proper players transfers becomes very boring very quickly. Pro Evo 6 is the sort of game you will play every once in a while until you remember why and put it away again. The one thing that could have saved this game from mediocrity is the Wi-Fi ability, but unfortunately that is the final nail in the coffin. I have no doubt in my mind that future football games will feature Wi-Fi games and that without the terrible lag they will be incredibly popular, I only hope that Konami sticks with the DS and sorts out the problems in time for Pro Evo 7.

It pains me to admit just how bad this game is as I had waited so long and with such bated breath. The simple fact of the matter is that this game is not worth anything near the £25 you will pay and even if you get it second-hand, you'll still not be getting value for money. If you want to throw away £25 and can't think of anything more reckless to do with you money, then by all means get this game. Otherwise, (*sob*), give this one a miss.