Category Archives: Editing

Gone in 60 Minutes

  By not-Greg | September 26, 2012 - 12:00 | , , , ,
156 Comments

The last time I tried my hand at any in-depth PES Editing, this picture here is what happened. Like something out of a horror film.

That was supposedly David N’Gog, at Bolton, back in PES2012. I cocked up that Option File installation, needless to say.

It’s been tempting to roll up my sleeves and get stuck in with some DIY Editing on PES2013. Plenty of others are working hard on stuff. Why should I sit back and wait for things to fall into my lap?

But I have no familiarity with the system and no time, really, to learn it. Back at work today. I’ll wait for the Championship Option File, and then see what I want to do when it turns up.

I’m warming to my Emergency Standby Master League. I’ve got the Brazilian giants in Division 2 with me. They really are all rather good, for the most part. My feeble Defaults are routinely battered by their pace and strength. I’m back down on Professional difficulty, and pondering Regular. My time on Top Player was hilariously brief.

The table after 8 matches:

Thanks to my first and so far only win of the season, I’m off the bottom—for now.

I’m still no further along, really, in getting to know these new Defaults. At the moment, most are just a capital letter followed by a stream of other letters.

I am starting to know a few, and warm to a few as well. Minandinho is the star striker. Castilis is a capable midfielder. Coynborough, my favourite, has the erratic first touch of pinball flippers—but I like him anyway.

On Monday I was about 95% sure that I’d be switching from this Master League to a more traditional-feeling one, like the one that served me so excellently in PES2012. I.e., one with a full and satisfying Championship component.

But now that I have slightly bedded down in this League, I’m only about 70% sure that I’ll be restarting.

I’m settling into the world, getting to know my team and my opponents. I met Ronaldinho at his new club, Atletico Mineiro, and coped pretty well with him. I can defend well in PES2013, but goal-scoring remains a problem. Take a look at the new-look Calendar:

That’s a 6-0 thrashing I took at the hands of Chelsea in the FA Cup on October 3rd. I was 4-0 down after 20 minutes. The final score could have been 10-0, but I decided not to humiliate myself and shut up shop after their sixth goal went in partway through the second half.

The other scores aren’t too clear on this picture of the calendar. Your own results are shown in bold, which shows up indistinct here. I only won one match, 2-1, on the 21st of the month. I got a draw on the 6th, and lost the others.

I have scored some good goals with the new Defaults. They tend to be satisfying goals in context, rather than spectacular ones in their own right. A Coynborough equaliser in a tough match. A Minandinho header to get my first win. Goals like that.

I have only scored one of my beloved long rangers in Master League so far, with… AAKOBJOERG? It’s the first goal on show in today’s special video… Brought to you in my own hosted video player—buffering takes a bit longer than usual, but it should be fine.

Ah, you’ve got to love that music.

(Please let me know if that vid doesn’t work at all in your browser or on your mobile device. Here’s an alternative link for viewing, if the player above hasn’t worked for you.)

And it’s true: the second goal was scored in Become A Legend. After Monday’s report about dabbling with Online, I have stepped across and sampled another of my disliked modes.

A regular commenter (thanks Liam) tipped me off that you could now play in BaL as an established Pro, and thus circumvent the awful, shocking, insulting periods when you have to watch CPU vs CPU action from the bench.

I’ve always enjoyed the core gameplay of BaL. In the past, though, I have always wound up hating it for frequently not letting me actually play the game. It simply cannot be tolerated, no way, ever.

I wanted to play as a good striker at a lesser team, feeling that I was guaranteed to stay on the pitch and actually play. I picked Pogrebnyak at Reading.

He’s a great player! You know what, he’s got one of the sweetest left foots in all of PES. I scored a hat trick with him in the pre-season Training Match. Most importantly, I stayed on the pitch for 90 minutes.

But then Pogrebnyak was called up for Russia, and I was subbed off after 60 minutes despite being the best player on the pitch.

