Donadel scores!
Finally, finally. Pardon the exclamation mark up there. I was just so excited. Here is Donadel’s first goal for Coventry City:
I had to wait almost a full season for it, but it was worth it.
Apart from this high point and the ongoing Cup run, my league form is still poor. I’ve hit the doldrums again in the run-up to the mid-season negotiations. A string of draws and one defeat. If this keeps up I might find myself dragged down into the relegation dogfight. Now that would be a first.
I’m actually feeling pretty fed-up with PES2008 right now.
For one thing, I’m suddenly seeing way more slowdown.
In the match at Galatasaray earlier this season, the action slowed to a crawl every time the ball was at either end of the pitch. The same thing happened against Blackburn Rovers at their ground.
For another thing, the CPU teams this year are majorly annoying. They’ve been annoying for a couple of years, but this year the annoying is turned up to 11.
PES2008, more than any other PES before it, uses its foreknowledge of what button(s) you have just pressed to give the CPU team an advantage. In PES5 and PES6, it used the knowledge to avoid your sliding tackles on the wings but rarely anywhere else. Now, it uses that knowledge all over the park, and can sidestep or hurdle any and every sliding tackle with ease. And it will do this multiple times within seconds. For example:
Yes, that’s absolutely awful defending from me, isn’t it? But it looks worse than it is. The camera angle doesn’t help – at least one of those four attempted tackles should have stopped the other player. The above clip is an example of what the CPU players do a lot more in PES2008 than they ever did before — they turn into untouchable supermen. After the CPU player evaded the first two I kind of knew what was coming.
Am I feeling disillusioned by PES, or by PES2008 in particular? Is the hurricane of fan dismay and negative press affecting my judgement? Possibly.
Or possibly not!
That’s how I feel in my worst moments, ck, but overall I’m STILL a PES fan and there’s lots in PES2008 to love. Not least the steep difficulty that at least I’m finding in the game – the fascination of what’s difficult and so forth.
I’ve just rewatched the second clip above again (it still hurts) and the third sliding tackle I put in *should* have got the ball, the man, or both of them together. The CPU blatantly used its knowledge of my having pressed Circle at that exact moment to sidestep me. The other three tackles were less full-on.
And if you think the above clip and the Kim U Don’t clip are bad… in a day or two there’s a clip that’s even worse than those two put together!
p.s. I checked out your site – intriguing! The stuff about soccer in North America fascinates me – most Europeans are a bit scornful of how the sport goes down (or doesn’t) over there, although I’d say the rest of the world should get down on its knees and thank whateve Gods may be that the USA *doesn’t* take soccer all that seriously. If they did, there’d be no European leagues to speak of, and every World Cup would be a case of ‘who can beat the Americans?’. Oh and thanks for the link to this blog. I’ve returned the favour.
so many blunders, its like non-professional football!
have you noticed how the defenders guarding the posts in set-piece positions NEVER react when the ball rolls past their feet, into the goal?
Its official, im going up!….top of the league, over 100 goals, 40goals conceded… its crazy! (ive had huge winning streaks, and even though im in the 2nd division, my team is rated ‘B’, im sure I can reach ‘A’ before I get out of this division.
You should really great some better players. I dont know what you consider the important stats, but i checked out donadel and he has no stars, i dont think frutos does either. those stars are important, balance, acceleration, top speed are the top priorities for me too.
p.s. Where do you get the time to play so much? self-employed? lol
Really? I don’t know about this game.
At the moment, the only thing PES has to do to keep players like us is still play better than FIFA, but it seems like a sinking franchise. This year’s release just sounds like it’s poorly done and I’m not sure 8-9 months is enough time to overhaul the game in time for 2009.
They badly need a new 3-D engine featuring 16 angles of movement, better collision detection (coughKimUDon’tcough), more delicately-tuned CPU cheats, a more granular set of options for difficulty setting, etc. The list could go on, but in the end they decided to overhaul something that already worked (online play), and f*cked it up.
It’s ambitious to develop one game across multiple platforms so that you could have worldwide online play, but at what expense? If you don’t have enough guys to do the ambitious and your bread and butter, do you drop the bread and butter? In this case, Konami dropped both!
When you see these endemic problems (consistently crappy art direction, poor default uniforms, bad grass textures, etc.) within a franchise, it means that they don’t have the talent. When they scale back features (editing modes, gameplay modes) or fail to make basic obvious value-adds (full second divisions for top leagues), it shows you they don’t have enough institutional bandwidth to make it work.
In all seriousness, why should so many people have to wait for the first good fan patch to start a ML?
^ All of this are my thoughts based on reports from across the pond on how the game plays and its problems. It’s a tribute to the quality of PES that I care enough to read about a game it looks like I’m not going to get to play until December. I just wish they’d get it right.
@David – congratulations on the promotion (and the goals!). I keep trying to get better players but my team ranking stops me. I’ve got the best players I can get right now. It’s a vicious circle. I do pay attention to the ability stars but so many of those players’ clubs won’t let me negotiate. Oh, and I do work full-time… what can I say?! I like to spend my free time playing PES. I only average 5 games per session, but I’ve had two or three such sessions over the past weeks. That’ll settle down over the next month or two.
