actually it is starting to piss me off a little. don't get me wrong. i loved the demo. i played about 50 matches with the demo on both 4 and 5 stars and none of the games seemed fixed or fishy. it all seemed realistic and flowed very good. best game ever, i thought.
of course technically there should be no difference between the demo and the real game, but i think i know what it is.
fact is, now i am playing on 4 stars serie A as inter and the good old PES nasties keep surfacing again: whenever i score the CPU kicks into "god" mode and my players turn into crap. they miss the simplest passes, they clear a ball but it magically bounces back to the opponent. they perform idiotic actions even though i clearly told them (via my "controls") to do something else. fine, if the CPU turns into god when i play Milan. but palermo? give me a break... 40/60 ball possession, a goal that i predicted (after one of my players "cleared" the ball to a corner, even though there was absoultely no command and no reason for having him do so). CPU dribbles like little roberto carlosses, like liittle ponies. can't even cross the middle line. headers straight back to palermo. tackles either foul or straight back to palermo. x-passes straight back to palermo, no matter where i point the pass at. in the end i won with a dodgy penalty awarded to me, but it didn't feel right and was very frustrating
so where is the difference? i think it's the adaptive AI. this didn't exist in the demo because you started every game from scratch so to say -- as if you'd play PES5 for the first time fresh out of the package. real game different. CPU "learns" your patterns and steadily pumps up its ability, no matter which team you are facing next (and actually no matter which level you are playing). so after i beat milan barely by 1-0 palermo is next up and plays like milan on steroids.
this is certainly fine for the best of PES players who want a consistently increasing challenge and consider this game to be "too easy" after a while, but in terms of realism -- i've said this before -- it is just not right. there is just no way, that real palermo plays the way it did. so Konami should finally build in an option to turn this feature off.
and mind you: i am not complaining, because i can't win. i am doing quite ok in the standings. and it doesn't help me either if you tell me that you don't have this problem. consider yourself lucky then. i KNOW that it is there (it always has), and i just wish there'd be a way to avoid it other than having to clear ones option file on a regular basis.