A Rumour With A View
Posted by: not-Greg in Kim Cyun Hi, PES2009, defending, tags: defending, Giggs, Kim Cyun Hi, PES2009Yesterday a rumour appeared on WENB to the effect that PES2009 might—just might—be released on 17th October, which would be earlier than usual this year. We’re so used by now to the game appearing on a late Friday in October, that a release date of either 24/10 or 31/10 was pretty much assumed to be the case. Assumed by me, anyway. But if there’s any substance to the rumour, then we may well be looking at a UK release date of 17/10.
Last year, I started using GAME.co.uk for all my big pre-release pre-orders. I’d heard that they commonly sent out games in time to arrive at least a day early, and often two days early. Sure enough, I received FIFA08 from them two days before it landed on retail shelves. The same thing happened with PES2008.
The only time they’ve let me down was for Metal Gear Solid 4, which had the cheek to arrive on the actual release date, not before. Huh. I wasn’t impressed. But I’ll be using GAME again this year for PES, and hoping for early delivery again. I’m not on any kind of affiliate whatchamacallit thing with them. I’m just highly recommending them as a probable way to get the game early, is all. If history is any guide, and the release-date rumour is true, then I could have PES2009 as early as 15/10, which is (I’ve just counted) 106 days away. Hurrah! (Or how do the internet kids put it? Woo-hoo? Woot? Something like that.)
I hope the rumour’s true and PES2009 does come out early. If anything, I think Konami should move heaven and earth (and then move heaven some more) to release the game at the end of September, never mind October. By mid-to-late October, football game fans will have had several weeks to bed down and get all smoochy with EA’s hotly-anticipated FIFA09. The whole reason EA settled on September for its annual release was to beat PES to the shelves and rack up the sales before the real football game arrived in town. Well, times have changed, and I think Konami know it. So would a PES2009 release date of, say, October 3rd be too much to hope for? Probably.
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I’m still getting through the matches in my Master League career on PES2008. I’m at the start of season 2019 and top of the league on goal difference after 5 wins out of 5. My opponents in game 6 were my old enemy from the past, Valencia. I’m playing great and confidence is high. When you play PES with maximum confidence, I’ve noticed, almost nothing can get in your way. I hammered Valencia 3-0, taking particular pleasure in keeping a clean sheet.
One of my aims for this season is to concede less than 20 goals. I’ve been frustrated in recent seasons by the leakiness of my defence. I want to determine if it’s just me playing badly, or if the game absolutely must score some goals at certain times. The jury is still out on that one, really.
Six wins out of six, then, but I was still only top of the league on goal difference. Deportivo in second place had matched me win for win. They’ve got a nice little 100% record of their own going on there. My goal difference really is worth an extra point. It’s +23 after six games of a thirty-game season. Extrapolating to the end of the season, that’d leave me with a GD of +115. In theory. I’d love to get even half of that in practice.
This season I’ve rejigged my forward line, removing the talented Kim Cyun Hi from the starting role that he’d enjoyed for the past few years. What games he has played so far this season have been in place of Giggs whenever the latter has been unfit.
Playing a right-footed player on the left sometimes works, sometimes not. The best striker I’ve ever played with in PES was Dennis Bergkamp in PES5. He was a right-footer who ploughed a mean furrow on the left side of my front 3 across a dozen amazing seasons. (Some of that amazingness can be seen here and here.) Playing Kim Cyun Hi on the left up front seems to be his best position for me, crazily. He’s scored more goals for me so far this season than any other striker, and that’s even without playing in every game. I’m considering bringing Kim back at this position permanently, and moving Giggs back to midfield. I’ll see how the next few games unfold and then I’ll decide.
All things that have a beginning must come to an end. Winning runs in Pro Evo are no exception to this natural law, alas. Predictably, it wasn’t Barca or Real or any remotely ‘big’ team what dunnit. Real Mallorca held me to sticky 1-1 draw. I call it sticky because it was just one of those games where it seems your players run through treacle and are scared of the ball. I considered this game two points dropped, and so did the league table. Deportivo won their corresponding fixture to overtake me at the top. They won’t last long.
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I’ve played half a season in my alternate ML with that 4-1-1-4 formation, and I must tell I’m really enjoying it. It might be the most interesting formation I’ve played yet. Lots of options, plenty of movement and overlapping from the SSs. Really cool.
