PES Chronicles

To finish in the top six and qualify for Europe next season, I’ve worked out that I can probably only afford to lose about 5 games all season. So I’m disappointed to get off to a bad start in season 2013. I’ve played 3, lost 2, and drawn 1.

Real Madrid were my latest opponents and they all but broke my heart. I was 1-0 up until halfway through the second half. Then I conceded the equaliser. It was stupid. I’d been defending superbly, fully implementing my best principles of ‘defenceless defence’ and holding the Real galacticos at bay. I thought the game had 1-0 written all over it—maybe even 2-0, as I was threatening to get another almost every time I ventured forward.

Then Real broke through my back line seemingly without effort. My CBs were nowhere. I’m not complaining about scripting here (for once). It was my own fault. I’d allowed Maldini to go chasing a Real forward too far upfield. He didn’t catch him, and was out of position when they played an aerial pass over the top of Couto.

The CPU has always been great at aerial passing. I’m not talking about aerial through-balls. I mean the circle pass, which I rarely use, personally, except occasionally when spraying the ball from one full back to the other. In other circumstances I don’t trust it—or I don’t trust me—enough to use it. But the CPU can land the ball on a sixpence from any position when it wants to.

So they got their equaliser but there was still time for me to get the winner, as I have already done so often in PES2008. The game seems to be calibrated for 2-1 and 3-2 scorelines. Failing that I could at least hold on for the 1-1 draw. That wouldn’t be a bad result against one of my main rivals at the top of the table, and I could always turn them over in the return fixture later this season.

But I went too hard too quickly for the winning goal. I couldn’t help myself. I had my ATT level up to the max. Real broke quickly from one of my corners, and scored the winner in injury time. In injury time!

So it’s been a bad start to the new season. How often does this happen? I mean, really? It seems to happen every season. Thinking back over the PES years—including all of this one, i.e. the next-gen version—it strikes me that bad starts to seasons are the rule. For me they’re the rule, anyway.

I’ve played all the games in the first half of season 2012. Progress through the seasons using the PSP is fast—it seems I’ve barely begun playing before I’m looking at the calendar and wondering who I should get in the mid-season negotiations.

It’s all thanks to the ability you have on the PSP to simply pause matches whenever you want by putting the console into sleep mode. You can then leave it for minutes, hours, or even days and then resume play exactly where you left off in mid-match. Sometimes in mid-kick. As can be imagined, the PSP is a godsend for the sort of PES player who just can’t seem to put down his Master League…

That’ll be me, then. I’ve been playing PES2008 on buses, on breaks at work, last thing at night before falling asleep, first thing in the morning after waking up. What’s great about PES2008 on the PSP is that I don’t have to slice my PES play into discrete chunks.

On the PS2 and PS3 it’s almost like making an appointment to play PES. You sit down, pick up the controller, switch on the TV, load up the game, play your few games or your many games, and then end the session. With the PSP things are more fluid, more bite-sized (this has bad aspects as well as good ones; for now I’m focusing on the good ones). There’s no such thing as a single play session, really. Instead, the play session is spread across the entire day, only being momentarily suspended as circumstances dictate.

With the PSP I even manage to play during quiet moments at my desk at work. I can see or hear trouble coming from a long way off, and the PSP goes into the drawer until it’s safe to come out again.

So I’ve been able to play half a season—15 games plus 3 Cup games—in the same kind of timeframe in which I usually only manage to play a third of a season, or a quarter.

I met Villarreal in the first round of the Division 1 Cup. I beat them 1-0 at their ground and 2-0 at mine. That was easy, I thought. Too easy…

In the first leg of the second round I faced off against Real Betis at home. I scored two quick first-half goals and found things easy thereafter. I held them at bay without difficulty; by half-time they hadn’t had a single shot on goal. For the third season in a row I was 2-0 up at home in a Cup first-leg match, and cruising.

Then, for the third season in row, the CPU team snatched a late away goal and the game finished 2-1—meaning that for the third season in a row I’ll go to the away leg (after the mid-season break) with matters ‘delicately poised’. Sigh.

In the league I’ve been performing steadily. Nothing spectacular—yesterday’s satisfying win over Barcelona was probably the highlight of the season so far.

I’m holding steady in mid-table, which is where I’d be happy to finish in my first season among the big boys of Division 1. Sneaking into a European place would be a bonus.

