On The Fritz
Back to my International Cup efforts on PES6 today. After my taster of the next-gen PES it’s hard to take the cartoony-looking PES6 seriously. It’s tempting to just go through the motions and let the game more or less play itself while I think about how I’ll be feeling this time next week when I should (GAME’s excellent preorder service willing) be sitting down to fire up the full PES2008 on my PS3.
You have to concentrate when you’re playing PES. Granted, when you’re playing on the lower difficulty settings you can get away with thinking about something else. But on Top Player, where every PES player finds his rightful home eventually (how long does it take you to ’settle’ there every year? Minutes, hours, days? Weeks?), it’s no good playing the game with half or even three-quarters of your attention.
Focusing fully, I beat Germany 1-0 in the group opener. After humming and hawing for a while, I had replaced Owen with Crouch in the starting lineup. I moved Rooney out to the left wing, and placed Crouch where he belongs – right in front of the opponent’s keeper. I don’t rate Crouch at all in real life, but I quite like Crouch in PES6 in the same way that I quite liked Heskey in PES4. Big and lumbering, yes, but they have a way of making things happen.
I got my reward halfway through the first half. Ball out wide to Rooney – he can be one of the best wingers in the game, as it’s tough for him to be shaken off the ball – and a run down to the corner flag. Checked back onto his right foot and sent over a double-tap cross… Crouch was on the edge of the box. I had no other players nearby. For such a tall player (with his celebrated ‘good touch for a big man’), Crouch is pretty useless in the air. What he often does in real life, and in PES6, is to perform acrobatic scissor-kicks with those Daddy-long-legs of his.
He did so now. Executed a perfect scissors kick, his long limbs somehow gracefully coordinating themselves in the air, and sent the ball past Kahn into the roof of the net.
Unlike in my disaster against Argentina a few days ago, I defended well and played the rest of the game out quite comfortably. I’m now joint-top of the group with Turkey. The other team in the group is Holland. That’s my next fixture.
I really am playing these games one at a time, every day, by the way. I work full time. As the new PES approaches I’m less and less motivated to play the current one. Especially after playing the PES2008 demo. Come this time next week I’ll be playing many, many games per day, so this is the calm before the storm…
Similar posts:
- Triple Dutch
- “Now we can concentrate on the league”; and Negotiate This
- PES2008: The First Game
- England 0, Wales 3
- A Blast From The Past