My final four games of the season (and possibly my final four games of next-gen PES2008, period):

Parma 1 - 3 Singers FC (Elcherino 3)
Sunderland 2 - 5 Singers FC (Elcherino 4)
AEK Athens 2 - 1 Singers FC (Caracciollo)
Newcastle 3 - 3 Singers FC (Espimas 2(!), Altintop 1)

(Can you spot the games where Elcherino didn’t play?)

Newcastle put in a suspiciously energetic performance in the last game. I was actually 3-0 down at one point. Then Espimas sprang into action with his underrated Middle Shooting ability. He banged in two long ‘uns for me and could have had a hat-trick by the end. Altintop had his first (and possibly last) immense game for me, dominating the forward line and netting a classic centre-forward’s header from a cross in the process.

Here’s the end-of-season promotion/relegation information from the two Superleague divisions. I was really looking forward to seeing who would go up and down:

(Apologies for the blurriness of these snapshots. The 20th-placed team in Division 1 was Villarreal; the 3rd-placed team in Division 2 was Sevilla.)

Elcherino finished as top scorer in Division 2 with a staggering 40 goals in 18 games. Even Schwarz in my old ML team of superstars only managed 29 goals in my last Treble-winning season.

Would Elcherino have scored 80 goals in a full season next time around?Or even 100? I think he would have.

I finished 6th in the table after being rock-bottom at the halfway stage. If the season was just a couple of games longer I’d have sneaked into a promotion spot. I don’t think I’m being too presumptuous when I say that promotion next season would be guaranteed. At least 100 league goals in a title-winning campaign would be easily achievable.

———————-

However, there isn’t going to be a next season for Singers FC or for next-gen PES2008. Over the past few weeks I’ve spoken a lot about the many reasons for this decision. I won’t repeat myself here (much).

I’ll keep the saved game, of course. Some sunny day in April, or in June, or in September, I might well find myself slipping the PES2008 disc into the PS3 once again.

Because it’s not all bad. It’s easily the worst-ever PES (in my opinion), but it’s still a pretty fine game for a short time. My stats (above) show that I’ve played for more than 130 hours in total. I’ve had my forty quid’s-worth out of this game, oh yes.

If they ever manage to fix the online play I will definitely be back - sooner rather than later. What little I have seen of the online game suggests to me that perhaps PES2008 was designed with multiplayer in mind. Sadly, PES2008 online is an appalling example of the near-criminal shoddiness that seems to have gone into PES2008’s production. There is no resolution in sight. Technically, it has the worst online quality of any game I have ever come across, ever.

I’m very surprised that the PES community (if PESfan is anything to go by) seems to be letting Konami off the hook on this one. The citizens of the internet are not usually noted for their patience and forbearance. You would think that the PS3 Online section of the PESfan forum would be permanently full of threads along the lines of OMFG sort out the online already! But no, there’s almost nothing.

I think it means one of two things. Either the PES community is oddly passive in the face of an ongoing travesty; or too many dissatisfied customers have simply drifted away from PES2008 and moved onto other things (as I am doing) for anybody to put up much of a fight.

——————-
And thus that really is the end of the road for me and PES2008 at the moment. We are finished. We are over. It’s a shame, and it’s worthy of much wailing and gnashing of teeth - at least on a personal level.

It’s a mark of how great PES has been that its fans almost seem to regard it as part of their personal identity. Hence the resistance felt by so many (including me) to the notion that next-gen FIFA08 - of all things! - might, just possibly, be the superior football sim this year (and it is).

I know there are people out there still playing and enjoying next-gen PES2008 offline. Good luck to them. Like some old-gen FIFA games of the past, next-gen PES2008 is a decent enough video game that happens to be based on the sport of football (talk about damning with faint praise…. )

It’s good for a week or two, or even for a month or two, but it lacks the year-round longevity of its predecessors. Sadly for me it’s just too much of a departure from the ultra-high standards I have come to expect.

——————

Next on peschronicles, we go back to the future. It’s PES5 all the way.

My most recent four games have gone like this:

Marseille 2 - 5 Singers FC (Elcherino scored 4)
Singers FC 5 - 0 Feyenoord (Elcherino scored 3)
Atalanta 3 - 5 Singers FC (Elcherino scored 4)

and I was particularly unimpressed with this one:

Singers FC 7 - 1 Tottenham - (Elcherino scored 5)

Here’s a clip showing what happens almost every time it’s my turn to kick off, whether at the start of a game or after the CPU team has scored:

I’m up to 7th in the table with just four games to go. I won’t be able to haul myself into a promotion spot. The resurgence came just a bit too late. The third place is mathematically out of reach.

