PES Chronicles

It was my first start in the First XI at Portsmouth. I’m almost midway through my second season as a young professional footballer in PES2009’s Become A Legend mode. After a rocky start (it just felt wrong not to control every player) I’ve ‘got’ what BaL’s all about. I’m enjoying it almost as much as I’ve enjoyed Master League in its pomp, which is saying something.

I was nervous about my first start, and I played tight. I probably played more conservatively than at any time since I started playing this mode. I had an average match. It was the first leg of a D1 Cup tie, at home, against Sunderland. It ended 0-0 and I was pleased with my average performance. I was taken off in the 68th minute, which was fair enough. My stamina levels still need a lot of work. I thought I’d done enough to stay in the team for the next match, a full league match, and so it proved. I was selected in the First XI again.

After nearly a season and a half, I’m still learning my trade, still settling into the solo-player ethos of the BaL gameplay. I’ve finally worked out that the best way of getting the ball is loitering near the ball, rather than charging in and trying to take it. Your AI team-mates actually do want to pass it to you—you just have to coax them into doing it. Most of the time the ball will come to you if you position yourself intelligently. It really is an off-the-ball game as much as an on-the ball one.

I knew I’d need to play well to keep a regular place. A goal, or at least an assist, would do very nicely. My only goal in BaL so far is still that headed goal in training with Aston Villa last season. I’m so hungry for my first proper goal, in a proper match. Preferably one scored with my feet.

Sadly, I did not play well in my second full start. I was substituted at half-time. We were 0-2 down by that point. The final result was 0-3. My post-match rating was 5.5. Ouch.

I was disappointed but not surprised to find myself back on the subs’ bench for the next match. It’s pretty clear that I’ve got to play well to keep a place at this stage of my BaL career. I’m working on my game. I’m trying to get better. But this mode brings certain frustrations that I’m still not getting to grips with.

A big frustration for me is when one of our attacks breaks down and the other team streams back upfield and there’s absolutely nothing I can do to stop them. I can see their counter-attacking script playing itself out. They will keep the ball, and they will create a chance or get a corner, and I just have to watch helplessly. It’s this aspect of BaL more than any other that feels utterly foreign to me.

After sitting on the bench for the ENTIRE next match (easily the thing I hate about BaL the most) I was brought on as a sub in the next match. Only, I was brought on as a DMF. Uh? Never mind. I tried to get on with it, but then a few minutes later I was subbed myself. A caption appeared on-screen saying 4-3-3, as if that should be enough explanation for me. No, it wasn’t. In any real football match I would have been part of that reorganised team, part of the 4-3-3. In 30 years of watching football I can only remember a handful of occasions when an uninjured substitute has himself been substituted. I suppose I just have to mark this one down as yet another PES quirk.

Portsmouth are near the bottom of the league table at the moment. We started the season very well, but I wasn’t anywhere near the team back then. Since I’ve started making appearances as sub, and now getting a few starts, we’ve barely scored a goal, never mind won a match. It would seem to be all my fault. That’s strangely fine by me: what I caused, I can correct. I think Portsmouth will be relegated to Division 2. It’s far too early in my career for me to be the kind of one-man team I think I’d need to be, in order to turn this ship around. But I’ll stick it out here. The mid-season break is fast approaching. No doubt I’ll get a few offers from other clubs. But my mind is made up: I’m Pompey now and I’m Pompey for the next several seasons, until I’ve at least taken them to a D1 title. I’ll make my BaL name right here or not at all.

There has been another development. Last week, a few days after starting to play BaL seriously, I also started playing my old Master League save again, using the same BaL camera: Vertical Wide. It was in order to familiarise myself. The camera is a tricky one to use. It twists around when focus is on the wing, and the directional controls are always relative to your view. You can find yourself running the ball out of play if you’re not careful. The shooting values seem different too.

Playing my Master League save with the Vertical Long camera was like discovering a hidden 6-star difficulty level. My Coventry City team, packed with superstars, has taken some awful beatings. We’re 13th in the league table after 10 matches. I’m toying with the idea of starting a new ML career with the Default team, using this camera angle. But I’ve got enough on my plate right now. There’s only room for BaL.

