PES Chronicles

Stick with it — there are 3 more stars of difficulty, and a rewarding Master League at the end of the acclimatization tunnel!

I always remember 3 star being harder than 5 (never played 6 bizzarely enough). Perhaps take the step up?

I have moved up to 4 star. I remember that all the talk during the ‘PES5 year’ said that 3 star was harder than 5, but I never saw it myself. I played most of that year on 6 stars (once I unlocked it in the shop).

I will be sticking with PES5. It really is like playing a new PES game entirely. You know that initial doubt you have every year? I never suffer much from it in the normal run of things. I think I’m nearly acclimatised to PES5 now.

I have a good few Tournaments ahead of me before a Master League is on the cards. I really do have to win a tournament from scratch (no reloading if I’m beaten).

I think the speed issue is nothing to do with the PS3 speeding things up but simply you not having played it for at least a couple of years. When you were playing it constantly it would have seemed normal, i do remember myself feeling that PES6 gameplay was a lot slower than it’s predecessor.

PES2008 was shelved long ago for me and whenever i need my PES fix (which for the first time in a long time isn’t at least once a day) i have been picking up and loving my Master League on PES6

Well I felt like I couldn’t comment without actually going and digging PES5 out and dusting off the PS2 for a go.

Well I must say my first impressions were ‘Good god how can he want to play a game with such hazey graphics!’. To be fair after a while it wasn’t so bad, I did adjust to it.

First of all I have to make clear I SUCKED at PES5 I bought never picking up a football game before and having not watched a full football match for over 8 years (I know I should be sent to hell). So I was dire at it.

Anyway once I loaded it up I thought I’d amuse myself and see how easy the game CAN be with top players. So I setup an exibition game with me (Man Utd) against Wearside (or Sunderland to me and you). I set my players to top form and theirs to lowest. - I know setting to extremes but I was hardly going to play and develop a master league team on there!.

Anyway after 36 minutes I was 3-0 up with two wonder strikes from Heinze (Didn’t check but he must have one hell of a shot power!).

They were goals that I think in PES 2008 would of been saved as they were from a fair distance out side of the box and they travelled pretty much along the ground. No defenders touched it and they both went flying past the keeper. (I can’t believe just top form vs. bottom is going to make that much of a difference - I still take shots like this on PES2008 in the hope of some long range goals) The keeper always gets them (When I actually hit the target)

I said 36 minutes because after then I stopped I think everyone could see how that game was going to develop. I then dived right in to a ML team, default on 5 star. Setup with my new favourite formation of 4-3-3 (thanks greg lol) I was playing against Sparta Rotterdam in my first game.

I was worried after your comments of how you had to learn to defend again (I could never defend properly on PES5/6) The game came out as a goaless draw. I played exactly as I do on 2008 and was able to get some half-decent chances on goal (5 with 3 on target to their 3 & 1)

You were saying also about how with R1 the ball gets knocked forward, I thought this was more to my advantage I was able to knock the ball past players then run around them (sort of).

I’m not sure what sort of conclusion or point I’m trying to make but there was no doubt that in my mind the latest version of PES still plays like the earlier ones it has the same familar feel about it.

In a very simple way

Goalkeepers (something mentioned probably more than anything)
They were better at handling the ball but I felt at times they dont reach for the ball as often as they do on 2008 (Maybe thats why the palming things an issue)

Defending

I had to very little, I was able to easily head most of the balls away or break the attack down with ease. The rest of the time they were offside.

Attacking

Possibly easier than on 2008, I suspect that may have more to do with the defaults being slightly better than they are on the latest game.

Referee!

It felt like I was playing a non-contact sport. Whenever I got near an opposing player they got a freekick. (no cards were ever given though).

I’ve written enough and I tend to babble anyway.

I don’t mean to cause offence or anything like that if I have I just wanted to put my 2 cents in. I wonder if sometimes with these things (and I think your experiencing it now) some of the best memories are better left that way. Its like when you meet people you use to fancy when you were younger and now wonder what you were thinking.

I for one will definatly be going back to PES2008 for now, I do now feel comforted in the fact that all the time I’ve spent on the latest one has left me better equiped if I ever feel like taking another trip down memory lane. But as it stands, PES5 will be going back on the shelf to gain the dust I just wiped off it.

Paul

stinger - I think you’re right about time colouring my memories of PES5. I still can’t get over just how fast this game is, nor how wrong my memory was/is! It just goes to show you how things like eyewitness accounts of accidents, etc., can be so wrong. Not the same kind of thing really (long-term vs. short-term memory), but it’s in the ballpark. How do we know that what we (think we) know about our own past is what really happened? I’ll shut up about that now.

paww2k8 - That’s a spirited defence of PES2008! I’d never be offended at disagreement about anything I ever write on this blog.

