Part 1
Sitting at an airport lounge at an undisclosed location. Played a good 3-4 hours of PES5 (Not WE9!) last night. Full Impressions in a few hours. NO photos though, that was not allowed unfortunately.
I have to say that for those of us who have played WE8LE, the interface and options are almost exactly the same both in terms of look and functionality. The ML looked exactly the same as in WE8LE, with the execption of the button graphics, which are a bit different.
The Middle Ground (or something like that) ability is awesome! I played a match with Chelsea and shot a stunning goal from over 30 metres with Lampard. A fucking piledriver of a shot that hit the underside of the crossbar and bounced with an helpless Gigi Buffon trying to get to the ball. Awesome! After that I picked Inter and kept trying to do the same with Veron and Adriano. These guys are now lethal outside the box with their shooting ability....very, very cool, but didnt feel over the top at all..its just nice that you can finally score from farther outside the box unlike in WE8LE. Adriano's shots were just really powerful. Of course, I then tried with Zanetti and Makelele to no avail..so you need to have a skilled, hard shooting player to pull it off. Lampard's and Robbens stats were much improved btw.
Goalkeeper animations have changed a lot. They can now throw the ball almost to the halfway line. When you have a throw in and use o to throw, you get a powerbar and the animation is faster as is the throw itself. Not as slow as in WE8LE. Also, when pass with X, you get a powerbar. You can see players staming under their names in the HUD. You can turn that off if you want.
I can confirm that there's loads of new national teams like Ecuador and so on...not sure, if anyone of us cares, but there they are.
Network option was available in the main menu of PES5. This is no surprise of course, I mentioned online gameplay in Europe PS2 a while ago. Arsenal and Chelski kits look awesome. Faces are much improved with the likes of Fabregas, Hyypi