Love Football

Namco put online these images of Love Football, finally showing some famous players like Ronaldinho and Gerrard. And it actually seems to look a little bit better graphically too.

Some of the most curious people out there have certainly noticed that a demo of Love Football has appeared on the japanese Live Marketplace. Unfortunately, and I think that's a first, this demo will only work on a japanese 360 so if you downloaded it you have lost a lot of time and bandwidth for nothing. Anyway, I have the chance to own such a system so I've captured this video of the demo. I've been rather pleasantly surprised by the game. Not that it's great, but I had extremely low expectations. The gameplay isn't bad and controlling only one player certainly changes everything compared to PES or Fifa. It's too bad the graphics are really average, to say the least, and that the animation could have used some more work.

And then I mean kick, as in soccer. Cause this looks and sounds awesome. Graphically, it may fail to impress (but it's still better than before) - but they got it going on. They are serious. The concept with third-person-soccer is a couple years old, but it's still much more revolutionary that anyone in the football genre has pulled of in the last 5 years. This could be exactly what we need - to get EA to understand that graphics isn't the only thing we want, and to get Konami to understand that graphics is ONE of the things we want. Love Football would be a third person Sensible Soccer, I would say - and that means, it could later on in the series become a classic. Oh, and, don't forget - all the old videos are played with novice difficulty, so that should explain some of the easy goals in the videos.

Microsoft started the press briefing this morning with their now familiar mix of upcoming games, this time for the japanese market. It's mostly old footage, but there may be a few new things in there.
Update : All videos have been removed at Microsoft's request.

Namco released this new video of Love Football showcasing some of the player animations, quite nicely done I have to say. Will this be enough to forget about the very average, to say the least, graphics?

Namco released the following images of Love Football, the very first soccer game to feature leather shorts. But the crowd actually has more than one color now - it has whooping three different colors.

Love Football had "impressed" a lot of people last month when new images had been released. It's now back with these 2 videos. I'll let you guys be the judge.

Even our new favorite game Love Football also had 2 full pages in this Famitsu Xbox 360.

Namco released a big batch of images of their soccer [i]simulator[/i] Love Football. The images show some more of their revolutionary feature: 3rd person soccer. And that feature can, if they succeed, really sell some games - both in Japan and Europe, as they are trying to put alot of teams based all over the world in it.

Yeah, we sure do here over on Xboxyde (well, at least I do) - but I don't love crappy games. And Love Football looks crappy. But I guess at least the stadiums looks OK.