I’ll get straight to it. In times of yore, the Vertical Long camera provided a zoomed-out viewpoint from behind your goal for the whole of a match. But we haven’t seen what I regard as a ‘proper’ Vertical Long camera in PES for over a decade now. In every version since ISS98, the Vertical Long camera has forced you to play ‘downscreen’ for one half of a match. And I hate playing downscreen in a Vertical view. So I’ve stuck entirely with the default horizontal Wide view for a decade—and now I want my old Vertical Long camera back.

I want PES2009 to have a Vertical Long camera that allows me to play ‘upscreen’ in both halves. I think I remember reading a month or so ago that the game will permit this feature for the first time in a decade. I keep wondering if it’s true, and hoping.

The 2009 batch of football games are so close that I really don’t think I can function properly until I get my hands on them. The FIFA09 demo will be available a week tomorrow; the full game is only a month away. PES2009 (and its demo) is now only 6 weeks away. Or 7 weeks—it all depends what release date you believe.

I don’t know whether I am coming or going. It’s all producing some strange symptoms…

The other day I spent an hour in town walking between various shops, hunting for a PS1 copy of ISS98. I didn’t find it. I could easily get it from eBay, but I think I’ll just leave it now. I’ll hang on for FIFA09. And I suspect that it’s only a matter of time before ISS98 (or any one of those early ISS titles) pops up as a PSP download on the PlayStation Network. In which case I would be at the front of the queue.

I’ve mentioned on several occasions that ISS98 is one of my favourite versions of ISS/PES. ISS98 was the one with Fabrizio Ravanelli and Paul Ince eyeballing one another on the cover. Back in 1998 I played it almost into the ground on my old PlayStation—whilst wearing short trousers… (Not really. I was twenty-something in 1998, but it was so long ago now that it feels as if I should have been wearing short trousers.)

No doubt the mists of memory are being kinder to ISS98 than it deserves. No doubt I’ll reel in horror, if/when I ever get to play it again.

Ah, but it had that 100%, ‘proper’ Vertical Long camera… If it is indeed back for PES2009 then I can see me and Pro Evo getting very cosy together again. There’s something about playing vertically, directly attacking a goal ‘upscreen’ that makes an already immersive game even more so. Shooting in particular when using a Vertical camera is extremely satisfying. Aiming is so much more intuitive.

If anyone has any concrete information about the Vertical camera in PES2009, I’d love to hear about it. Remember that it has to point towards the opponent’s goal in both halves. Otherwise, I’m not interested.

I doubt that any of the early playtesters—at Leipzig and elsewhere—took the trouble to test all the camera modes. Even if they did, I bet none of them played with the Vertical Long camera. And even if they did, I bet they never used it for the whole match. When the big PES websites—PESfan, WENB, that lot—start getting their promo copies of the game, I’ll post a question for them. But will I get my question answered? Those Q&A threads are nightmarishly fast and furious. I think I’ll end up finding this one out for myself.

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In my next post I’ll be bringing down the curtain on the game that has occupied most of my football game year. I’m talking about the PS2/PSP version of PES2008. Old faithful.

FIFA08 ran it close. I have played loads of FIFA08, more now than ever. But that shabby, classico version of PES2008 just edges it in terms of hours played. And I owe it a special post to discuss my current state of play, what I think of it overall as a PES game, and whether or not I will continue my ML career on the PSP version over the coming year.

On my next FIFA Sunday I’ll also be doing a similar summing-it-all-up post about FIFA08. That game has been another faithful servant in this grim year for PES fans.

What would any blog be without a Top 10 Tips For Eternal Greatness type of post? All the blog tipsters recommend it – usually in a Top 10 list of blog tips, the scamps.

When I was a very small boy indeed, one of my favourite TV shows was a gameshow called Play Your Cards Right. At the start of every show the host, Bruce Forsyth, welcomed the studio audience by saying, and I quote: “What a wonderful audience! [pause...] You’re so much better than last week’s…”

It always provoked a near-hysterical bout of laughter from the studio audience. I was laughing too, although I didn’t really know why it was funny. When I found out why the audience was laughing, I could never watch television in the same way again…

(This is heading somewhere PES2009-related, don’t worry.)

The audience laughed because it was (most of the time) the exact same audience from’ last week’. There was no last week. Up to 6 episodes of the show were filmed every day over a week or two.

