Ooh, look at the time. 11.30 on Wednesday morning. This post is due up in half an hour and I haven’t even started. It usually takes me about an hour, on average, to put together my average kind of post. This one will test me.
So what’s been happening? Trouble has been happening. At the halfway stage of Season 17, all my financial chickens are coming home to roost. Look at this tangle of thorns:
I’m still in with a good shout of the League title, and the Champions League too. But even winning both of those won’t save me from my first post-season finanical headache since the very earliest seasons of this Master League career.
I will have to sell/release a few players, clearly. Barnes might have to go. He’s 35 now, but still really good. He’s not one of PES2012′s many players who might as well be packed off to the glue factory on their 30th birthday.
No, Barnes has actually improved with age—but he’s on a salary of £20m+. Him and a few others too.
I’ll make it through the financial window okay, but some of my players won’t, it’s quite clear to see.
Drat. Oh well, at least this shows that the Master League fianncial system is fairly robust. You can game the system for a while, but sooner or later, one way or the other, you have to Pay.
How are things going out on the pitch? Very well, if a little strangely. It’s tight at the top. I’ve been in second spot, chasing Man Utd, all season.
I lost a match and drew another in my most recent session, but get this—Man Utd lost and drew their corresponding matches too. I was suspicious, given Master League’s tradition of keeping the human player in touch with key CPU results at certain times.
It keeps me just 3 points behind the leaders, but you know, I almost wish the game wouldn’t throw us these bones. Is the time coming for a true Master League Hardcore mode? One where you’re not mollycoddled at all with things like favourable CPU results, and player stats, and the like?
Speaking of Hardcore games….
There’s an actual screenshot of an actual game that I am actually playing for hours every day at the moment. Master League? PES? Pah. Right now they’re nothing compared to the mighty Dwarf Fortress.
Yep, the game I am playing more than any other right now is a freeware ASCII game still at the Alpha stage that won’t be finished for 20 years, according to its creator. I usually play Dwarf Fortress with a graphical enhancement tileset (making it look like this), but I’m trying the unadorned ASCII look for fun, and loving it all the more.
The greatest game of my life has been the Pro Evolution Soccer series, for sure. Somewhere behind it comes the likes of Civilization, Metal Gear, Final Fantasy. And now Dwarf Fortress. Ask me again in a few years, and I wonder what I’ll say.
And now it’s five minutes to twelve. I’ve rush-written the post just in time. It’s not been noticeable has it?
NG – yes I think so, I’m finding Civ4 really quite easy (admittedly lower levels but nowhere near as harsh on things like city happiness balances as Civ3) and I’m having second thoughts about the Olympics game – what I really want is an athletics game, I don’t want to play Volleyball, Table Tennis or sit on a horse. A cross between Hypersports and Daley Thompson would be ideal.
2 games to go and I now see why it has felt like the AI has cheated me every time I threaten to break away in 4th place. I am 2 points ahead of Man U in 5th and play them next. Just as CPU teams sometimes lose crucial games to do you a favour it seems as if there is an NBA jam style ‘make it competitive’ factor that has seen me lose to QPR, Blackburn, Newcastle, etc yet beat Arsenal, Man City, Chelsea. Chelsea have lost 9 games and yet are 2nd only on goal difference. A mad season.
And abbeyhill – your tales of woe have been the highlight of the 2nd half of the PES year for me. Please play 2013 on the hardest difficulty with defaults and a no signings policy, it’ll make me feel so much better about my game!
uncle turf—ah yes Civ4 (or any Civ really) played on a low level is fairly straightforward. Confession time: above those low-to-middle difficulty levels, I don’t think I’ve ever won a Civ game. As soon as you start having to micromanage city squares and (in Civ4) city specialists to eke out that extra bit of productivity or culture or whatever, my mind glazes over and I tend to build an army of swordsmen to take on the AI’s tanks… When I know I’m so far behind that defeat is inevitable (not even an ace player could recover), I quit and restart. As I think I mentioned before, in all my years of playing the Civ series I think I’ve finished about 20 games out of hundreds.
League table autobalancing has been a part of ML for as long as there has been ML. It ebbs and flows, of course. Just now I’m experiencing patchy form. After a season of total invincibility, Man Utd above me are also having a rough patch, conveniently maintaining the distance between us of a few points. Do not like.
lol, thanks turf – I must admit that am now starting to despair about getting anywhere on this game on current settings, but will keep on trying. And a baby boy born this afternoon
abbeyhill—congratulations, get your sleep levels topped up
And get a game controller in the kid’s hand as soon as you can…