The last few days have been all Bradley, Bradley, Bradley. You’d think it’d be easier for me to just marry him or something. All of this fixation upon Bradley probably gives the impression that he is my Most Valuable Player. He may well be that in the future, but for now he is not. For now, Komol is my top player, the man whom I cannot do without.

Komol started coming good last season, when he scored my greatest PES2008 goal so far, and one of my top 5 PES goals ever.

I love to score long-range goals in PES. Best of all is when it’s a long-range goal that means something.

I hadn’t started at all well up here in Division 1. That’s par for the course, really, for me and Master League—I never get off to a flyer whenever I eventually go up to join the big boys. Every year I read about other PES Master League players getting promotion in season 1, winning the title in season 2, and securing the Treble in season 3—all whilst making love to a beautiful woman, presumably.

Can such stories be true? Or is there really a desperate cabal of 15-year-olds permanently deployed on the internet, persistently laying claim to unlikely gaming feats?

Perhaps there are players good enough at PES to ‘complete’ Master League within three seasons. I’d bet there are players good enough to do it with the Default squad. I’m emphatically not one of those players.

Against Deportivo la Coruna I was heading for yet another 0-0 scoreline. It would have left me with a record of W1 D4 L1 for the season. Not disgraceful. Not relegation form (yet). But hardly the kind of steady mid-table success that I had in mind, and which me and my squad are both now good enough to achieve, realistically.

0-0, then, but ahhhhh… In the 90th minute, Komol collected the ball out wide. And then it happened. One of the best, most satisfying long-rangers I’ve ever scored on PES2008, and yet again one of the finest goals I can remember scoring on any PES, ever.

With some goals, you just feel them. In the pit of your stomach, in the marrow of your bones. I could turn the pretension up to 11 here, but I’ll let the replay speak for itself:

Having three replay angles is a first for me on this blog. I really, really like the goal. Others may disagree, but my mind is made up. I love this goal and I want to marry it. I think I love the fact that it’s a crowded penalty box, and the flight of ball initially takes it up toward outer space before gravity (albeit the virtual, computer game kind) starts to do its job.

There was no time for Deportivo to come back. I picked up a crucial 1-0 win.

Scoring a really big, meaningful long-range goal can be among the most intensely joyful experiences that PES has to offer. Sure, under the same circumstances, stabbing the ball over the line from two yards out in the middle of a goalmouth scramble can be just as important. But is it as satisfying? No, never.

There are plenty of differences between the PS3 version of PES2008 and the PSP/PS2 version of PES2008 that I’ve been playing for the past couple of weeks. They are, after all, completely different games, so this is not surprising.

There is one difference that is just as remarkable as all of the others, and arguably more so. I’m talking about the unusual way that the CPU teams conduct themselves during negotiation periods. I don’t recall anything like it in any previous PES.

I have found that the CPU frequently offers trade-in deals—their own players plus cash—for my players, including the worst of the worst on offer, i.e. my Default players.

A couple of seasons ago I was offered a player called Komol plus about 600 points in exchange for somebody like Ximelez. I know, this Komol character would have to be—how you say?— absolute pants, wouldn’t he? Surely?

Well, no, actually. At the time, I checked out Komol’s stats. He was young, only 18 or 19, but his stats were pretty decent. They compared well to the starting stats for players like Camacho and Yamada at the same age. I accepted the offer, and got rid of Ximelez for this Komol person (and the 600 points, of course).

No, I don’t know what the CPU was playing at either. It did all seem to good to be true at the time. In many ways, taking advantage of this kind of offer from the CPU seems like a bit of an exploit, but I’m currently playing so badly and doing so poorly (I’m in my 4th season in the bottom division) that I need every ounce of help I can get.

Komol has been good. Not brilliant. Not fantastic. Not yet good enough consistently enough to get a regular starting place. But good enough to start getting these kinds of goals lately:

(I don’t know what was going on with the weird blue-screen effect on the main angle in those replays.)

He’s 20 years old at the moment in season 2010. His development curve indicates he’ll peak during his mid-twenties, somewhere in the high 80s overall. (I think I’ll push him further than that. To play with, he certainly feels like a player who’ll peak in the mid-90s. We’ll have to see.)

The CPU gifted me a top player for nothing. That’s what it comes down to. If it hadn’t, I might never have found Komol. I never, ever look at those lists of great young players that people put together every year. Perhaps the PES powers-that-be grew tired of people constantly going on about the Schwarzes and Yamadas of their world? Perhaps this is their way of politely drawing other exceptional talents to our attention—or at least to the attention of lazy people like me. Who knows?