Pro Evolution Soccer 2008

Urgh. When I’m older and I look back over the things I’ve done in the past, this one will probably make me sick. Completing a football game released in 2007 in 2016 is just painful. I made a vow never to play another football game again after FIFA 2012 and will definitely be sticking with that. There are too many good games out there to waste more time on repetitive rubbish like this.

So what does Pro Evolution Soccer Offer? Well, there is League mode, Tournament Mode and Master League. Oh, and naturally the obligatory Xbox Live multiplayer rubbish that goes with every sports game released since 2008. The only real part of this game worth mentioning is the same thing everyone says and that’s Master League but I really didn’t get into it and here’s why.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 38 Achievements

The first thing I’m going to do is complain about the game some more. The in game gallery menu has something that appears to be an achievement tracking system where all the achievements are listed and are called titles. Only it doesn’t fucking work. Upon completing the game, I have all the achievements but two of my ‘titles’ were missing. Oh, and they were for the online things I was supposed to do which means I had to have an internet connection when I did them. So, so stupid.

There are six achievements that aren’t for winning the various leagues in the game but are for beating every single team in the various leagues and for beating all the international teams. The five  club leagues were not a problem but I obviously cocked up at some point when doing the National Teams. As the game struggled to keep up with its own title system, I didn’t really stand a chance that it was going to store a record of which National Teams I had beaten. So I had to play nearly all of them again. It’s a good job I left it about 5 years between attempts otherwise I would have lost my mind.

You also have to win all the cups in the Master League and this is a total fuck ass because it means you have to not win the league. That’s right, because of the way it’s set up, you have to win the game’s equivalent of the Europa League which means you have to finish outside of the top six. It’s so weird deliberately trying to lose and draw matches and getting fucked off when your rivals fail to win leaving you ahead of them.

A lot of the basic achievements require you get certain stats in matches but these only trigger after you have played 100 games. I wouldn’t worry too much about this though as you will reach 500 games or more if you are going for the clean sweep.

So yes, outside of the online the big one is for playing 500 games, scoring 1,000 goals and winning all leagues and cups. The games and goals will come with the leagues and cups but this is where the game really fucked me over. You unlocked special players for winning the leagues and after I won the English League for the first time, I had the special players at my disposal. However, I noticed on my track record that it hadn’t actually given me a time stamp for winning the league. I played through the rest of the leagues and everything else I needed to unlock the achievement, only to find that it didn’t unlock. So I had to play the full English League again. Then, to really add to my issues, it still didn’t unlock. Only when I went into the track record to investigate did it finally give me the fucking thing. Cunts. Cunts!

Multiplayer

And further cunts. These achievements are totally unnecessary. I couldn’t be fucked to do battle with the arbitrary dickheads who still play this online so I took the easy way out, got a second copy and smashed them out in afternoon. Mostly straight forward but the one for scoring a free kick takes some work if you don’t want to be there for hours. What I did was take China, make their goal keeper absolute shit, make their defence really aggressive, get a free kick in a decent position, remove their wall and let Beckham hammer it in. The one thing that is annoying is that if the keeper gets a hand on it, it invalidates the achievement even if the ball goes in. Poor.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I’m glad to see the back of this one. It looks like Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 will be the last Konami football game that will be fully completable too. All newer titles have had their online culled. Even so, I wouldn’t recommend this one to achievement hunters. If you want to play football games, you will and you probably don’t care about achievements anyway.