PES Chronicles

I’ve played all the games in the first half of season 2012. Progress through the seasons using the PSP is fast—it seems I’ve barely begun playing before I’m looking at the calendar and wondering who I should get in the mid-season negotiations.

It’s all thanks to the ability you have on the PSP to simply pause matches whenever you want by putting the console into sleep mode. You can then leave it for minutes, hours, or even days and then resume play exactly where you left off in mid-match. Sometimes in mid-kick. As can be imagined, the PSP is a godsend for the sort of PES player who just can’t seem to put down his Master League…

That’ll be me, then. I’ve been playing PES2008 on buses, on breaks at work, last thing at night before falling asleep, first thing in the morning after waking up. What’s great about PES2008 on the PSP is that I don’t have to slice my PES play into discrete chunks.

On the PS2 and PS3 it’s almost like making an appointment to play PES. You sit down, pick up the controller, switch on the TV, load up the game, play your few games or your many games, and then end the session. With the PSP things are more fluid, more bite-sized (this has bad aspects as well as good ones; for now I’m focusing on the good ones). There’s no such thing as a single play session, really. Instead, the play session is spread across the entire day, only being momentarily suspended as circumstances dictate.

With the PSP I even manage to play during quiet moments at my desk at work. I can see or hear trouble coming from a long way off, and the PSP goes into the drawer until it’s safe to come out again.

So I’ve been able to play half a season—15 games plus 3 Cup games—in the same kind of timeframe in which I usually only manage to play a third of a season, or a quarter.

I met Villarreal in the first round of the Division 1 Cup. I beat them 1-0 at their ground and 2-0 at mine. That was easy, I thought. Too easy…

In the first leg of the second round I faced off against Real Betis at home. I scored two quick first-half goals and found things easy thereafter. I held them at bay without difficulty; by half-time they hadn’t had a single shot on goal. For the third season in a row I was 2-0 up at home in a Cup first-leg match, and cruising.

Then, for the third season in row, the CPU team snatched a late away goal and the game finished 2-1—meaning that for the third season in a row I’ll go to the away leg (after the mid-season break) with matters ‘delicately poised’. Sigh.

In the league I’ve been performing steadily. Nothing spectacular—yesterday’s satisfying win over Barcelona was probably the highlight of the season so far.

I’m holding steady in mid-table, which is where I’d be happy to finish in my first season among the big boys of Division 1. Sneaking into a European place would be a bonus.

Similar posts:

• The Towering Inferno
• The trouble with trebles
• Focus, focus, focus
• The Marcos of a man…
• Now we can concentrate on the cup