Football Focus
Posted by: not-Greg in Treble, league table, pes, tags: league table, pes, TrebleThe middle of season 2016 has rolled around—where does all the time go?—and just like last year I’ve kept my virtual chequebook in my pocket. I don’t want or need any new players. Who would I get? What would I do with them? I suppose Kaka might still have something to offer at whatever age he is now (I haven’t even looked), but is he really going to do anything for my team that the likes of Yamada, Del Piero, Camacho, and even Dos Santos can’t already do? No, he’s not.
So I’ll just wait for Kaka (and Rooney, Ronaldinho, Ronaldo, et al) to be reborn as Regens. I’ll get them then. Developing them myself will be more satisfying anyway.
By the time that happens, I hope I’ll have a Treble or two under my belt. But is it going to happen this season? The two Cups can take care of themselves (I’m still in both), but the League is the big one—and after game 15, heading into the four-week mid-season break, my record was Won 9, Drawn 3, Lost 3. After Osasuna beat me for the second time, I lost the final game before the mid-season.
This time my vanquishers were the mighty Levante. I’ve got no complaints about this game. Levante didn’t really play stupendously well, but they didn’t have to. They took advantage of an extremely sluggish human player, namely me…
Now this is something that I’ve not yet touched on in the blog. I might give the impression that I always play PES with an intense, fevered excitement, with a kind of laser-like focus—and sometimes I do play PES that way. During the first weeks of a PES year in particular, that full-on absorption is ramped up to the maximum. (On the first day of a PES year, once I get the new, cellophane-wrapped PES game in my hand, I spend the whole day shaking with excitement. Nobody can approach within ten yards of me for fear of all their hair standing on end. People with pacemakers know not to come calling on PES day. )
Once things settle down I play PES quite casually most of the time. I still play with enjoyment and immersion (you can’t do anything every day unless you enjoy it), but often with a kind of drifting attention, my mind flying to other things. When a big game comes along in Master League I raise my levels of focus, but overall I’d say my default state of playing PES is with about 75% of the concentration levels that I have for those big games.
Sometimes that focus drops below 75%—quite often, below 50%. It’s unavoidable. If I have something else going on in my life, or if I’m pushed for time and shouldn’t really be playing at all, I’ll play a few games with a kind of nervous, fidgety style that really isn’t conducive to good play. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why I’ve always been an average PES player, along with my relatively low skill at the game (I don’t dribble in PES because I don’t know how to—next-gen PES excepted, but hey, even my grandmother could dribble in next-gen PES2008 and score amazing, Maradona-esque goals for fun, and she’s been dead for 20 years).
So Levante happened to ‘get me’ in every sense when I was in one of my down cycles on the old concentration-and-focus front. They beat me pretty handsomely, scoring 3 nice goals to my 1 scruffy goal. All of which gave me that disappointing 9-3-3 record going into the mid-season.
It makes the league table very interesting. Valencia are starting to pull away at the top. They remain unbeaten all season. I’m in fourth place, seven points behind them. It’s entirely possible that I might yet again miss out on the Treble this year. Assuming I win all 15 of my remaining games (that won’t happen, but let’s just say that it does), they can afford to lose two games and still win the League. I’d feel a lot better about my chances if I was in second place rather than fourth place. It feels as if there are too many teams jostling for the privilege of trying to catch Valencia. My next game is against another member of the chasing pack: this season’s surprise package, Atletico Madrid. I’d better start winning. A bit of focus wouldn’t do any harm.
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Something tells me the computer will make them drop more points to make it exciting.
I wonder how many seasons the computer will go up too? Would it still count if your in season 2345..?
Something tells me you’re right. I’m a few days ahead of the blog, as ever. I doubt I’m spoiling things for anyone who knows PES when I say that the game is doing its very best to let me catch up…
Re. the number of seasons the game will go up to, I believe it’s capped at a maximum of 50 seasons. In PES5 I got to season 2045 or so (season 39) by the time PES6 came out and I switched to that.
Does it just end after that then? That would be weird. Yeah it will let you catch up so it can screw you over on the last day..
I am playing through a full Euro campaign on professional with England. It is proving to be realistic! I beat Andorra at home VERY comfortably 3-0, but away to Macedonia I scraped a 0-1 victory. It was an own goal too..
I also won 2-1 against Turkey in a friendly with an England second team. Long matches too, so the lack of ridiculous 7-5 scorelines is pleasing.
Thats twice I have been torn apart by Scotland and Ronaldin- oops I mean Naysmith. Just because Scotland had a decent qualification campaign EA has decided to make them one of the best teams in the game. I lost 2-1 with a ’shocking’ last minute goal. At least I knew I had lost at the start of the match and had time to think about the future games in the group, you know, the possible ones.