It’s much the same in the world of video games franchises that are updated on an annual basis. I am not about to claim that every version of PES from PES1 through to PES2014 have all been secretly pre-programmed at an abandoned aircraft hangar in the Nevada desert or anything like that (insert PES2008 gag here). But I do believe that the development cycle for each PES starts and finishes a lot earlier than is generally supposed.

It’s probable that the features to be included in PES2009 are either already finalised, or very close to being finalised. This would seem to have been confirmed by Seabass himself. Responding to unprecedented criticisms of PES2008, he stated that PES2010 would see a return to the PES drawing board. It’s already too late for PES2009. Probably.

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Here, in no particular order of importance, are 10 things I’d like to see in PES2009. They’re very individual to me, and many of them are only ‘niggles’ – not major problems at all, and therefore things that can easily be fixed without breaking the whole game. Right?

The list is accompanied by several bandwidth-hungry JPEGs to make things look pretty and make you forget that you’re reading on the internet and stuff.

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1. Master League#1: End the silly feature where you cannot have a player on the Transfer List and use him in a Trade negotiation at the same time. It’s so annoying.

2. Master League#2: At least three Divisions are needed for Master League. A twelve-club Division 3, and twenty clubs in Divisions 1 and 2. Hell, go the whole hog and make it a four-division structure. It wouldn’t be hard. ML players would love it. ML haters are going to hate ML again anyway, so what is there to lose?

3. Editing: An editor on a par with the PS2 versions’ editors. If this isn’t already planned for PES2009, then Konami are even closer to committing professional suicide than they already did with PES2008. And I say this as somebody who doesn’t really care about editing. If I can change kit colours and proper names, I’m happy enough. But others do care – boy, do they care.

4. Graphics: A level of graphical sheen and prowess appropriate for the next-gen consoles. That’s all. If EA can do it, Konami can do it. (Incidentally, how long are the next-gen consoles going to go on being called next-gen consoles? It’s the kind of thing that annoys me, and it annoys me.)

5. Penalty kicks: For the love of all that’s holy, please bring in a power bar for the kicker at the very least. Online wags have rightly compared PES penalties to a web Flash game circa 2003. Come on. They’re an embarrassment.

6. Fix the side-backs. In real life they don’t wander into the CB positions at the most critical moments for no apparent reason. If this is an example of Konami’s infamous scripting, well, they should come up with another script that doesn’t rub our noses in it quite so much. Speaking of which…

7. Scripting: We know it exists. They know that we know it exists. We know that they know that we know – etc. What’s needed for PES2009 is a bit of honesty and openness from its makers about just what is going on under the hood.

It’s not asking for much. Plenty of other computer games inform their players of what to expect on higher difficulty levels.

The Civilization series is a notable example. Going into a game on Deity level, say, you know exactly what bonuses the AI players are receiving. They can build faster than you. They can make war better than you. They can make money quicker than you. You know exactly how and why you’re about to get your arse kicked unless you do something about it. It’s not shrouded in mystery and plausible deniability.

I’d settle for a nice section in the sparkling new PES2009 manual that details the exact effects on the human and computer teams of the varying skill levels. For example: “If you choose to play on Top Player, the CPU team receives a +10 bonus to all of its stats across the board.” That kind of thing.

8. Online play: There’s no squirming out of this one for Konami. I don’t play online (not much, anyway), but billions do. When they do do it, they want to experience the ‘online is the same as offline’ standard of play that was so (in)famously promised for PES2008. Along with a proper Editor, this is another must-have. Everything is moving online. I’m resolutely a solo gamer but even I can see which way the wind is blowing. In 10 years’ time, games like Warhawk (no single-player mode; 100% online) will be the norm.

9. Foot planting. The good people over at WENB do keep going on about something they call ‘foot planting’. I have only the vaguest idea what they mean, but this does not stop me from enthusiastically endorsing it.

10. Camera panning. To be clear: camera panning in PES is where the camera is anchored near the halfway line at a point of your choosing. As the action moves from end to end, the camera pans to follow the action – instead of tracking up and down the sideline, as it does in PES2008. I’ve got to add this to the list of must-haves. Of all the things that I miss in PES2008, the absence of camera panning is one of the most dismaying.

AND FINALLY:

“Mr Seabass, don’t make me angry”

Don’t you dare release PES2009 until it is fully finished. Don’t even think about it. That would be most unpleasant.