Bread and Butter Goals
Goals! They’re what football is all about, and I’m here to talk about particular kinds of goals…
I’m talking bread and butter goals – the kinds of goals you cannot have a football team without. Oh, those 35-yard, curling, dipping, wonder strikes are all well and good (thanks Macco)…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jiQ33oaAwI&rel=1]
(and let’s see that again, slowed down and from another angle)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2Y-PBmZB3U&rel=1]
….but without the routine tap-in types of goals, preceded by methodical team-work, you’ve got nuthin’ to back up all that window dressing. Here’s Schwarz finishing off an incisive move:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fdo0lfZttfk&rel=1]
It’s fair to say that Shimizu is a vertically-challenged kind of player. It’s almost comical to see him next to a big defender out on the pitch. One game I was so short of strikers that I had to play Shimizu in the middle up front. But I got my reward. Here’s Shimizu leaping like a salmon in the box:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8jQwcIIBWk&rel=1]
Sadly, while I’m now getting the bread and butter goals, I’m still just as leaky at the back. It is starting to infuriate me that the CPU teams can seemingly score at will, at times, in certain games. You know you’re in trouble when you mysteriously cannot clear six CPU corners in a row and the constant pressure only slackens when the CPU has got the goal that it’s clearly after.
I’ll write at greater length about PES conspiracy theories (aka ’scripting’) another time. I tend to flip between the two camps: those who believe in it, and those who believe that it’s all down to the Formation settings and the human player’s skill – or lack of it – at defending. It depends where I am in the game. Here at the start of my Master League career, I have to say I believe in it. There are too many last-minute CPU equalisers and winners. There are too many times when my previously formidable centre-backs falter and trip over their own feet with no one else around.
But this post is meant to be about goals. The bread and butter kind.
This one was tapped in by Folan in the 90th minute at the end of a good move that featured a raking 50-yard cross-field Circle-pass from Guimaraes. The score had been 2-2 for most of a dour second half, and this won me the game. I was jumping around the room. Almost incidentally, this goal completed a hat-trick for Folan in the match:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwDNFTBOYX0&rel=1]
When I moved back to Kansas and started supporting the Wizards (Kansas...
The Folan goal is just fantastic. Beautiful football.
There is scripting in PES.
1. The entire game is a computer script anyway.
2. Konami have chosen a simulationist approach. They aren’t interested in a truly level playing field, they are interested in a game that plays and feels like real life football.
3. In order to replicate the results and run of play of real-life football, Konami must do one of the following:
3a. Perfectly mathematically model real football
3b. Use “reverse engineering” to cause their game scripts to reflect the way things work.
Konami have chosen 3b — clearly, we don’t have the understanding of physics, body-mind biochemistry or math to perfectly model any sport. What we can do is look at how things work (i.e. what minute is a goal most likely to be scored in an average match?) and weight the game’s probability scripting toward that result.
I think it’s the right approach, but there are times when Konami really go overboard, and it (like the ending of a Scorcese movie) becomes a bit heavy handed.
We need the illusion of gamism (consistent rules, skill matters most) to enjoy the game, and four games in ten decided by last minute headers off of corners breaks the fourth wall. Plodding centre-backs catching up to my mercurial winger breaks the fourth wall.
Here’s a test I ran once on PES 2006: I played the same big match in a Maste League, and no matter how many goals I scored, my opponent would come right back and score on me. Every time. The results went:
1-1, 3-3, 0-0, etc.
It wasn’t just that they were in good form while my team was in poor (which I could live with), it was that the reverse-engineering said “set conditions for a draw” and the script was so heavy-handed that I (with my medium to low level of skill) couldn’t break it.
I’m planning to write about scripting in PES as it’s such a controversial subject. (I think I’ll catch up with myself on the ML front first, though.)
Accounts of people testing individual games as you did are common over on PESfan – I must have read dozens of them over the years since PES5 came out. It was with PES5, I think, that scripting in PES became so in-your-face and obvious that I fail to see how anyone can seriously deny its existence.
Of course, the debate rages about whether it’s only more pronounced in Master League, or if it permeates all game modes. Online players claim to see it all the time as well. But some PES players would say it doesn’t exist at all.
I’ve never gone as far as setting out to test a single game, but there was once an occasion when the game crashed on me in the final minute of what was about to be a 0-1 defeat. I’d absolutely dominated the game, having a good 20 or more shots and 60-70% possession, to the CPU’s 1 shot/1 goal response. I was happy to reload my pre-game save, thinking I might have dodged a bullet.
Predictably for us PES conspiracy theorists, the second game followed exactly the same pattern. If I had been more curious at the time (this was years ago) I might have played and replayed the game over and over a lot until I was certain of what looked like blatant scripting.
I agree with your point about PES frequently breaking the fourth wall – immersiveness is truly the key to proper enjoyment of this franchise. Immersion in the action, and in the narratives generated by each individual game – and, on a larger scale, by a Master League career. Anything that intrudes on our suspensions of disbelief is a minus-point for the game.
Oh, and when I got that goal with Folan (on Sunday or Monday just gone) I finally thought I’d started PES2008 at last!
Have you got your copy of the game yet? I’d be very interested to find out how it plays on a US setup.
It’s not a conspiracy! It’s a recognition that yes, the game attempts to simulate real life football drama and scenarios and the only way to do so is from the outside in — i.e. for weighting probabilities away from their “normal” state, and closer to the state that achieves the desired end.
It’s the only way it would work. The question is, where’s the proper balance?
If you’re going to get a last-minute goal against a player at the level of Rob McLean, your probabilities would have to be weighted toward that goal so strongly that a player like myself would never have a chance of stopping it.
Conversely, a game that I found to be a balanced contest that simulated the oppossing team “digging deep” wouldn’t likely trouble Rob much if at all.
I think sometimes that the real question is one of fine-tuning the simulationist stuff so that it doesn’t appear to override the gamist stuff (although, of course, it does).
Haven’t gotten my copy yet– and sadly, as I’m on a PS2, I just realized today that I might not be able to play it when it does arrive, due to region-speciific games.
Which means I may be shelling out $500.00 for the PS3, essentially just so I can play Pro Evo three months early.
Commence mocking me.
You could always get a 360…. RROD-risk and the sheer NOISE it makes both notwithstanding. I’ve played the full game on the 360 and it’s graphically much better. Colours are richer. The game plays smoother. I only saw slowdown in replays, and even then only rarely. I tell you what, if I was making my next-gen console decision knowing what I know now, it’d be a 360 for me. You get used to the Xbox pad after a while. The PS3 pad is also equipped with ridiculously spongy trigger buttons.
Re: scripting – over the past few years I’ve beaten and drawn with many players online (on the rare occasions I have played online) who were clearly much better than me. They haven’t said anything afterward (probably because they were so used to seeing the game play for their opponent at times) but still, we both knew what had just gone down, oh yes. Ten minutes or so of a mutually interactive script.
to b honest after playing pes since pes 04 (masterleague starting in pes 5) i never hav noticed this scripting. 2 b honest i find more often then not ill go down 1st, usually in the 1st half. maybe some ppl jst slacken off in the last 15 minutes or so, jst try 2 keep possession in those dying seconds, passing around ur defence. maybe scripting is real, i really dont know, but there are ways of avoiding being its victim