PES Chronicles

I deliberately chose not to bring in many new players during yesterday’s mid-season negotiations. First and foremost, I felt that I didn’t need them. I was top of the league and doing very nicely, thank you. Bringing in a load of new players could only disrupt the harmony. So I settled for three new players, only one of whom—the 17-year-old Andy Cole—is in my starting line-up.

What I’m leading up to here is that I went on a run of two straight defeats and a draw immediately after the negotiations period, and I don’t know why.

Sure, I played Stam, Rasnic, and Andy Cole (my three new boys) in some of the games, but not in all of them, and never all at once. Regardless, it felt as if I was playing with a different team from the one that finished week 18, just before the negotiations, in the #1 spot in the league table.

In game 19 I played Marseille, at home, and lost 1-2 after being 1-0 up until the 80th minute. Dammit, I thought, and cursed myself for an apparent lack of concentration.

Next up were Lazio away, and it was another game like the one before. I lost 3-2 after being 1-2 up in the 90th minute. Really. Lazio scored two goals in injury time. Now that was hard to take. I was careless and angry, yes, but the way these two games had gone had made me that way. Everything is Seabass & co.’s fault, not mine.

Well, maybe it’s partly mine. Or mostly mine. But what are we expected to do, as PES players? Are we supposed to sense beforehand when the CPU is out to get us, and play on full defensive mode for the entire game, settling for a 0-0? Because that’s often the only way to approach such games. And you can’t really tell until well into the first half just what mood the CPU is in, by which time the pattern of the game is set.

This kind of thing happens a lot when the CPU is in one of those moods. My player—Camacho, a great little tackler—is the one who wins the tackle, but loses it:

My next game against Sampdoria was another Super CPU game. This time I exercised a little more restraint and managed to come away with a 1-1. It was 0-0 for a long time, but then I sneaked a jammy goal in the middle of the second half. After that point the only time I was allowed to have the ball was in order to kick it back immediately to a CPU player. And then Sampdoria got their equalising goal. And then the game was over.

What on Earth was going on? If I’d won the three games, as I expected to, I’d most likely be way out in front and a near-certainty for promotion. Was the game just making the league table look more, you know, exciting again? The argument about PES and scripting has gone on for years and will likely go on for years to come, unless Team Seabass really does rip it up and start again in 2010. Maybe then we’ll get a football game that always plays the same regardless of how well/badly you’re doing.

After all this, I took on Spartak and beat them 1-3, a good performance that included this goal from Camacho. A raking cross leads to a sweet first-time stretching volley:

Is there nothing this player can’t do? And he’s still only 20, with several seasons of development to go.
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So, after these four games, I’ve slipped to second place and I’m only 3 points clear of the fourth-placed team.

If that’s what the game wanted to do, it’s a job well done.

I’ll now have to be careful not to allow myself to be overhauled and slip out of the top 3.

What are the odds that the final game of this season will see me battling for a promotion place or for the league title?

I think those odds are pretty good.