You could try KCH + Schwarz as CFs and Giggs + Del Piero (or Khumalo) as SSs, Camacho as AMF, Bradley as DMF, and the regular four at the back. Do it in your off season or in training to see how it works out.
It might have something to do with the specific players and their abilities, of course, but for this particular team of mine it’s working out great. My 1-1-4 are Ayew DMF, Yamada AMF, Taarabt SS, Ben Sahar SS, Schwarz CF and Carter CF.
Adriano - the more I hear talk of playing with a front 4, the hungrier I am to just get on and do it. I already had the thought about Kim+Schwarz in the middle, with Giggs and Del Piero on either side. It’s a mouth-watering prospect. I’ve decided to finish season 2019 with my regular 4-3-3 (because I’m actually almost at the end of the season, in ‘off-blog’ realtime), and then start season 2020 using a 3-3-4. I think it can work—I’ve got the right players. If it doesn’t, I’ll go for some variant of the 4-2-4. I’ll schedule a full range of pre-season friendlies and try all the formations at some point, including that 4-1-4-1. I’m convinced it could be made to work like a 4-1-5…
It’ll be hard to abandon my 4-3-3. I really have played with nothing else for about 5 years now (a brief season in PES4 excepted).
Don’t you get bored?
I find that playing with the same formation, namely, the 4-3-3 in my main ML, it gets really predictable. And it’s way too easy.
Now with the other 4-1-1-4 ML I’m really into playing it for the simulation factor. It really opens up plenty of other possibilities. I’m scoring a bigger variety of goals, and not only with one single player.
It can definitely seem like a 4-1-5, since the AMF is always involved in the attacking plays, not to mention the SBs always coming forward, since I set attacking arrows for them.
I do think a 3-3-4 would be harder to pull off. It would at least be harder to keep a clean sheet.
No, I’ve never yet got bored with my 4-3-3. I really am so average that I can always bank on having a good game against the CPU, no matter how many great players I assemble into a squad of galacticos. I’m not even bored with 4-3-3 now—the only reason I’m going to make the switch is that I sense this really is the last PES year when I will ever play ‘classic’ PES and I feel like going out with a flourish.
(Yes, yes, yes, I know that PES2009 is still going to come out on PSP/PS2, but I will not be going down that route again. If PES2009 is rubbish again on the PS3, I’ll be heading straight for FIFA09 and staying there until PES2010. If FIFA09 is bad, I’ll stick with PES2008 on PSP/PS2.)
God forbid both FIFA and PES have failures in ‘09!
I think the stability of 08 on the American version bodes well for PES 09, however. I think we’ll get a playable PES . . . although, because it’s Konami and Seabass, we’ll get a handful of WTF inclusions that nobody asked for, but nothing that would make the game that much better.
Only after playing it for a couple months will we really be able to say “a ha.”
One thing that should be mandatory is full second divisions for each of the major leagues — or at least the USABLE slots to create them. The travesty of Other League C teams being unusable in a Master League went a long way toward souring me toward PES 2008.
Come on you FIFA! You’re *this* close to making the perfect footy game, now take another step forward and add a robust team/player/formation editor so that fan mods can have some currency.
ck - I think the latest from the FIFA camp is very promising. The videos look appreciably faster than FIFA08. Although I’m one of those who mostly likes and sometimes loves the new FIFA engine, I thought FIFA08 was on the stiff side, so the apparent addition of some ‘zip’ is very welcome.
Strangely, I missed editing more from FIFA08 than I did from PES2008. I wanted to be able to create my own club in FIFA08, just as you could in all previous FIFAs stretching back to the year 1344 or whenever it was they started making them. Its omission from FIFA08 was a puzzle, along with much else that wasn’t included. What was/is it about the HD era of gaming that made so many games publishers get all patchy about things?!
I badly want to see and read more from Konami about PES2009. If I had to put a bet on what I think PES2009 will be, I think it’ll be an acceptable PES game with very nice HD graphics—and I’d actually settle for that. I’d have settled for it last year. Anything less and the world might as well just go ahead and come to an end.
I think that publishers are coming to grips with the time expenditure required to create games for the new platforms, and find themselves dropping features.
The other possibility is that you and I just weren’t represented by whatever marketing focus groups they pulled together to find out what had to be in the game.
Where can we write to get our two pence in?