Pro Evolution Soccer 4 Xbox patched

Konami appears to have patched Pro Evolution Soccer 4 on Xbox this week, hopefully bringing to an end a lot of frustration for fans of the Japanese team's footballing opus.

Although PES4 was rightly hailed as a wonderful experience on Xbox, most gamers and reviewers who actually tackled the game on Live found it to be troublesome to say the least, with inherent lag issues, unskippable replay sequences and the ability to quit while losing without penalisation conspiring to make quick matches and anonymous encounters almost redundant.

Friends and close-knit leagues emerged, which went some way towards dealing with the latter issue, but the hard-coded problems remained - and the former certainly distorted the rankings system.

Happily though when you log into PES4 on Live today you'll be asked to download a mandatory online update, which fixes some of the lag problems, allows you to skip some goal celebrations and lets you win by default in the event that the other player quits before time.

In our limited experience with the patch this afternoon, lag is certainly less noticeable. Although it's by no means completely gone, our experiences may be down to other players being useless and downloading things at the same time, and so on. And although it'd be nice if we could skip offside replays and the like too, we're generally happier than we were.

So... Anybody up for a bit of post-pub PES-age?