Never bring a PSP to a gunfight
Posted by: not-Greg in Barcelona, PlayStation3, goal replay, league table, psp, tags: Barcelona, Giggs, goal replay, league table, PlayStation3, pspI’ve zoomed all the way to mid-season 2015. I find that I’m doing this a lot on PES2008. I’m playing so many games so quickly that I could feasibly get through a full season every three days or so. Or every two days.
I was never this speedy in times gone by. The culprit here is the PSP version, specifically the transferability of a Master League career from the PSP to the PS3 and vice versa. I’ve been playing the game everywhere: on buses, on lunchbreaks, at random snatched moments around the house, in bed before going to sleep… The PSP’s sleep-mode enables you to play a match and pause it indefinitely while you do something else (there’s something else to do?), then resume the match exactly where you left off, at your convenience.
The overspill is starting to affect areas of my life that were previously safe from being ‘infected’ by PES. The other night, Tuesday night, I settled down to watch the second leg of the Champions League semi-final between Man Utd and Barcelona on television. I love watching big TV matches that have a lot riding them—short of the final itself, Man Utd-Barcelona was a pretty big game. But I took my PSP to the couch wth me. And what did I end up doing? That’s right, I played PES2008 and watched the match on TV at the same time—with the result that I never really watched the match on TV at all, because I was too preoccupied with PES2008. That’s just one example of a much wider phenomenon. I’m really going to have to make the effort to take that UMD out of my PSP…
And so I’ve got to Week 15. I’m still gunning for the league title, and I’m still unbeaten—I could be on track for my first unbeaten Master League season in three PES years.
Real Madrid have emerged from the chasing pack as my main challengers. They’re currently shadowing me, always just a few points behind. It’d be very easy to slip up and lose my grasp on the title. I’m being ultra-careful in every league game. I’m concentrating hard, taking nothing for granted—you know what I mean. If I hadn’t drawn so many games I’d be a long way out in front. (Sorry for the blurriness of the photo, by the way. It’s a PSP screenshot—they’re never the best quality with my mobile phone but for some reason this one turned out particularly bad. And the eagle-eyed will notice that it’s a screenshot from Week 16 anyway, a week after the supposed timeframe of the current post. I forgot to take a screenie after Week 15.)
I coasted through the rest of my WEFA Championship qualifying group - Played 6, Won 5, Drew 1, Lost 0. The draw came in the last game against Spartak, who couldn’t qualify but were all over me anyway. I was lucky to get a draw from that game. I found AC Milan and Barcelona to be surprisingly easy to beat in our fixtures. Maybe I was just on form, I don’t know.
I scored a great goal with Giggs in a D1 Cup game (I’m through to the Quarter Finals, of course). Giggs is quietly emerging as my current squad’s most outstanding individual player. I don’t mean he’s necessarily better than Bradley, Camacho, Schwarz, et al; just that he’s consistently getting crucial goals and making dangerous runs when I most need them. When I struck this shot I thought I’d hit it much too hard and it was going over. But no, Giggs being Giggs there was some spin on the ball and it looped deliciously down into the net:
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Thats a peach of a goal!
Were you ahead already? Couldn’t see any defenders around lol.
Ah, you’re making me misty-eyed for PES2008 on the PS2.
My Euro version might play, but I think the disc is damaged– neither my PS2 or my PS3 can read it.
I just wish I could use all the great Euro option files for my US PES game. Of course, as the US version seems to be clear of the ‘wonder run’ phenomena, the disappearing goalkeepers and the combination of horrid Paul Robinson-style keeping and last-minute wonder goals that made the Euro PS3 version so unplayable, I’ll take my medicine on the option file.
beautiful goal… havent ever scored anything like that on pes yet.
congrats on the league position and for advancing to the knock-out stage of the Champions Leaugue… who will you be playing?
Btw shame on you for not number gigg’s right!
11 is his number. :p
Paww - as I recall, I was indeed already ahead at the time of this Giggs goal. I was playing him as the left-sided CF in that game. I play him there a lot, because Komol is often fatigued with all the games I have to play—and, whisper it, but Komol is starting to fade. Giggs’s time in the First XI is not far off.
And I never get any of the players’ numbers right! It’s just not something I ever spend any time doing—never have done, probably never will do. (Never say never.) I have to say that Schwarz wearing a no. 5 shirt does bother me slightly, though.
ck - give it another week or two before you’re sure there’s no wonder dribble in the US release. I may be misremembering, but I’m sure the WENB boys said at the time of its release that the US version is identical to the Euro version. If you do manage to extract a solid six months’ play out of next-gen PES2008, I’d take my hat off to you, sir. As I said before the rot set in, next-gen PES2008 has got a lot going for it and can play a very nice game of football. Shame about the Euro-zone cockup with the non-existent difficulty level after a time.
re. last-gen PES2008, I really am loving it. The PSP has really added a whole new dimension to the experience. I can’t see me playing any other football game until FIFA09 appears in late Aug/early Sep, and that’ll probably just be a dalliance of a day or two. I picked up GTA4 on Tuesday and have hardly made a dent in it because of my PES addiction. I’ve always been like this, of course (hence the blog, and its tagline), but after my horrendous time on the PS3 version around the turn of the year, I thought that was it for me and PES this time around. Last-gen was my get out of jail card.
Heyendo30 - thanks, and come on, really?! Never scored a goal like that on PES?! I think the ‘whip’ effect is down to the in-game modelling of Giggs’ abilities (technique, etc.). It’s certainly nothing special that I did, apart from choose the placement and power, and the timing of course. As I said in the post I was convinced I’d hit it too hard and it was going over.
I actually had two viewing angles for this goal—the one in the clip, and a ‘proper’ view from the default position. As it’s got such a reaction here in the comments (I had no idea that it’s apparently a rare kind of goal - ?) I’ll see if I’ve still got the other view somewhere, and post it up.
As for who I’ll be facing in the first knockout round of the CL, it’s… Real Madrid. I play them in the league in between the two CL matches, so I’ll meet them three times in a row. I hate that!
Yeah, if I remember correctly, wasn’t it your third season where things started going all haywire? Right now, I’m finishing my second. But as of yet, none of the things that drove you nuts have surfaced.
And I thought the dodgy keeping, weird collision physics and wonder-goals in injury time had been part of the game from the off?
ck - it was around the 5th season, my Treble-winning season, that the dismay started to set in.
And yes, the dodgy keepers & collision detection etc. were noticeable from the outset. If you’re not seeing any of that then you might well have a more polished edition of the next-gen game on your hands, you lucky bugger. I don’t want to believe it, which is why I’m in denial.
Are Sunderland in your ML? If so, does Daryl Murphy play like Ronaldinho dreams he could play? That’s a bit of an acid test of the version’s strength, right there. The number of times Daryl Murphy put me to the sword in my 5 seasons of that first next-gen career was ridiculous!
I’m very interesting in finding out how the US release goes.
I’m assuming though that the US PC version will be the same the euro one!
And are you suggesting that PES2008 on PS3 isn’t region free?
Thats the whole point in this blue ray stuff..