I had to watch, fuming, while the x2 speed CPU-controlled players ran around for FAR TOO LONG.

This is why Become a Legend, in its current form, will never be for me.

I love the idea of it. When it lets me play, I get very involved and very satisfied at pulling things off—things like that goal above. (Could that be the best goal–or at least the sweetest long-ranger—I will ever score in PES2013?)

I played the next League match too, and stayed on the pitch for 70 minutes this time. I suppose you’d have to play as Messi or someone to stand a great chance of playing the full 90.

I tentatively started a ‘proper’ BaL career with a young player, an AMF starting out in the Dutch league. After being subbed off at 60 minutes in my opening Training Match, I quit BaL. I doubt I’ll be back in its current form.

Let me be clear: I understand that sometimes/often being on the bench and sometimes/often being subbed off is an intrinsic part of the BaL experience. I can accept that, embrace it even. But I cannot accept being forced to watch the CPU play against itself. That is what I have always hated about BaL.

When they let you skip the CPU vs CPU periods, that’s when I’ll be interested in BaL again.

I’ll tell you this, though—that Pogrebnyak really does have one sweet left foot. He reminded me of Schwarz from PES2011. If Pogrebnyak was a few years younger he’d be top of my shopping list for Master League.

Partying like it’s 2009

  By not-Greg | April 6, 2011 - 12:00 | , ,
22 Comments

I’ve restarted Master League in PES2010. I believe that PES2010—with its spiffing, new-look Master League—was and still is the best that PES has been on the next-gen consoles. I know that it’s a minority opinion.

Contrary to what I said last time, I haven’t restarted with the Defaults. Instead, I applied a mind-bogglingly large Option File. I’m playing PES2010 ML career #2 with Coventry City in the Npower Championship, using all the real teams and kits. Barnsley, here I come.

Despite the comprehensive Option File, only a couple of Coventry’s players have their proper faces. Lee Carsley is the most notable lookalike. That’s one grim visage he’s got going up there.

I’ve never really enjoyed starting with the Defaults. I always relished the extra layer of difficulty, yes, but enjoyed? Not as such. It’s just an annual tradition that’s taken hold over the years. Having already put in my Default hours the first time around on this game, in 2009/10, I feel entitled to a change of routine for career #2.

It took me 40 minutes to transfer all the data from USB. Then I had to download a game update to resolve a compatibility issue. In all, it took 50 minutes. I used an OF called GTM Pro World that I found on PES Gaming. The unzipped size of the thing was about 100MB. Hundreds of player faces and kits had to be manually transferred, one by one. It’s the most thoroughly patched PES I’ve ever played—and I love it.

I’m playing on Top Player difficulty from the start. 10-minute matches. Classic players are on (I’ve yet to check whether the OF has unlocked all of them—I actually hope it has).

On the right is my First XI and formation—I’ve stuck with my traditional 4-3-3, for now.

Match 1 of the new career felt properly exciting and atmospheric.

It was against Leeds United. We lost 0-1, at home, not a good start to the campaign.

In action, my team feels a lot better than the Defaults usually do at this stage, so I’ve still got wild hopes of a first-season promotion to the Premier League. For now, it still gives me a thrill just to look at the table and see real teams in a real league structure.

Most of my players aren’t up to much. In this regard PES fulfils its traditional function of uncannily reproducing the individual feel of players and teams. I can’t see many of this CCFC squad still being with me in five seasons’ time.

When you start Master League with original squads, your Youth Squad is populated by Default players. My Youth Squad is no exception. One of the youngsters was a 17-year-old Castolo. As I discovered at the tail-end of my first career, The Myth as a teenager does eventually mature into a decent front player.

I snapped him up, even though there were others better than him (Minanda, Ceciu, etc.). The Myth is too strong.

Here in this new phase of PES Chronicles, I’ll be making a conscious effort to do two things that I often say I’m going to do, but almost never do:

  • Keep the posts concise and to the point. I’ll be aiming for 350-500 words per post.
  • Pay more attention to the nuts-and-bolts of Master League. I.e. player stats and formations and strategies.

