PES Chronicles

How careless of me. Here I have been playing PES2008* for a couple of weeks now, and I still haven’t done a proper job of updating my First XI and Full Squad lists. Here’s the First XI:

Despite my lowly position and my continuing failure to get to grips with the game, I think this is a pretty good First XI.

There are a couple of niggling worries. Yamada is playing so out of position at the moment, but I want to play Camacho on the right. And Yamada is a little short of having the quality needed to take the place of one of my strikers up front. Couto and Maldini in the centre of defence are both Youth players and not very strong. I concede loads of goals and it’s all their fault (not mine…). But I want to develop them and I haven’t got any great CBs on the bench anyway.

(Whoops. I’ve just noticed that I’ve missed a player off the squad list: a very capable CB/DMF called Donk (really). I got him in the first negotiations in season 2007, and he’s been pretty solid. He’s only on the bench now because I’ve got Maldini and Couto and I want to develop them.  I haven’t got time now to update the squad list, but I’ve got negotiations coming up in the next day or so. A couple of players will leave and others will be coming in, so I’ll update the list then.)

One peculiar thing I have noticed about PES2008: the CPU is very keen to initiate trade-in deals of its own.

I’ve never known the CPU in any PES to do that before, or if it did, it was a very rare occasion and the players it offered to you were absolutely terrible. Not so this time around. Of my current squad, I got Batlles, Sergio Garcia, Sibon, and Komol—all of them pretty good players—from trade-ins offered by the CPU for the likes of Castolo, Stein, and the rest of them.

*It’s no longer ‘last-gen PES2008′. It’s just PES2008. From now on I’ll only draw the distinction when specifically comparing it to the so-called next-gen PES2008 .