Unfair play award
Posted by: not-Greg in Andy Cole, European Cup (ECC), goal replay, league table, tags: Andy Cole, European Cup (ECC), goal replay, league tableWell, well, well. I don’t want to tempt fate, but it looks as if season 2018 could see all my PES2008 dreams come true. Last season was terrible from the perspective of winning things (the only perspective that really matters in any kind of football, real or imagined). My #1 goal for this season is a nice meaty Treble.
I’ve started the season like the proverbial rocket. Five wins out of five in the league. Four wins out of four in my European qualifying group (I’ve already qualified for the main tournament; the remaining two games are a formality). The Division 1 Cup is just around the corner. It’s all looking good so far.
The early season table makes for some interesting viewing. My long-time nemesis, Valencia, are apparently trailing way behind for the moment. I’m not fooled—that’ll change, and quickly. It’s still very early days.
Despite the five wins out of five in the league, my form hasn’t been that great. I haven’t played noticeably better than I did last season. The difference this season, I think, is that I’m defending slightly better.
I’m conceding less goals, on average, than I did last season. A long time ago somebody advised me that the way to defend in PES2008 (the PS2/PSP version) is not to dive in and slide-tackle and block all over the place. Instead it’s best to stand off, bide your time, bring another defender over, jostle them, harry them, snap at their heels, just get in the way. After a few hundred games now, I can fully agree. The occasions when I’ve been most frustrated with this game, defensively speaking, have been when I’ve tried to get the ball back off the CPU too quickly, and been punished. The CPU can go through your entire team like the proverbial hot knife through butter if you start falling to ground in front of it. Old habits die hard, and I still do it—I still slide-tackle all over the place for fun. I never used to play PES like this. I used to be great at defending, and adopted the stand-off, tactical mode by default. My months on the next-gen version of PES2008, the most arcadey version of the game ever, have affected me more than I know.
My fifth game of the season was against Levante. They almost spoiled the party by taking a 1-0 lead that they held onto almost to the end. 1-0 was the scoreline in the 85th minute and it looked like being the final scoreline. It was one of those suspicious games that you often get at the end of a winning streak. Suddenly you mysteriously cannot score, no matter what you try. It’s almost as if there’s a line or two of code that says something like (translated into 1980s BASIC):
IF playerwinningstreak>3 THEN LET chanceofscoring=chanceofscoring-75%
It doesn’t always work that way, of course. It just seems to. You can beat the programming, eventually. It is possible.
I got an equaliser—a precious equaliser to make it 1-1 and hopefully preserve my unbeaten run. I’d have settled for a draw. I knew I couldn’t win every game. And so the 90th minute came along. The Levante left-back had the ball and was moving upfield with it. Andy Cole was behind him. I felt like fouling him with a sliding tackle from behind to disrupt their play, so I did. It was utterly vicious, and the Levante player stayed down. But the referee waved play on, giving the advantage because the ball had broken to another Levante player (naturally). As soon as there was a break in play, Andy Cole would be getting a yellow card—it was that kind of foul.
Levante tried to move through midfield but I got the ball back with Camacho. The Levante defender was still down! A few PESes ago I might have kicked the ball out of play, but not any more. Yamada was standing wide open where the injured defender would normally have been covering. I played the simplest of through-balls…
The replay is quite amusing. It shows the Levante player on the ground injured while Yamada gleefully tucks the ball past the keeper to score the winning goal. At the very last moment, does the CPU player lift his head to look forlornly at the goal? I think he does! But you decide:
I felt a little bit bad after scoring the goal. It was my vicious foul that had put their player down on the ground, and created the hole for Yamada to loiter in and receive the ball.
In the real world my team would have kicked the ball out of play to let the player receive treatment—wrongly, in my opinion. Surely I’m not the only football-watcher in the world who has noticed that real-life players are completely abusing the whole ‘kick the ball out of play for an injury’ convention in order to snuff out the other team’s tactical advantages?
But anyway, this was a computer game, not real life, so the referee was not surrounded by protesting Levante players after the goal. I won it 2-1 and Andy Cole didn’t even get booked for the challenge. After I scored, the referee ‘forgot’ about the foul. I love computer games.
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Greg
I’m optimistic that you will win the treble this year and fulfil your PES 2008 dreams.
That’s funny seeing the CPU player on the deck and you knocking the ball home. As you have said many a time, the CPU AI constantly cheats in game. So what goes around comes around. Nice out of the boot finish.
Going back to your debate with Adriano, regarding CF / WF. I am sure you have tried this, but I was getting loads of success in 2 AMF playing wide with 2 CMF. You could play Giggs and Camacho wide in MF and Cole and Kim upfront. In effect you will have 4 players attacking with your 2 midfielders on the edge of the box.
I try various formations, whilst keeping the same personnel. I have played BEN SAHAR as a WMF and he is as good their as he is as a CF.
not-Greg,
You mean in the past you have actually kicked the ball out of play when a COM player was down? Get outta here.
heraldo - The CPU has cheated me so much and so consistently in PES2008 that I felt no qualms at all about taking that opportunity when it came.
Re. the WF/CF debate,and on formations in general… I’m very reluctant to start playing around with my core 4-3-3 until I feel that I’ve ‘bedded down’ in this ML career. Historically that won’t happen until I’ve got a couple of straightforward Trebles under my belt. That can take a few seasons or it can take twenty or thirty seasons. Only then will I seriously consider a permanent change to my formation.
Adriano - didn’t you have the version where the CPU would kick the ball out if one of your players was injured? I think it was PES4. Might’ve been PES5. Whichever it was, I always felt honour-bound to return the favour whenever a CPU player went down injured. The CPU always threw the ball back to me afterward. And - get this - I always used to throw the ball back to the CPU from my throw-ins after they’d kicked the ball out.
I remember that if their player went down and I didn’t kick the ball out, the crowd would start to whistle and the CPU players would get hyper-aggressive. It was just something I did that I felt was in keeping with the spirit of that PES game and the wider game of football at the time.
Why do I get the feeling that my PES habits just enrage you the more you hear about them…
“Hmmm… so he doesn’t use R2. Well, that’s odd, but each to their own. Hang on… he doesn’t like the idea of employing his wide CFs as WFs in order to extract maximum value from all of his players and 4-3-3 formation? That’s odd too. Well, you can lead a horse to water, as they say, but - Now hang on. What? HE ADMITS TO KICKING THE BALL OUT OF PLAY TO LET A COM PLAYER RECEIVE TREATMENT?!!?!?! The bloody players aren’t even real!!! Aaaaarghhhhhh…..“
None of that enrages me at all, I just find your playing modus operandi (or modus playandi)… peculiar.
I don’t remember any of that from any previous PES. Maybe it was when I wasn’t playing any video games at all. Or when I was playing FIFA. Yes back when Winning Eleven was still a baby, I was big on FIFA.
Adriano - ahhh I see. I’m pretty sure it was PES5, now that I think about it. The injured player would lay there and the computer would kick the ball out of play. It seemed natural to do the same - and they didn’t like it when I didn’t…