Winning Eleven 8 International Hands-On

By Justin Calvert, GameSpotPosted Jan 21, 2005 4:55 pm PT

We take to the field with work-in-progress PS2 and Xbox versions of KCET's latest kickabout.

Already available in Europe as Pro Evolution Soccer 4, Winning Eleven 8 International is the latest soccer game to come out of Konami's Tokyo-based KCET studio. We recently had an opportunity to spend some time with work-in-progress versions of Winning Eleven 8 International for both the PlayStation 2 and the Xbox, and although we're still very disappointed not to be getting the Xbox Live support currently enjoyed by European players, we've found the game still offers some quite significant improvements over last year's iteration.

You can start your master league career with your chosen team's real players.

The "master league" career mode in Winning Eleven 8 International, for example, boasts a number of new options that will make it even more appealing to fans of the series, as well as much more accessible to newcomers. When starting a career in previous Winning Eleven games, your team would always be composed of the same fictional (and not terribly good) players. In Winning Eleven 8 International, you have the option to start your career with a squad composed of your chosen team's real players. This certainly makes the master league mode more realistic, but it also makes it less challenging, because your first goal when playing a career in previous Winning Eleven titles was always to assemble a strong team with the limited resources at your disposal. We suspect the majority of longtime Winning Eleven fans will want to stick with the fictional squad option, but KCET certainly can't be criticized for augmenting the existing options.

Another all-new option in the master league mode concerns player development. Now you're allowed to access a "development sheet" for every player on your team, which compares his current attributes to those he had on the day he joined your team. We've not spent enough time with the game to comment on how noticeably you can expect your players to change over the course of a career, but having players whose skills aren't set in stone should certainly make your role as a manager more interesting. Depending on how seriously you take that role, you might also be interested in checking out the new match analysis screen after every game you play. The match analysis screen features diagrams that chart your team's shooting, attack, and defense patterns. We've found the screen to be particularly useful for identifying the offensive tactics that have proved most successful for us in terms of goals scored.

Players' attributes will change over the course of your career.

Perhaps the most welcome addition to the master league mode in Winning Eleven 8 International, though, is the powerful new player search engine that you'll use when you're looking to augment your squad with a new player or two. There are a number of different search options available to you with which you'll be able to find players using their names, teams, playing styles, or specific attribute ratings. The advanced search, which allows you to search for players according to their attributes, basically works the same way as searches in most soccer management titles, so it's a really easy way to filter out huge numbers of players that you have no interest in signing. The talent search option is more unusual in that it lets you search for players according to their special skills and playing styles using 14 different filters. The filters are as follows: post player, dribbler, ace striker, winger, play maker, shadow striker, defensive midfielder, stopper, defense leader, offensive sideback, dogfighter, stronghold guardian, speed demon, and free kicker. Some of the filters are obviously more self-explanatory than others, so it's good that you'll see a brief description of each filter when you move your cursor over it.