It’ll take a lot to send me back to PES2008, but you’re right, I’m wobbling over PES5. The graphics are surprisingly getting me down and the speed of the game is still a problem. I like PES5’s ebb and flow - the stop-start of the gameplay due to the fussy refereeing falls away once you play within its limits. As ever with any PES it takes time to adapt to its specific quirks.

I disagree about the shooting and goalkeepers in PES5 as compared to PES2008. The goalkeepers in PES5 are brilliant compared to the duffers of PES2008. If it hadn’t been for the crummy keepers in PES2008, it might well have been a great game. The supercharged dribbling only led to so many goals because the goalies spilled 75% of the shots.

I’m not too proud to go back to PES2008 if my experiment with PES5 proves unsatisfying in the long run. Perhaps this week (or two) could illustrate the old saying ‘You can never go home again’. Oh, and I think your analogy about meeting people you fancied years later is apt. When I was at school I fancied the prettiest girl in my class like crazy. I saw her recently and she has not aged well at all. I also saw one of the plain girls from my class whom no one really fancied, and she is now a beautiful woman. There are indeed parallels with PES in both cases….

I’ve just defended and slagged off PES5 now I thought why isn’t he playing PES6 instead?

So today after watching the footie on the beeb I felt like playing PES. I wanted to see if I could replicate the kind of football I’d just seen.

After seeing I could hold my own on PES5 (A game I never fully got a handle on) I went after seeing how that translated in to PES6.

The last thing I’d played was PES5 so upon loading PES6 I was almost impressed by the sharpness of the graphics and overall clarity (I could clear depict player movements!)

I went straight at it, ML time defaults 5 star (I’d deleted my previous save so no 6 *). First game I fell straight in to it, wondering why I’d always done so badly on ML in the past. The game was tight but I felt I had the clearer chances, less than 2 minutes to half time Minanda crosses a ball in to the box which Espimas gets his head too and guides the ball in to the bottom right corner. I was very happy going in to half time 1-0 up.

Starting the second half I went after trying to replicate a PES2008 goal (with Dodo of all players) and made it up to the box before the bal being cleared away. I never really got any closer than that going at it 2008 style. I ended up 1-1 when conceeding to a set-peice (a corner I gave away by trying to get my keeper to collect the ball instead of letting it go over the line! I always seem to conceed goals with my silly mistakes.

I went on the second game and was amazed that my stamina drained players of last game were back fully fighting fit for my next game. I gifted another goal by passing the ball in the box instead of just clearing it. Once again another ball driven in to the box (Stremer RB) Espimas rose again and scored a carbon copy goal. (I score few goals from crosses in 2008). Another 1-1 draw but I was very pleased as I was expecting the sort of onslaught after being 1 down in the few 10minutes. It never came, I was able to just get on with the game and try and get one back.

If it wasn’t obvious I was enjoying playing PES6! (Me I’m the sort to ditch the old version for the new) I’ll go back to 2008 today or tomorrow to see how I feel.

For the moment though I can see how you said (one of the pes5 blogs) about how you enjoyed controlling the pace. Theres alot less-pressure on you and its easier to pass the ball around. I liked this alot, I was able to try and play the ‘beautiful game’ (On a lesser talented default scale of course). I’m starting to fall in the trap of thinking 2008 isn’t as good as I thought. Time will tell though. (It seems I’m one of a few that prefers the new commentary so I do miss that).

Keepers on PES6 though, BETTER!

I’m scared, I never thought I’d like this more than the new.

paww2k8 - I tinkered with my PES6 ML career right up until PES2008 came out and it’s still fresh in my mind.

I had a team of proper Galacticos at the end and it was slightly easier than PES5’s ML, but nowhere near the very very light difficulty of PES2008.

I think the disappointment (for me) of PES2008 can best be summed up by: goalkeepers. It’s easy because you score lots of goals. You score lots of goals because of the goalkeepers.

Any salvage operation that I might - *might!* - carry out on PES2008 would involve me implementing House Rules designed to curb the goals I score.

That’s what drove me away. The thought of having to do that on a PES game after years of excellence when it was not necessary was just too depressing.

Don;t you like in PES5 and PES6 how when the goalkeepers save your shots they either hold it or deflect it to safety? I’ve scored a couple of goals in PES5 over the last few days where a keeper has deflected it to my striker, but they’re the exception. In PES2008 they’re the norm!

I’ll also be checking out PES2008 at least for a few games over the next few days to see how I feel about it now. I really am wobbling on PES5 and it might be that I start back on PES6, or PES2008, or FIFA08, or…. I just don’t know. Sensible Soccer just came out on the 360. That it should come to this.

