Camacho of the day Comments Off
There he is – Camacho in all his glory, in the sky blue of Singers FC, wearing one of those fey ‘alice bands’ when it’d be much simpler to get yer hair cut. I might dive into the Edit mode and give him a bald head, you know, just for a laugh.
This is the first of my (hopefully regular) special posts focusing on players’ stats and special abilities in PES2008. So far it’s not an area I’ve dabbled in, but it is understandably pretty fundamental to the PES world and to the Master League corner of it in particular.
Most of my mobile phone ’screenshots’ turned out badly again, despite me taking extra, extra special care to keep my hand steady. Never mind. Some of them are useable, and I took some handwritten notes. Also, because Camacho is still only 18 years old there isn’t much to look at for the moment. This first glance at his stats is purely to lay down a marker, so that when I look again at his stats in two or three seasons’ time we can see in precisely what areas he has developed the most.
Camacho’s top stats at the moment are thus:
Attack 75
Defence 63
Body Balance 75
Top Speed 78
Acceleration 79
Shot Power 83
Aggression 83
Mentality 76
Team work 78
He has three special abilities listed:
Middle Shooting
Playmaker
Passing
For a callow 18-year-old youth, those are pretty impressive numbers, and he has a trio of special abilities that should – should - combine to make him a deadly attacking force in future years.
Naturally Camacho’s impressive stats are tempered by the averageness of his other stats. PES stats are an organic whole. A player with a 99 Attack rating who is rated 50 in all other areas would be a terrible player. You can’t extract a few choice categories and determine whether or not the player will be great to play with, or a nightmare who will keep losing the ball and/or shanking it into row Z.
But Camacho is ticking all the right boxes. His other stats, while in the low 60s or 70s, are on the up-and-up as well.
Again, I’m cursing my shaky hand for making my mobile phone pictures turn out blurry, but one of them turned out okay, and shows just how far Camacho has developed in the short time he has been with me. In the picture, his Joined stats are on the left, and his Present stats on the right.
I got Camacho in the middle of last season before he had played for anyone else. He’s had just over half a season with me to develop to the small extent that he has. Being a young player, he’s unfit for every other game on average and doesn’t play. So effectively he’s only had a quarter of a single season playing in my team.Nevertheless, he has come on remarkably, to the point where I consider him an essential player. When he’s missing from my midfield I tend to struggle. Those Playmaking and Passing special abilities are critical for me and my rather ordinary team at the moment.
I haven’t seen the best of his Middle Shooting as yet. He still can’t outpace many other players, and thus the space to exploit his Middle Shooting is in short supply. In any case, the fact that he has this ability does not mean he’ll be firing rockets into the net from the word go. His other, regular stats – Shot Technique, for one – have to develop to the point where everything complements everything else and reposes in a perfect kind of harmony. Additionally, it seems to me that PES2008 is less long-shot-friendly than the last two versions.
His development graph shows a relatively low peak in a few seasons’ time, but these graphs are often only indicative of a player’s future development. Plenty of PES players can and do exceed the upper red line.
If past experience is anything to go by, Camacho at the age of 25 or so will be one of those players who has stats in the high 80s and 90s pretty much across the board. I am salivating already. The question is: will I be able to keep him? Having started a PES2008 with House Rules, those rules might dictate that I have to get rid of him if he gets too good…
The next time I do one of these special stats posts, I’ll look at two players side-by-side and do some comparing and contrasting. One of my Default players and one of my best new signings might be interesting to look at together. Ordaz and Caracciolo? Something like that.
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NB: For reasons out of my control, tomorrow’s and Sunday’s posts might appear later than usual. A lot later… possibly not until the late evening.