We’ll see whether those two aims are compatible in the long run.

Editing special

  By not-Greg | October 12, 2010 - 11:00 | ,
54 Comments

This special post has to go here on its own, or it’d take over tomorrow’s Master League post.

I’ve played PES and its predecessors for a very long time, but I’d never bothered with Option Files or with Editing until the past few days. The most I’ve ever done is change all the fake English team names to their real ones. Doing more has never appealed to me for lots of reasons. Mainly because I’ve always been happy enough in my own make-believe PES world.

Now that I have bothered, I wonder what took me so long. This stuff rocks.

I downloaded the WENB Option File and installed it on Sunday night.

The entire process, from download to installation, only took about 10 minutes. My preconceptions of what installation would be like proved hilariously false. I’d assumed it would be fiddly and tiresome and, ultimately, not really worth it. I was wrong on all counts.

It really was a case of copying everything in the download’s SAVEDATA folder to the GAME DATA section of the PS3, via a USB stick. That was all. That was all. PES2011 auto-recognises the information. I thought there’d be lots of secondary fiddling around in-game. There was none. Imagine me cackling with glee off-camera here:

Link: Option File up and running

The current state of the WENB Option File is a happy accident for me, as it provides exactly what I need at this stage: kits and team names and badges. I didn’t really want the proper league structures that are currently missing due to a technical hiccup. I still want to create my own make-believe Premier League. I’ll be continuing that personal tradition at least

My Editing wasn’t finished there. A commenter on the blog, Heraldo, pointed me towards the raw PNG files to create my own official Coventry City kits. That link goes to a useful thread on PESGaming, but I’m sure there are plenty of other sources.

Below is my Work In Progress home strip for Coventry City. That’s an early stage of creation. The sky blue is too light—I need to work on that. I will do, and it’ll be all correct by the time I start my Master League.

Again, I was initially dubious. This will definitely be fiddly and tiresome, I thought. But again, it’s not really. And it brought a pleasant sense of accomplishment.

Now this really was a revelation—no wonder people obsess over Editing. A few years ago on a PES forum I saw somebody saying he looked forward to Editing almost as much as the game itself. I didn’t understand that then. I kind of do now.

And there was still more. I had heard about chantpacks: fan-created mp3 files that can be imported into the game and assigned to specific teams. You’ll Never Walk Alone for Liverpool, and that kind of thing. Via PESfan I downloaded neilez2′s chantpacks for every team represented in my ML, and had great fun augmenting my game even further. This is great.

How much of a difference does it make really?

Quite a bit, actually. I was actually grinning as I paged through the real leagues and the real cups and the real teams. It was absorbing to add all the real chants.

And I had a flash of insight. I bet EA really are not very happy at all about PES’s Editing facility. It’s blatantly an invitation to circumvent EA’s expensive official licensing.

Just over a year ago, Seabass and David Rutter were in the same place at the same time. That was Gamescom 2009, and I half-expected there to be some kind of jovial face-off between the two over games of FIFA and PES, maybe a cheesey hug and handshake—a good-natured photo opportunity for both individuals, both companies, and both games. But no, not even a hint of that happening.

Could relations between EA Sports and Konami be less than cordial, and could it be due in part to friction resulting from PES’s Editing?

As I sit here playing a near-as-dammit fully licensed game of PES via the back door, I think it’s more than likely that lawyers have been engaged and letters sent at various times over the years.

Remember a few years ago when PESfan suddently stopped hosting Option Files, and clamped down on discussion about them for a time? I remember them saying they’d had contact from the English FA about copyright infringement. I’d say EA would have been behind that.

Never mind. It’s all mostly irrelevant to us on the shop floor, actually playing the game(s).

Tomorrow’s post will be all about the beginning of my Master League career, as Coventry City, in a full official-style strip, but in a made-up Division 2. Ahh, how I love Pro Evo.