PES Chronicles

A member of PESfan called Ziggy Bashmore (great name) has created a superb guide to starting out on Master League with the Default squad in PES2008. The site referees have already made the thread a sticky in the Hints and Tips section (membership required to view), and rightly so.

View the guide (hosted at Imageshack)

What I love about the guide is that it is expressly aimed at experienced PES players who might be struggling this year with Master League. There’s no babywalking the reader through ‘what button to press to shoot’ and the like. It’s straight down to business.

The mini players’ biographies are intriguing, if only to see what another Master League player makes of the Default stiffs. It turns out that Ziggy has much the same low opinion of Ximelez as I do.

Of particular interest to me is the section on form arrows and the exact effects that they have on your players. Very interesting indeed… Ziggy also recommends taking advantage of the Regulate Condition feature, something I haven’t used for two PESes now. I might reconsider.

As with any guide to any game, there are areas where you will disagree. And you might not even want to look at any guide at all. Making your own mistakes in a game and gradually discovering its secrets for yourself can be most of the fun. Having said that, if this guide had been available two weeks ago, I’d have read it. Twice. An hour.

You know you’re on a roll when things like this happen.

The video clip below isn’t too clear. I was playing Wigan Athletic. I was 0-1 down and desperate for a goal to get back into the game.

That’s me attacking – with Huylens, of all people. It was meant to be a cross. The keeper collects the ball about a foot outside his goal, and then holds onto it as he falls backward into the goal.

Yes, the whole of the ball does cross the whole of the line. The goal was given. I was, needless to say, happy…

The own goal made things 1-1. I won the game 2-1 in the end and kept my winning run going. I’m still 8th though. Everyone else around me won too.

The keepers in PES games usually release it automatically at times like that. Maybe my other player nearby made this keeper hold onto it for longer than usual.

What made this incident sweeter was that the goalkeeper was none other than Chris Kirkland, the former real-life Coventry City player.

Whenever a player in real-life scores an own-goal for his old club, people always wonder – half-jokingly, but half-seriously too – if he did it on purpose.

So, did Chris do it on purpose? As a virtual character in PES2008?

Oh, come on. If Konami couldn’t be bothered to include kit selection in the game (never mind a decent framerate), they’re unlikely to indulge in modelling players’ behaviour that minutely.

Are they? Here’s a picture I took of Chris a few moments later. He’s obviously sulking (nice pout, Chris), but I think he looks secretly pleased.