Season’s beatings Comments Off
Happy bleedin’ Christmas. There’s nothing quite like a bit of PES on Christmas morning. Every year I have at least a couple of games before being dragged away to the delights of those tasty little sausages wrapped in bacon, bottomless glasses of fizzy red wine, and paper hats that don’t fit on my big head. This morning, as slate-grey clouds scudded overhead and the neighbours’ kids raced up and down the road on their new bikes, I sat down in my sad little room and powered up the PS3.
There’s not much Christmas spirit in evidence in my Master League at the moment. I played four more matches – taking me tantalisingly close to the mid-season negotiations (aka the Promised Land). I took another four gruesome beatings, dished out to me by a ruthless CPU. I have now lost nine games in a row.
This is considerably worse than how I remember it going the last time around. Bumping up the ML difficulty level from Normal to Very Hard has done exactly what it said on the tin.
Atalanta, Marseille, Benfica, Feyenoord: all four teams came, saw, and conquered. I spent this morning alternately groaning and crying out in frustration as none of my passing moves worked and very few of my shots found the target. I scored one goal in the four matches. Just one: a header from a corner. Not even a proper goal…
The only positive spin I can put on this morning’s results is that I kept the goals-against tally down to a reasonable level. Only one team, Benfica (a very strong outfit), scored more than two goals against me. Admittedly they did score five without reply, so I can’t be too overjoyed at ‘only’ losing 0-1, 0-2, and 1-2 in the other fixtures.
I have two more games to play before I get to the mid-season Negotiations. There was no time to get there this morning. It’s bloody Christmas, after all. There are certain things that one simply has to do at Christmas, whether or not you’d rather be playing PES. If I don’t get to see The Guns of Navarone on TV for the umpteenth time, I won’t be happy.