PES Chronicles

Every so often I find myself with a hankering to get back into a Football Manager game for the first time since 2005. In that venerable franchise, you take complete control of a football club. You pick a formation and design your own tactics in considerable depth. Football Manager players have a paranoid belief that the AI ‘learns’ any new tactic and will crack it after a while, forcing you to tinker anew. (Plenty of other Football Manager players, of course, say that they never change their tactics but still have loads of success, and they don’t know what all this ’scripting’ nonsense is all about…)

I never can quite manage to get back into Football Manager, no matter how hard I try. I suppose it’s a time thing, first and foremost. And when it comes to gaming, I’m a console gamer at heart.

In PES2010, something similar to Football Manager’s ‘cracked tactics’ syndrome may have arisen. I’m talking about the new innovation, borrowed/stolen from EA: the tactics sliders, and the odd way they seem to stop working after a certain amount of time.

Recently, after fiddling with them for a long time (unforgivably, it was my first really long fiddle since starting to play PES2010 a few months ago), I had an amazing run of form. Well, now that run has come to an end. It is almost as if the AI has indeed cracked my tactical changes, and now I’m back to the status quo.

Having had that success, I was very reluctant to change the sliders again. I persisted with my new slider settings for about 10 matches. Things were not encouraging. Win, draw, draw, win, draw, lose, lose, win, draw, draw… This has been my Master League life for far too long

The AI teams had their usual fun with me. I can usually fend off the lower teams and secure a win. The bigger teams are a real headache. They’re too fast for me—the whole game is too fast for me when they’re in the mood. Porto came back from behind to thump me 4-1. That one hurt. But it didn’t hurt as much as a 0-1 defeat at the hands of Arsenal (for reasons that are made clear in today’s mini-movie, below).

My record has gone back to being mediocre at best. With half the season gone, I’m rooted in mid-table and I think I will stay that way. My dreams of the title this season were ridiculously premature.

At least now I know what I have to do to try and change things. It’s the sliders. (Or: “It’s your tactics”, in the immortal words of the Football Manager forums…) What worked once is not guaranteed to go on working.

This could be the start of a whole new obsessive layer of PES for me. In a way I resent that. If I get an hour and a half to play PES per day, I mainly want to spend that time playing the game. Not fiddling about with menus and sliders etc. But this is a faulty outlook and I need to correct it. There’s little point in suffering through bad matches when I’m not exploiting gameplay-affecting settings to their full potiential. So I need to start slidering, routinely, before every match, or at the very least during every match. Even if only a little.

In brighter news, I have qualified from the group stage of the Europa League. I beat Juventus again in our return match. Parma beat me twice. I scored late to draw with Dinamo Bucuresti, and I beat them the second time. In the end I qualified on goal difference. It was a good campaign, and I’m looking forward to the knockout stage.

Today’s mini-movie shows two ordinary goals (although the looping header felt a bit special, and looks good too). There are also two moments of total horror, PES2010-style. The first horror incident was bad enough, an attempted pass that actually goes NINETY DEGREES in another direction. That cost me a goal against Parma in a big European match. The second horror incident is possibly the very worst thing that has ever happened to me in PES. Ever. It was a double-whammy of glitches, first another magic ball incident and then, in the same passage of play, some next-gen PES goalkeeper eccentricity at its very worst:

Link:

Regular readers will know that I never reload a previous savegame in order to get a different outcome. Sometimes, though, something so sickening happens that I consider doing so. This was one of those rare times. How the ghost of Kim U Don’t must be laughing. Jan Kun Mu, my new keeper, has so far been pretty dire. I might move him on at the end of the season. What is going on with Korean goalkeepers in this Japanese-made game?

I didn’t reload in the end. But I was >this< close…

Oh dear. I’ve finished season 2014 and it all went pretty badly wrong in the closing stages. This was supposed to be the season where I either won the Treble, or at least ended up with something to show for my efforts.

