[A-Z Games] I: ISS Pro Evolution

Football is definitely a love of mine and my interest in it has helped me, socially, so many times. It is so easy to connect with people across the world with it.

My favourite game of all time is Sensible World of Soccer which I had on the Amiga but when I got a PlayStation there seemed nothing of a similar quality, or even close. I got a copy of Actua Soccer (clearly a play on words on the ongoing Virtua series of games from Sega) and still played it but with a conscious realisation that it wasn't that good. I heard of a new game called ISS Pro coming out which looked great - a good friend of mine told me that I should be excited as he had ISS on the SNES and loved it. At a similar time, there was also a ISS game on the N64 that played very differently^[1] - a little more manual with the 360º control but also seemingly quicker and more arcadey. ISS Pro was a very good game with a set of nice likenesses to the players but without the licences to use real names. The look and feel was quite bold and arcadey but also a lot of fun and the through ball mechanic was great and quite new to me. 

A few years later came ISS Pro Evolution^[2] at about the time of Euro 2000. It seemed slower, more deliberate and not as good - for about ten minutes. In a wonderfully circular way, I was now at university with the same person that had initially told me to get excited and playing together, it was obvious that the game had definitely evolved and could now be considered a true great. The teams and players had real personality with differences in teams feeling more obvious. From this point on, in football games, I did not change teams' formations and tactics drastically from reality and expected to play in that way. For me, it was at this point that a true legend was born. The different styles that you could use to win (or frustrate for a draw) were superb and the variety seemed to match that in the real, beautiful game with low scoring, hard games the norm and each goal really counting for something. A turning point was the same friend frustrating my possession game with a defensive display as Paraguay and scoring once on the counter^[3] . That is what football is all about. 

It was not from this point that real player names were added but this really added to the immersion and the players resembled the stars of the game quite closely. The number of options around the formations and strategy were ramped up massively and you could choose to play in particular ways with certain teams - great at playing in certain ways. I used to have a soft spot for the Croatian team with the silky midfield of Boban and Prosinecki, for example. This version of ISS has provided the template that Konami have built from and so can be seen as the real genesis of the series - it was appropriate that they changed the name at this point slightly. EA would also, effectively copy this model of football game and tweak it to add real gameplay to the raft of licences in the all-conquering FIFA series.

The series has continued with yearly updates and has continued to evolve in its own way but the revolution came with evolution.

3 other I titles that might be interesting: 
Ico - Actions and emotions speak louder than words.
IK+ - Simple, quick and tight fighting game with falling trousers. 
Internal Section - Musical shooter, before such things were known of (i.e. pre-Rez).

^{1. I later found out a lot more about the series and the Japanese versions which were, sensibly, given different names - Winning Eleven by KCET and Perfect Striker by KCEO. I can only assume the marketing people in the west thought it would be more confusing.↩}

^{2. I kind of miss the days of Japanese developers making games with longer, and more outlandish prefixes and suffixes.↩}

^{3. Later, I moved I the slightly different Japanese Winning Eleven of which Winning Eleven 6 (for the 2002 world cup) was a highlight. My favourite point being when another friend would come to play and we had “rival teams” of which one set was England vs Italy. He had a rule that he couldn't leave on a draw, however late it was and so when it was a 0-0, he stayed. Five excellent 0-0s later, he scored a late, late winner. This is what brings the joy of the game home to me.↩}