PES Chronicles

It’s been an interesting couple of days on the PSP version of PES2008. I haven’t even been tempted to go back to the PS3 version, and I don’t think I ever will go back to it. I gave the next-gen version a much greater chance than it ever deserved.

The so-called last-gen version of PES is the true version. It’s where the action will be, if it’ll be anywhere, from now until PES2009. (And if PES2009 is just an updated next-gen PES2008? I don’t even want to think about it.)

I regret starting my PSP Master League on Top Player. Last-gen PES2008 is a wholly different game from next-gen PES2008—different passing, different shooting, different tackling, different through-balls. Everything is different. I already knew this before I started, but after playing a few warm-up games I confess that I thought I could handle it.

I’m not handling it at the moment. I’m mid-table (in a league of 12) in the middle of my second season. I get pummelled in every game, lose most of them 1-0, and have only scored about 6 goals in an entire season and a half so far!

The CPU seems to be extraordinarily aggressive in PES2008. It’ll snap at any loose balls, regardless of whether you have a player in between or not. It’s also pretty skilful, and has scored some great goals. I rarely post CPU goals on this blog, but I had to post this one:

A 35-yard volley from a cleared corner. I’d have been proud of that goal. The CPU scores long-range shots against me for fun in the PSP version of PES2008—something I am very happy to see. The better the CPU opposition, the happier I am, and the more longevity the game will have.

There are some downers. Here’s some shocking collision detection, as showcased by my goalkeeper:

What’s remarkable about this clip is how unremarkable this kind of thing has come to seem. Collision detection in PES2008 (all flavours) is as bad as it has ever been in the franchise’s history. When did PES players just start to accept things like this as being normal?

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The competitive league season of Football Manager Live (Beta) has started today. I’m about to play my first proper game, after several days of largely meaningless (but useful) friendlies.

My team’s profile in the game is pretty poor. Most of the other new players were cannier than I—they spent a longer time exploring the menus on Day 1 of the Beta. FM Live uses a database of real players, not made-up ones. Everyone else found all the good players before I knew where to look. I played a friendly last night against a guy who had David Beckham and Gilberto in his team, among others. My best player is a non-entity striker called Robbie Simpson. It’s still too early for me to know how I can go about catching up, but I’m sure there is a way.

POSTSCRIPT:

Doh. The season starts tonight, not this morning. I won’t play my first proper game until tomorrow morning, Thurs 6th March. FM Live features a host of playing options suited to the time of day you can play. Due to my working hours and other commitments, I joined a daytime league where I can play all of my games in the mornings.

When I was logged on just now I took the opportunity to play another friendly. I was 1-2 down going into the last few minutes. I rejigged my formation to beef up the midfield, and instructed my players to start thumping long balls into the box. It worked, and I came away with a 2-2 draw despite being the inferior team. I think I am going to love FM Live.

Here at the start of March—barely 5 months into the PES year (reckoned from October to October)—I find myself at something of a loss. I’ve finally abandoned next-gen PES2008 for good.

This time I mean it. I did try the House Rules route, which extended the game’s life for a while, but the quality of the game is just too poor to sustain a long campaign until the next release.

It’s the first time this has ever happened to me. Every year since there’s been a PES I’ve played it solidly, almost every day, for the whole PES year.

Perhaps that is my problem with next-gen PES2008: playing every day. I know there are many people still playing the game with great enjoyment. I suspect they’re playing occasionally, as their routines permit, perhaps a couple of games once or twice a week. Perhaps my daily play habits did not do the game, or me, any favours.

My opinion on it is only my opinion, but I believe that PES2008 on the PlayStation3 is a disgrace to the PES name and should never have seen the light of day. It’s a decent enough football game in its own right—I played it for over a hundred hours—but it’s a shockingly poor excuse for a PES game.

So it looks like I picked the wrong year to start a PES blog. Ouch. What is to be done now? I’ve just got the PSP version of the game, which offers a way out if I want it: back to the last-gen version.

I’ve been playing it over the weekend and it seems very, very solid indeed. After getting well and truly burned with the next-gen version I’m understandably cautious to rush to final judgement. But it’s looking good.