But I got knocked out of the Champions League at the pre-qualifying group stage and crashed out of the D1 Cup. I was doing okay in the League, snapping at Valencia’s heels. I was confident I could win the title at least this season. And I was doing great in the WEFA Masters Cup—the Euro consolation prize—where I met Marseille in the semi-final. I was regularly playing and beating Barca and Real Madrid in the league. So Marseille in Europe should be no trouble, right? Right?

First of all I was intrigued to see the formation that the CPU was using: a weird variant on the 4-3-3, a kind of 4-2-1-3 that I don’t recall seeing the CPU use before. Those two CMFs look to be too close together. The sole AMF will have his work cut out. The burden on the three forwards (two SS and a CF) is proportionally greater than in my (relatively) more sedate 4-3-3 formation.

I thought I was going to exploit Marseille’s strange formation to the full after a first leg at their ground that finished 1-2 to me. A win, and two away goals: I couldn’t help but regard the tie as effectively over. The second leg would have to be an utter disaster for me to go out now. The final here I come…

But no. Marseille turned me over 1-3 at my place, winning the semi-final 3-4 on aggregate. It was pretty pathetic. I have no idea what went wrong, really. I just seemed to be overwhelmed by frantic, fast, lethal, attacking CPU play, and none of my many raids forward came to anything.

Disappointed (this is now my eighth season without any kind of Cup win), I turned my attention back to the league. With four games to go I was a point behind Valencia, who I played next.

It was a tough, tough game. Both sides had chances. The very best chances fell to me, but it was one of those games where the woodwork and a super-goalie conspired to shut me out. 0-0 it finished, then, without any change at the top of the table. I had to win all my remaining games and hope Valencia slipped up. I was sure Valencia would at least draw one of their remaining games. My goal difference was superior. All I had to do was win all three games, and I could still do it.

I won my next game, then played Real Madrid. As I’ve mentioned once or twice, I’ve had a pretty good time against them in this division. Imagine my extreme chagrin, then, to go 0-1 down straight from their kickoff. I equalised. Real scored again. I equalised again. Real scored again. That’s how it went, all the way to the final whistle, with the final score 4-4.

Did I not like that. Not only was it an utterly stupid old-FIFA-style scoreline of the kind that I always hate to see in PES (thankfully not so much in the PSP/PS2 version of PES2008), but it let Valencia grab a three-point lead going into the final fixture. I now had to win and hope Valencia lost.

I didn’t win my last game. I lost it, pretty dismally—Osasuna beat me 2-1. I was trying too hard. But in the end it wouldn’t have mattered, as Valencia won their last game and took the Division 1 Championship by a whopping 6 points—the biggest gap there’s been between 1st and 2nd all season. I was, and am, displeased with myself.

So I end season 2014 completely empty-handed. It’s getting annoying. The only thing I’ve won in PES2008 so far (on PSP/PS2) is the Division 2 title, way back when. Nothing else. At least it means I still have everything left to play for. The hunger is still there, spurring me on. Roll on season 2015. Finishing second this season means I’ll go straight into the full WEFA Championship tournament—none of that pesky pre-qualifying nonsense. I’ll have a normal start to the season with just one game per week. As ever the Treble is the target and this time I think I’m really going to do it.

The WEFA Masters Cup is mostly uncharted territory for me in PES. It’s the game’s equivalent of the UEFA Cup—or the Euro Vase as some wags have unkindly dubbed it. It’s peculiar just how devalued the competition has come to seem. I’m talking about both competitions here: the virtual, computer game one, and its real-life counterpart. I can remember a time when football players, football managers, and most of all football fans would have given everything they had (or at least the proverbial right arm or left testicle) to play in Europe, in any competition. That time is at least a decade behind us now. So what’s changed recently? What’s made the UEFA Cup (and the likes of the FA Cup) suddenly seem comparatively worthless? I don’t have any answers.

The formula for success in Master League usually deposits you in the WEFA Championships and keeps you there, season after season. If you find yourself playing in the Masters Cup it’s because something has gone wrong. You finished the previous season in the top 6 and qualified for the pre-WEFA Championships qualifying tournament—but it’s still too soon for your team and the best you can do is finish 3rd in the group.

