Singers FC: mid-season 2010 Comments Off
Well, this is a bit of an anti-climax. Here I am at the mid-season transfer window… and I’ve got a transfer embargo on. There’s nothing to do, really, except press the X button as many times as it takes to get me through to Week 19 of the season. I really have got one of those abortive boomerang controllers for my PS3, you know. Honest…
Several posts ago I was talking about my talented left-winger, Melengue. I was worried about his suddenly-discovered ability to run literal rings around the opposition—often performing actual loop-the-loops, what with this being next-gen PES2008 (curse you, Seabass).
This next-gen PES2008 phenomenon of wonder-dribbling, as I call it, sees any in-game player of modest abilities or better (i.e., a lot of in-game players) able to go off on unstoppable runs and beat as many players as it takes and slot an easy goal into the net at the end of it. On Top Player. No, I don’t know what Team Seabass was thinking either.
My House Rules are designed to prevent me having any players with the abilities to go on wonder dribbles. Thus, Melengue had to go. So there had to be some transfer activity after all.
I looked for a decent AMF to swap him for. I found a player called Zicu who, unlike Melengue, was mainly left-footed.
The name worried me: Zicu was sufficiently like Zico for me to suspect an ‘Elcherino moment’ approaching. But Zicu is not Zico. He’s Romanian, for one thing, and his abilities are pretty modest. He’s got decent pace, though, so he’ll have to be watched for signs of wonder-dribbling.
And that was that for the mid-season negotiations. Zicu takes Melengue’s place in the First XI, and it’s on to Week 19, and whoever I’ll be playing there…
I’m not very enthusiastic about the future for me and this game.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again (because it’s true): next-gen PES2008 is a terrible PES game.
In its own terms, considered as a standalone game, it’s an okay football game—a solid 7/10 football game. But in terms of the PES franchise? I’d give it 4/10.
For probably the first time since I started this blog, I am not a few days ahead of matters. As of right now (Thursday afternoon, 28/2) I haven’t got any further in PES2008 than the latest news in this post—the signing of Zicu.
I can’t guarantee there’ll be any new news on Friday. I feel a bit PESsed off, to be frank.
I would far rather be playing other games right now. And no, I don’t mean the likes of FIFA08. Currently I’m less than enamoured by all football games, full stop.
I’ve got a load of great games to get through away from the sports genre. Oblivion, Halo3, Assassin’s Creed, Command & Conquer, Mass Effect. I’m currently playing through the opening hours of Okami—a criminally neglected PS2 game with cel-shaded, quasi-anime graphics that look utterly spectacular on the screen. The gameplay’s great as well, fortunately.
And I’ve been playing Portal on the Xbox360. I just finished it late last night. The entire game only lasts about four hours and sees you constantly jumping through wall-mounted vaginas (Freud would have a field day). But I think it’s the greatest game I’ve played for many years, apart from PES—the PESes before this disgraceful next-gen PES, of course.
I’ve been in these moods before and come out of them. Maybe I will again.
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POSTSCRIPT – 15.00 hours GMT
Just received an email from Amazon – my copy of the PSP version has dispatched and should get to me either tomorrow or Saturday. (I’m glad now that I resisted buying the PS2 version. Why should Konami and Seabass be rewarded for shoddy workmanship any more than they already have been?)
Could the PSP version save the day? It just might. I’ve been playing the PSP version of PES6 quite regularly over the past few weeks and—apart from the lack of player development in Master League and the shocking loading times—it’s not bad. Not bad at all.
We’ll see how it goes.