I might—just might—get myself a copy of the PS2 game (from a bargain bucket so that Seabass & co. don’t get another penny of my money). I might keep the daily PES habit going that way. It depends on me continuing to find the PSP version playable over a longer period. I’m going to give it a week or two and a few Master League seasons. I’m already in season 2 of a career with Coventry City. The gameplay is so utterly different that I’m having to (re)learn PES all over again. I’m loving it.

As well as the PSP/PS2 version of PES2008 to fall back on, I have several other football games that I could devote space to: Football Manager 2008, Football Manager Live, FIFA08, LMA Manager 2007, and even Sensible Soccer on XBLA. In particular I am very, very excited about Football Manager Live. The competitive season starts tomorrow (it’s been all friendly matches until now) and Beta testing will start in earnest.

I don’t know where the future will take me or this blog, but one place it will never take me—as God is my witness—is back to the semen stain on the fabric of reality that is next-gen PES2008.

Well, well, well. It’s a funny old world. There I was yesterday, completely in the doldrums, as dejected about the (frankly) piss-poor next-gen PES2008 as I’ve ever been and declaring myself down on all football games.

I spent the day mooching about on the computer. In mid-afternoon I was happy to receive a confirmation e-mail from Amazon telling me that my PSP copy of PES2008 has dispatched.

At least that’s something, I thought. I have high hopes for the PSP version of the game—maybe it’ll save my PES year. Something’s got to save it, because next-gen PES2008 might never see the inside of my PS3 again. Seriously.

So the approach of the PSP version was a bonus. I felt slightly cheered up, and then in the early evening I received another email:

About four months ago (not ‘recently’ as the mail claims) I put my name down to be a Beta tester on the forthcoming Football Manager Live. And then promptly forgot all about it. Until yesterday afternoon, when the above invitation landed in my inbox.

As well as the expected Terms & Conditions (please don’t ask me for a download link and a password), there was a pdf. guide. The first paragraph contains a very concise, in-a-nutshell description of what FM Live is:

I downloaded the client—a very quick download and a trouble-free installation. A couple more emails and secret passwords later, and I was playing. I was playing Football Manager Live!

At the time of writing I’ve only spent about 40 minutes in the game. I plan to spend a lot more today and over the weekend.

That 40 minutes was long enough for me to set up a manager profile; choose a team and customise its name, appearance and home stadium; acquire a full 22-player squad; choose an initial formation and some basic tactics; and, of course, play a friendly game against another human opponent. (The full competitive season doesn’t get underway until next week.)

My human opponent was a Dutchman who, like me, had received his invitation email less than an hour previously. We sent our teams out onto the virtual pitch and watched the action. Attentive readers of this blog will know that the regular Football Manager game is a little too taxing for my PC and causes it to reboot at random. So I was worried how FM Live would perform, especially during the 2D matches. But the FM Live client seems to be a touch ‘lighter’—in terms of system resources used—than its bigger, older sibling.

I won my game and went back out into the game world lobby, which was rapidly filling up with new and excited players. Doubtless I was one of several hundred new Beta testers, most of whom would be discovering their invitation emails and logging on over the course of the evening.

Anybody who has played any recent version of Football Manager won’t have any trouble finding their way around the FM Live menus. Everything from the main game is in the online game. The tactics screens—for the team and for individual players—are exactly the same. Ditto the player transfer screen.

All in all I am very impressed. The FM Live interface is clean, intuitive, and compelling. You want to do more, discover more, see more. Unlike most MMOG experiences, the other players seem to be a sensible, mature lot. I’m not saying that I dislike the kids who inhabit most other MMOGs that I’ve played. Just that their brand of ‘OMFG u suk!’ interaction isn’t to my taste…

It was perhaps the most intriguing 40 minutes I’ve spent on an online game in a very long time. I’m looking forward to sampling some more of that world later today and over the weekend. And with a bit of luck my PSP version of PES2008 will turn up in today’s post. After being almost in the pit of despair yesterday, happy days are here again.

Every Sunday on PES Chronicles is Other Football Game Sunday—a special day when I take time out from my hectic PES2008 schedule to report on my experiences with any other football games that I’ve played during the past week.