Elcherino is the top scorer in the Division by a long way. Despite only starting to play after the mid-season negotiations, he’s on something like 33 goals (<<< that’s one blurry picture). The next-highest scorer, Viduka, is on 14 goals.

I’ll at least finish this season, but then… I’ll see how I feel.

Knowing what I now know about PES2008, I cannot take it seriously as a PES game. Among the many reasons why PES came to be such a phenomenal force in the football gaming world was that it possessed an undoubted quality of realism. It was the discerning football fan’s football simulation. Until now.

In what kind of football is it possible for one player to score 16 goals in four games, with at least - at least - a hat-trick in each? It might be possible in Sunday morning football or in school football, but even then it’s still extremely unlikely. In professional football it simply doesn’t happen.

I know, I know. Yes, I did watch and enjoy the Spurs 6, Reading 4 game on Match of the Day on Saturday night. I know that Reading were also involved in a 7-4 result earlier this season. And that there was a 4-4 game at Stamford Bridge on Boxing Day.

But those are exceptional matches in real football. They account for considerably less than 1% of all games. Not more than 90%, as in PES2008

I suppose I could follow some sound advice and immediately place Elcherino on the bench, keep him there, sell or trade him at the end of the season, and limit myself to getting players of more modest ability thereafter.

I could do that. It might even be interesting, and fun, to try it out. But I don’t know if I really want to. I never had to resort to that kind of desperate measure before.

Severe disillusionment with PES2008 has set in. It has taken root in my soul and it won’t let go. FIFA08, for all its shortcomings, is a better football game than PES2008. I acknowledged this to myself a long time ago. Only now am I facing up to the fact. (Once again I have to stress that I am talking about the next-gen console versions of both games, which are utterly different from the last-gen versions.)

I no longer play PES2008 - I just sit there and work the controls. And I think of something else whilst doing so.

How did it ever come to this?

PES2008 is not a ‘proper’ PES game. That’s the awful truth. It’s not PES at all.

I’ve just about come to terms with it, but what terrifies me (frankly) is the possibility that PES2008 - with its arcade handling, its 100mph pace, its jet-heeled players, and of course its butter-fingered goalkeepers - is not an aberration due to the developer’s lack of time and playtesting (as most PES-followers assume), but instead represents a deliberately planned new direction for the entire PES franchise.

If that is the case, then we can probably forget about PES for the rest of this generation, in the same way that we used to automatically disregard FIFA. It’d actually be FIFA that would carry the football game torch forward. The torch that PES used to bear so proudly.

Don’t have nightmares.

(The last time Castolo was truly great he was called Castello, but I’ll come to that.)

Yet another Elcherino hat-trick featured in a crazy game against Sampdoria that ended 5-5. That’s 17 goals for him since mid-season. He’s already second in Division 2’s top-scorer table. Caracciolo got my other two goals. I was lousy at defending in this match. Elcherino’s goals have made me complacent. I’ll have to work on that.

Elcherino was unfit for the next game against Spartak Moscow. I had to play Castolo up front on the left. I was quite worried about this game, as I was also missing Altintop, Camacho, and Jackson.

Castolo rose to the challenge of filling the Special One’s boots by scoring all three goals in an easy 3-0 win. Here’s the pick of them:

Ahhh, Castolo. There’s plenty of PES lore that I’ve yet to mention in this blog. The topic of Castolo as a PES phenomenon is a prime example.

Castolo in PES2008 - and in PES down the years - is a subject I will return to at greater length in the future. It’s going to be a long 10 months to PES2009.

For now I’ll just say that until PES4 - I think that was when he underwent the name-change from Castello to Castolo (why? this has never been established) - he really was as good as the first set of strikers you’d end up buying for your ML team, and sometimes better. He was definitely the last player you’d ship out on a trade or transfer, and you’d always get a good price for him.

Nowadays, though, I don’t see what all the Castolo-related fuss is about. He’s better than the other Default players, granted, but being the best of a bad bunch doesn’t make him a good player. In my opinion Castolo, like many real-life players, continues to enjoy a special reputation based on past exploits alone. He really hasn’t been ‘all that’ for at least three instalments of the game now.

Until he scored his hat-trick against Spartak, he’d only scored one other all season. In my first Master League he was just as bad.

And yet people still rave about him, to the extent that the entire Master League default team is often referred to as ‘Castolo & co.’

I don’t get it. Maybe it’s me.