Getting back to business in PES2008 after a few days away is always a pleasure. Familiarity breeds contempt, and absence makes the heart grow fonder. I’ve said it before and I will say it again: computer games and the game of football fit together like a hand in a glove. My gaming habits have altered over the years. The days when I could routinely play games for 12 hours a day are now long gone. I miss those days.
Most kinds of computer games require a specific time commitment. You have to sit down regularly and give them the same kind of organised attention that you would give to a film—Metal Gear Solid 4 being a singular case in point. Now, like most people I love Metal Gear as I love life itself, and I love MGS4 as the sine qua non of Metal Gear, but when it comes to the best use of my time I vastly prefer the on-the-go, day-by-day, long-term commitment that a game like PES demands of me.
The same goes for any sport-based game, really. I have a career going on my PSP copy of Tiger Woods 06 that I still dip into occasionally. Ditto Madden 07 on the DS. One thing I love about playing PES is the episodic, bite-sized experience that it allows me to have of it. I’ve now been playing ISS/PES almost continuously for nine years; I’ve been playing this one career in PES2008 since early March 2008, a period of roughly 14 weeks. As great as a Metal Gear game can be, it just doesn’t lend itself to the same kind of long-term play. Even when I replay MGS4 (and I’m planning to replay all the MGS games, including the four PSP games, in chronological order at some point over the rest of the summer) the process will still have a definite beginning, middle, and end. Once I’ve finished them all I won’t play them again for a while, if at all.
But PES is open-ended, endless. PES, for me, is the ultimate sandbox game. Grand Theft Auto and its ilk can take a running jump.
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After 24 games in season 2018 of my ongoing Master League career, I’m riding high at the top of the league. I’m still unbeaten and would very much like to stay unbeaten until the end of the season. I have only ever had one unbeaten season in all my years of Master League, and that was way back in PES5. I’ve gone through loads of seasons where I’ve lost just one or two games, but I’ve only ever had that one unbeaten season. Fingers crossed.
A couple more steady wins in the league have left me 11 points ahead of Valencia. There are just six games left. The league is surely in the bag, but I won’t be making any assumptions and relaxing any time soon.
Earlier this season I went out of the Division 1 Cup, dashing my hopes for a Treble. The only trophies I have left to go for is a League and European Cup double.
In the first leg of the European Cup quarter final against Galatasaray I did a good job of nearly blowing it. Somehow I allowed them to score 3 goals against me at home. Happily, I came back to level it up at 3-3 before the final whistle blew, which made the second leg a lot more viable than it might have been.
The second leg was potentially treacherous in so many ways. Galatasaray had the away goals advantage, and they’ve been one of my traditional bogey teams in PES over the last couple of years. I needed to win the match, obviously. I needed to score early and hang onto my lead, and then build on it if I could. I did score early, and scored two more to make it 0-3 to me on the day, 3-6 on aggregate. I went through to the semi-final with ease. What was I ever worried about?
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This weekend I had the weirdest D1 Cup semifinal ever. I played Groeningen, one of the teams I have been “sponsoring” (by donating money and players to - like Rafael Sobis and Alexandre Pato) to make my league harder.
In the first leg, at home, they managed to score two of the softest of soft goals, one of them straight after stealing the ball from me after kick off.
Prieto and Khumalo scored for me in quick succession to make it even. But before the first half was over, they actually score a couple of even softer goals.
When I came back for the second half, I was fuming. I was intent on employing every trick I knew, which I did, and many of them consisted of passing the ball up field to Kim Cyun Hi, and running circles around the opposition.
Kim went on to score 4 goals, to make it 6-4, in the weirdest game I ever played in PES. We wuz robbed too, since Kim was brought down in and around the penalty box a number of times without a single foul being called. He should have scored at least a couple more times.
Groeningen narily got a shot on goal in the second half, as I used every dirty trick in the book while defending, abusing the power of players like Bos and Bradley to jostle the opposition off the ball. I’m sad (but secretly happy) to say that a couple of their players left the field injured.
When the away leg came, I won 1-3, with Kim scoring a hat trick, one of them a beautiful overhead volley, that I got on tape. One of the other goals was a lob from outside the box, that is also going to be in a future compilation I’m making up.
Phew, long post.
Adriano - I’ve been AFK since yesterday afternoon, finishing MGS4…
Just caught your post, and it is SO true that in PES2008 especially (all PESes did this in ML, but PES2008 seems to do it most) a Cup game is more prone to catching you cold with a blizzard of goals from the CPU than a regular league game.
I played a cup game just last night where I went 1-0 up. The CPU scored a tame header from a corner, then dispossessed me straight from the kick-off and virtually walked the ball into my net yet again. Nothing could stop them - of course, since it’s an AI, it knows exactly what I’m pressing and when, and can avoid every tackle and go round every covering defender if it wants to. And it wanted to.
I really think PES2009 has got to at least make a start in getting rid of this overt scripted nature of some elements of PES gameplay. I first noticed it in PES5—before that point, I’m sure it existed, but was subtle enough not to be noticeable.
Incidentally, it was interesting to see the Konami press release yesterday. PES2009 will indeed be coming out on the PS2. At least there’ll be the fall-back option if they mess it up again on the PS3.