Today’s OFG news is… not much news, really. I’ve gone back to my usual behaviour of playing PES2008 pretty much 95% of the time.

I’m still plugging away with the PSP version of PES6 during bus journeys to work and lunchtimes etc.

The first goal in the clip is from my very occasional PSP Master League career with Barcelona. I just wanted to see what it was like to play with Barcelona. I’m anti-Barcelona. But 90% of PES players aren’t, and I wanted to see how the other half 90% live.

It’s okay really, but not very challenging. I seem to score a wonder goal with Ronaldinho in every other game.

The second goal is one that I found lurking on the memory stick. It’s been a very long time indeed since I played with International teams in PES6 on the PSP . So the goal must be from the first few days after I got the game—November 2006. It’s a long-range screamer from… Wayne Bridge.

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I did play a game-week in Football Manager 2008 as Coventry City (naturally).

I signed Malcolm Christie and David Thompson, both good additions to a mediocre squad. I played a pre-season friendly against Falkirk that I won 2-0, using a narrow 4-1-2-1-2 formation that has always worked excellently well for me in past versions.

During the 2D match highlights my PC started making the kind of asthmatic noises that signal an imminent shutdown. I got through the rest of the game, but I know my PC of old and I quit the game to avoid a reboot. It looks as if I won’t be playing FM2008 in full until I get a new PC sometime later this year when I can afford it. A few weeks ago I bought an Xbox360 and it more or less depleted my emergency fund (that’s the spare cash I keep lying around in case I have to go on the run from the authorities at a moment’s notice. Everybody has one of those funds. Right?).

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Speaking of the Xbox360… I haven’t had the chance to play Sensible Soccer at all this week. It’s a shame, as I was just getting into it—I was just starting to see what all the fuss was about—when I started playing Bioshock.

After that, well, the console might just as well be renamed the Bioshock360. All my Xbox time this week and most of last has been devoted to completing that sublime game. And having completed it, I’m itching to play it again on Hard, and in a different way (evilly), collecting all of the plasmids and seeing all the stuff I was too enraptured to see the first time around.

I will play Sensible Soccer for an extended period—for a couple of days, or a week—very soon. Before I start a league career I want to get good at the game, then play with the mid-1990s Coventry City squad. It should be interesting. Hopefully I’ll have something to report next Sunday.

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I only played a grand total of three matches on next-gen FIFA08 this week. This year’s FIFA on the PS3 and Xbox360 really is an oddity—a slow, almost stiff hyper-simulation of football. We have never seen its like on a games console before, to my knowledge.

One of the games was in my fledgling Manager Mode career with the lowly Dagenham & Redbridge in the Coca Cola League 2.

One of the major criticisms that PES players have of FIFA08 is that there is too little difference between all of the players. It’s a valid criticism. In PES2008, my dashing young AMF, Camacho, is a palpably different player at the age of 20 than he was at the age of 18. In FIFA08, all the players feel much the same, all the time. Of course, after a long time with the game, you start to notice that there are differences, but Michael Owen might just as well be Micah Richards, and vice versa, a lot of the time.

It’s only when you play with seriously inferior players in the lower leagues that you can feel a great difference. My Dagenham & Redbridge players are awful. They can’t run, they can’t pass, they can’t shoot. In the August transfer window I did get a few good players—Darren Huckerby, Bianchi, and a couple of midfield journeymen from the Free Agents list—but the bulk of my players are still FIFA08′s equivalents of the PES Default donkeys.

I played that one game and then scurried back to my ongoing Coventry City career, with my team of galacticos. For the first time in a few months FIFA08 annoyed me.

It seemed awkward and relatively dull compared to the fireworks and drama of my current PES2008 ML career. It’s only to be expected. You can’t swap between two radically different football games, as these two are, and expect to be able to translate your style of gameplay from one to the other—as a few too many PES players expect (or even demand) to do when they try out next-gen FIFA08.

Here’s a couple of goals from those three games on next-gen FIFA08 this week. The first is from the Dagenham & Redbridge game. The second goal is a super-duper-long-range strike from Van Persie (in my CCFC team):

I was going to say a few words today about the parlous state of FIFA’s online ‘community’ but I haven’t had time. Maybe that’ll be another one for next Sunday.