How to beat Barcelona

Play very, very carefully, and with lots and lots of concentration, is the short answer.

The same holds true for just about any single game on PES2008. You can never be comfortable, never complacent (well, I can’t be).

Just when I think I’ve got this game licked, I’ll relax my guard and come a cropper. This is all the next-gen version’s fault. Everything is the next-gen version’s fault, up to and including world hunger.

I’m convinced that the PSP/PS2 version is no harder, intrinsically, than previous versions on these consoles—so why am I creaking along in the middle of Division 1 in my sixth season? I’m an average player, yes, that much has been established. But even this average player was at least going for the Championship by this stage of Master League careers in PES6, in PES5, in PES4… all the way back there.

I go a goal up and I get sloppy. My muscle memory remembers the 130+ hours spent playing next-gen PES2008, where you only have to think “I want to score a goal now”, and hey presto, you score a goal. I exaggerate, of course, but it’s alarming that I’m not exaggerating by much…

When I go a goal up in this superior last-gen version of the game, I have to really make the effort to remind myself, constantly, that I can’t afford to blow the trumpets and charge everything at my opponent’s goal to get a second and a third. The CPU will slaughter me if I do that—and it has done so in the past.

I have to take the more cautious, strategic approach that I used to be familiar with before the PS3 version came into my life.

Nowhere is this more apparent than when playing the likes of Barcelona. They’re top of the table at the moment, and they play like it. Up front they’ve got Ronaldinho and Rooney (there are no English clubs in my ML). At times they’re as mesmerically brilliant in this computer game as they are in real life. Of course, here they’re programmed that way—but hey, suspension of disbelief and all that.

I went 1-0 up, and restrained my next-gen instinct to exert everything for a second goal that’d make the game ‘safe’. On this version, that’s a surefire way to end up down to eight men and getting hammered 1-4 or suchlike. I went to full defensive mode, and when I got it at the back I forced myself to knock it around between my defenders, waiting for a cut-and-dried opening up front.

In this way I kept Barcelona at bay with ease, and got myself a second midway through the second half. Even then it would still be possible to concede silly goals and draw or lose the game—it’s happened to me before. But at 2-0 you should be safe in PES, and I was. The final stats showed that I only let Barca have 1 solitary shot on goal, compared to my 15.

I also played several other matches, with varying outcomes. I’m still winning one, then losing one, then drawing one, then winning again, then drawing… The fine details escape me. When playing on the PSP (all of this season so far has been on the PSP), the games just flow one after the other. Maybe it’s costing me: the game is a mite harder on the smaller screen with the relatively restricted controls. Mid-table mediocrity looks like being mine for the whole of the season. Even a late push for Europe now seems out of reach.