PES Chronicles

It’s Valenciennes. My latest bogey team is Valenciennes.

I can’t beat them. Even if I’m 1-0 up and it looks as if I will beat them, they’ll score two or three goals with seeming effortlessness, and beat me. Being in a small league I seem to be playing them every few minutes.

They’re also my current Cup opponents. I’m pretty sore about the first leg. I was 1-0 up, at home, until almost the end of the game. Then somehow ended up losing it 1-2. How the—? I don’t know how I let that happen, but it’ll make the second leg—which I’ll play sometime later today—very interesting. I’ll need to score at least two goals, against my bogey team, in a game that I’m still learning.

Last-gen PES2008 plays a sublime game of football. I have to mention the speed of the game. When I tried to get back into PES5 a few months ago, one of the factors that ultimately turned me off it was what that it seemed just too fast for me. I’m happy to report that I don’t find this to be the case at all with the PSP/PS2 version of PES2008. I think a lot of this satisfaction has to do with me not playing the ultra-slow-paced FIFA08 so much nowadays. (It’s been two or three weeks since I last played FIFA08.)

Slowly I’m picking up what can and cannot be done in PES2008. (Pretty soon I’m going to drop the last-gen/next-gen thing and just call it PES2008.) At the moment, defending cannot be done. The CPU attacks me with pace and deadly passing and I’m all over the place at the back.

For me, this PES2008 is effectively an all-new PES game—and I’m delighted with it. It might be March, but in PES terms it feels like October. My PES year has been saved.

But I should have done with it what I usually do with a new PES game every October: just play Exhibitions and Tournaments for several days until I feel I’ve got the measure of things.

When the PSP version landed on my doormat a couple of weeks ago I skipped the preamble and jumped straight into a Master League. On Top Player. It was a mistake to do that, but having done it I don’t want to undo it. I’m having a great time in PES again.

In the league I’ve played a couple more games: won 1, lost 1. The one I lost? Yes, it was against Valenciennes…

At least that solitary victory—a 1-0 win with an explosive centre-forward’s header from Podolski from the edge of the box—has lifted me off the foot of Division 2.