@ck – I won’t deny that when I look at the next-gen consoles, when I look at the likes of Oblivion, CoD4, Bioshock, and especially FIFA08, PES2008 on the PS3 is more like a PS2.5 game than a true next-gen title. The Xbox 360 version is graphically richer – colours are more vibrant, framerates are smoother, and there’s no v-sync tearing – but those missing features are still missing.
I guess my PES fanboyism is currently carrying me through all these ML matches, season after season. Will I play this game almost every day for the next year? I don’t know yet. If/when I start actually getting good at it, will the impetus to go on playing simply vanish? Also unknown.
Hey (Not) Greg. Been reading your blog for a while and loving it. Who doesn’t love to read about other players’ MLs? I had bought PES2008 for the PS2, hated it, and gone back to playing PES6, but you inspired me to start a 2008 ML (with WE United). Surprisingly I managed to be promoted in the first season. I suppose it’s different because it’s on the PS2, but I didn’t find it nearly as hard as you did. As far as defending goes, you have to give up on the circle bottom for good. Just go for the x, or simply position your defenders between the opposition and your goal. You can even just stand there without tackling, they’ll usually try to move around you or try passing the ball to another player, which is much easier for you to intercept.
I found that dribbling past defenders is harder now than it was before. Maybe because my players are mostly donkeys. My current lineup is Ivarov GK, Filipe (RB), Libermann (CB), Luisão (CB), Ronny (LB), Bradley (DMF), Ederson (CMF), Diogo Rincon (AMF), Kim (LMF), Di Michele (RMF), Kim Uon Hi (CF). On the bench I have many of the default donkeys plus some good players like Lincoln (AMF), Sans (DMF), Van der Meer (SS) and Doesburg (SB).
Hey Mirandinha, glad you like the blog. It’s something I thought of doing to put all the time I spend playing PES to a good use…
Are you a Newcastle fan perchance? Everyone frondly remembers the first high-profile Brazilian player to play in the English Div 1 (as it then was). I’m sure he was the first.
I’m told things are different on the PS3 compared to the PS2. (Is it true that the PS2 game is a virtual carbon copy of PES6? That’s shocking if so. People said PES6 was PES5 with a lick of paint but it was really very different. Ditto PES5/PES4. And so on.
I just played a few International games on PES2008 and found it so easy to defend with the full-on international players. In four games I kept three clean sheets and scored seven goals. (Had to suspend play to go to work.) So I’m thinking mroe and mroe that I just need better players and/or to concentrate more when I’m playing. I’ve noticed that making your players keep to their positions – and not drag them all over the place chasing CPU dribblers – is vital.
Hey Greg. Mirandinha is my pesfan.com nickname. I’m Brazilian, and a São Paulo FC fan. I chose Mirandinha as my nick exactly in honour of the once Newcastle player yes. And he was a right cheeky character to boot.
Yes, PES 2008 is a carbon copy of PES6, I’m sad to say. Total ripoff. I thought PES6 was much different from PES5, but this time around it’s really not the case.
I haven’t experience any of the stamina problems, for example. And the new moves are nowhere to be found on the PS2.
I found that defending this time has a lot less with your defenders body balance numbers than with proper positioning and tackling. You have to really position your defender right before you tackle. If you do, you don’t even have to press the x button sometimes. Now that I’m more used to the game’s new defending mechanics, it’s become a lot easier than on PES6.
Attacking has been a little harder for me. Dribbling past opponents seems harder this time. At least I haven’t found the shortcuts yet. It got actually too easy in PES6 after a while.
I like your choice of players, Donadel was brilliant for me, as was Felipe (the backbone of my defence for many seasons), Shaw was amazing too, as was Guimarães. You can play the latter as DMF with great results after he’s developed a little.
Anyway, keep it up. I’ll be reading daily.:)
That’s pretty poor about the PS2 version being PES6.5 – I really hope the PSP version (whenever it comes out) isn’t the same. I’ve disliked both PSP versions of PES so far mainly due to the insane loading times (pre-game, post-game, and even IN-GAME), but if they’ve included a Master League with player growth this time I might learn to put up with it.
You might be planning to get a next-gen console in the future to play PES2008 on – at the moment I’d say make it the 360. The PS3 version of the game is graphically a lot poorer (at times it almost looks like a black and white movie next to the 360’s vibrant colours) and frequently has screen tearing and jittery framerate drops. The PS3 patch is rumoured to be out tomorrow (Monday 19th Nov) so we’ll have to see what if anything it fixes.
As for defending… I just completed an International Tournament with England – mainly to unlock the classic players for Master League, but also to see if I’m really as bad at PES2008 as I seem to be. I’m not, as it turns out – with the England players I really was able to defend much better.
Felipe’s in my squad, and I’ll be rejigging my defence soon.