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.

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.

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.