Season’s beatings
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.
Hope you had a nice Christmas. I couldn’t help but spend a good chunk of the day playing PES myself. I started a new super ML in the mold of yours, and guess who appeared in the first transfer window: Shimizu. I got the little guy, and he’s now playing a big guy/small guy partnership with Ribeiro (a 199cm tall Konami player).
Last time I had Shimizu on a PS2 version of the game was PES5. He just would NOT come to me in PES6 for any kind of money. Even after I started winning Trebles and offering very silly money for him, to see what would happen, he just wouldn’t come.
If/when you get to play PES2008 on the next-gen consoles, you’ll find that Shimizu is one of many ridiculously overpowered attackers who can waltz through entire defences without much effort. Yes, I’m *DOWN* on PES2008 at the moment.
I’ll be getting the ‘last-gen’ version for the PSP when it comes out in a few weeks and I’m actually looking forward to it.
For the moment, I’ll get this Superleague thing out of the way and then I almost certainly won’t touch PES2008 next-gen again all year.