PES Chronicles

I’ve played another five matches here in my first season in Master League on PES2008 on the PS3. I’m playing on Top Player difficulty. The Master League difficulty level is set to Very Hard. I’m also playing in a custom ‘Superleague’ made up of all the top club teams in the game (and Aston Villa).

I started the season pretty well. I actually won a game, which I wasn’t expecting to do. I only lost two games, and they were pretty close. Huh, I was thinking, PES2008? I’ll be back on PES5 before 2008 is even here…

Reality has set in. 5 hard defeats in a row. My players’ stamina levels from game to game have become so bad that they can barely walk with the ball, never mind run with it. Sprinting? The default players have never sprinted. Don’t make me laugh. But they at least used to waddle a bit faster than usual. Those days are gone. Sniff.

I lost the 5 games very badly. Stupid goals conceded far too easily, even taking into account the Default players’ skill-lessness. Any slender hopes I once had of maybe, possibly, challenging for promotion in my first season are firmly dashed. Even if I have a superb Negotiation Period (and I won’t), it won’t be enough to lift me back up the table.

The likes of Napoli, Sampdoria, and Sevilla are seriously good – far too good for Division 2. They’re all up there near the top, challenging for promotion, already a long way away from me.

Celtic dumped me out of the cup, 6-2 on aggregate. I was never in contention after the first leg at my ground ended 0-3. I briefly had some hope when I went 1-0 up in the second leg at their place, but that hope was quickly crushed as Celtic stormed back to go in at half-time 3-1. I grabbed a consolation goal towards the end.

It’s tempting to switch the match times to 5 minutes in order to speed up my progress through this tedious phase of my new Master League, but I can’t do that. There are two crimes I have never committed during several years of PES gaming. I have never reloaded a save in order to get a different result in any match. (Honestly.) And I have never played Master League games on anything other than 10-minute match lengths. (Some pre-season friendlies excepted.)

For me it’s now all about getting to the mid-season Negotiations, bringing in a couple of good players, and then having as good a second part of the season as possible. If I can position myself to have a great pre-season Negotiations after this one, I should – should - be able to challenge for promotion next season. Ah, but by then my House Rules will be in full swing…

The first big House Rule will start to affect me in this very season. During the mid-season Negotiations I plan to trim my squad to 28 players and keep it that way. At least until next season, when – depending on results, and how the game ‘feels’ – I might even bring the squad down to 25 players. The ultimately challenging squad size would be 20 players. That’s one for the far future, I think.

The House Rules will come into play as and when they are appropriate. There’s no point bringing them in now. The Default squad players are almost a House Rule of their very own.