That’s what happened to me earlier this season (and I was pretty gutted). But at least there’s a consolation prize in automatic entry to the Masters Cup. I brushed past Rangers in the last round. Now, in the quarter finals, I came up against Benfica.

I thumped Benfica 6-3 on aggregate. The three goals that Benfica scored were jokes: I was lazy, inattentive, sloppy. Conceding them disappointed me, despite winning the quarter final with ease. This keeps happening to me in PES. It’s not just something that started this year. I always let myself go from time to time—just ‘zone out’—and let solid leads slip, and miss out on trophies. It’s a bad habit and I’ve got to get rid of it.

In the league I started winning again, and briefly reclaimed top spot from Valencia. It’s now clear that the race for the Championship is between me and them. I’ve remarked before on how I find Valencia to be my toughest opponent in Division 1. I think it’s because they’re not as big a name as the Big Two (Real Madrid and Barcelona). When I play Real and Barca I play with focus and concentration. I’m lethal in front of goal. Give me a chance, or even a half-chance, and I’ll get the goal I need, and then defend for the rest of the game with patience and discipline.

But against Valencia and other relatively less well-known teams, I tend to play in a more harem-scarem, hell-for-leather style. This exposes me to more danger at the back and seems to blunt my threat up front. Go figure, as they say.

After taking #1 spot from Valencia for a whole week, I drew my next game and found myself in second place again. There are only 5 games to go—one of them against Valencia. That, I think, will be the Championship game. I just have to make sure to win all my other fixtures. And the Masters Cup as well, of course. That’d be so nice…

Quite often in PES when you’re in a delicate position in the league, the performances of other teams around you will exactly mirror your own. If you win, they win; if you draw, they draw; if you lose, they lose. This is most noticeable when you’re top of the league by two points (for example) and then you lose and draw several key games—but somehow you remain top of the league by two points. Because, fortunately, the team(s) below you lost and drew those games as well…

It’s only because of this phenomenon that I’m still top of the league at the moment. The 5 games I’ve played since the mid-season negotiations have all gone poorly. Won 1, Drawn 1, Lost 3. I have no idea what I’m suddenly doing wrong.

I think the mid-season break simulates an interruption of momentum. In real life a team can be flying along and winning games for fun. One weekend there’ll be a break for International games, and when regular league play resumes that same all-conquering team suddenly finds itself barely able to string two passes together. Something like this effect, I think, is present in PES. Also the addition of new players (even just two new players) to a squad can dilute the team work equation.

Or (and this is probably the real reason) I’ve just got complacent on the back of my steady pre-mid-season form. That’s happened to me too often in PES for me to recount. A sudden drop-off of form when I unconsciously assume a foregone conclusion (the Title is mine!) has often left me trophyless at the end of the season. I must not let that happen this time.

I’ve played the first leg in the Quarter-Final of the WEFA Masters Cup—a nice bonus after being knocked out of the WEFA Championships. I’m taking the competition seriously, fielding my best players when possible. In truth this isn’t hard to do—my squad is pretty strong. There aren’t any real bench-warmers in it, apart from the still untested 17-year-old Shevchenko. His time will come.

Speaking of young players: Kim Cyun Hi seems to like the Masters Cup. He scored two goals in both legs of the Quarter Final (against Rangers), helping me on my way to a 6-1 aggregate victory. I’m sorely tempted to start playing Kim Cyun Hi from the start in as many games as possible. I took a look at his stats the other day, and had to go for a lie-down afterward. I’ve never seen anything like it. Most young players take seven seasons to get the kind of growth that Kim has shown in less than two seasons. At the moment I’m strongly reminded of Shimizu at his peak—albeit a Shimizu with actual strength. Kim Cyun Hi should outstrip Shimizu with ease. He’s already got several stats in the red and high yellow zones—at the age of 19. This kid is seriously going places.