Pro Evolution Soccer Manager

[King Ellis]

Upon reading channel 4's Gamecentral this morning I was greeted with the news that Konami is making a management game based around Pro Evolution Soccer. A little googling brings up an article:

Konami enters the football management genre

Konami of Europe today announced Pro Evolution Soccer Management (working title), a spin-off title that enjoys compatibility with Pro Evolution Soccer 5. Players can manage any club from six European leagues, and are charged with balancing the day-to-day running of their chosen side, including player selection, training methods, and transfer dealings. In addition, coaching staff must be chosen to assist in specific areas, while Pro Evolution Soccer 5's exhaustive player database can be scoured for new signings (check full article for details). Produced by Akiyoshi Chosokabe, a member of Shingo 'Seabass' Takatsuka's Pro Evolution Soccer development team, Pro Evolution Soccer Management will be released for PlayStation 2 in 2006.

Link

A whole bunch on screenshots here: http://www.gamershell.com/ps2/pro_evolutio...creenshots.html including the prospect of choosing a nice French female assistant and:

"You've got a drugs test in the morning, try and remember to turn up."

Now, my first reaction is "Yes!" as i'm a very sad person and the combination of PES with a football manager game is something that I have always thought would be great. Perhaps in the manner of the Football Fusion method used by EA between FIFA and TCM, only less annoying (play TCM, save, put in FIFA, load, play game, save, put in TCM, load, play TCM, rinse and repeat). Only last night I was wondering Konami might pull their finger out and offer a better career mode, perhaps introducing some lower leagues so players can work their way up. As much as I love PES though I am highly skeptical, we've been through 5 incarnations of the PES series and countless ISS's before it and the only way we're going to get a half way decent career mode is to buy another game? And 6 leagues? I can only assume it doesn't include lower leagues or else they surely would have said countries. It will probably be a fun compliment to PES5 but surely it can't compete with FM2006?

[Turbo Yannis]

They've got Rio's gormless look perfectly.

No doubt I'll be buying it. It could be for lower leagues that they'll probably make the first game with only the top divisions and see how it works/sells. If all works out well then they might look into putting atleast some lower league teams in.

Could be wrong though as I don't know how much work it would take to have any of that

[lanky316]

I won't be holding my breath for this one. Yes the pro evo games are the best arcadey style football games out there but there just isn't enough to them and without a big overhaul this won't be able to translate into a ood amnagement game.

FIFA/TCM had the advantage in recent ones in that you could actually work you're way up from league two to the European cup on basic FIFA. Pro-evomanager will be a decent enough football game but there won't be enough in the basic management game to get really excited about. Without a lot more money being spent on developing that side of the game.

[ChrisSteeleAteMyHamster]

Might be worth a laugh....

I'll have to see how this develops....Could easily go either way