I suppose thats fair then if its because its something you’ve played recently. I hadn’t played PES6 for a good month+ pre-PES2008 so it wasn’t very clear in my mind.

I also wasn’t very good at it! lol

The thing I do like about the earlier PES is the stamina thing not being an issue. My players seem more injury prone too (which I never use to get but I welcome it).

Its true that when they do get a touch its rarely in to their own nets nor in to the other forwards. (Although it DID happen to me in PES5 in that Utd game I skied it lol.)

I haven’t had another go at PES2008 today. I’ll be spending tomorrow packing and driving back to uni and then an exam to revise for but hopeful I can get a chance pretty soon so I can compare it again after playing them.

Btw tell me if I’m approaching on writing my own blog within yours lol. I did toy with writing one but I ramble to much.

paww2k8 - Write as much as you want.It’s all good. I’ve been surprised over the past few months how the blog has affected my own experience of the game(s).

I’ve been toying with the idea of taking this blog to its own domain. It gets steady traffic, even now a few months after the release (it’ll dip sharply in the summer then pick up again from September, I bet). I think it could grow in various ways. My HTML/CSS ’skills’ are very rusty and I’d need to brush up on Java and the like. Even if I went with a Wordpress template I’d want and need to know how it all ticks. If I do move this to its own domain it’d be worth expanding the horizons a little and opening it out to guest posts, for example. It’d be fascinating, I think, to see how other people’s chronicles (over a day or two or a week or two) play out.

I work full-time though and I have various other things that take up most of my free time (PES & general gaming included, of course) so I don’t know. I’d only do it if I knew I’d be able to maintain the site properly and always keep the new content coming. As it is I sometimes only just meet my target of at least one new post per day. I have a few days off work this week and if I can tear myself away from the PS3 for long enough I’ll look into it a bit deeper.

Well fair enough then.

I’ve had many attempts at setting up websites (some such sucessful some not). Getting everything running smoothly can be an ass. To be fair even getting your own domain name and redirecting it to this site is a good start.

I’m assuming though that all the posters come from PESFan so in a way I’d might be a step back taking it off a blog site. I don’t know how many other game dedicated blogs there are on wordpress, never looked.

In a way unless you’ve got alot of time (which it doesn’t sound like) Wordpress sounds like a nice place to blog. Its reliable, fast, easy to use. The list goes on.

You can put up your own html/css content too as far as I’m aware. I was in the process of doing so for my own blog (I wouldn’t ever be able to get enough content down so I gave up).

Btw I didn’t mention it in any of my other big comments.

PES5 speed, yours sounds like the PS3 IS speeding it up. I’ve ran it on my PS2 and it runs roughly the same, possibly slightly slower than 2008 on my PC. PES6 is another matter (was using it on PC - it felt like how you described your experience of PES5 with the ball flying around).

It’d still just be a blog - only on my own domain rather than on Wordpress.

I’m steadily eating into my allotted 50MB of file space here on Wordpress - currently it’s at about 15% - and I just thought instead of buying more space here I might as well set up peschronicles on its own domain. I bought the .co.uk name a few months ago just in case (and to stop anyone else buying it and trying to sell it back to me. There are people who do that).

I don’t think it’ll happen, though. I haven’t got the time to maintain a website and produce its content. (And play games!) The last website I set up ended up taking over all my free time. When I start getting near 100% of filespace here I’ll probably just start uploading the files elsewhere and linking to them.

If you host this blog on your own domain, you can still use WordPress as the site engine — in effect, nothing would change, save that it was on your server instead of theirs.

To work fully with the WordPress themes, you really don’t need any Java at all. Most of the mojo is done with php, or modular extensions (plugins) that you won’t need to hack up.

I use WordPress as a content management system for some of my clients (I design websites), and love it. It lets me control presentation, and they control content. The backend is user-friendly and accessable.

If you want to take your site apart and make any serious changes, what you’ll really need is XHTML and CSS skills. They are the presentation layer. A basic idea of what the various php calls do will help, but honestly, they are pretty straightforward.

For hosting, I like lunarpages.com. Good rates, lots of space and bandwidth, and they’re set up well for WordPress. Migrating your MySQL db will be a bit of a slog, but the Lunarpages tech support actually answers the phone (gasp!), so they should be able to talk you through it.

ck - I’ve got a working XHTML and CSS knowledge that would probably be enough to let me make any tiny changes to the Wordpress template I ended up going with - but, for all the reasons above (mainly time), I’ll probably just stick with the status quo for now. I know I’d want to start adding bells and whistles and it’d eat into all the other stuff I have to do, and I can’t allow that to happen. A website is a true timesink.