PES Chronicles

February? I’ve said it before, but—what is happening to time lately? Weren’t we greeting the arrival of PES2010 and FIFA10 just last week or something?

Now it won’t be too long—two months? three months?—before the buildup to the 2011 games begins. The World Cup this year may alter the publicity calculus a little. Will Konami and EA start the hype earlier or later than usual? They could go either way, I suppose. A lot depends on whether they’ve got a World Cup game to promote as well. We know that EA definitely will have a WC game.

When the PES2011 and FIFA11 hype machine does get going, certain things are guaranteed. We’ll see underwhelming screenshots. Then there’ll be the now-traditional, utterly pointless FMV video of Messi or somebody doing a trick or—if we’re lucky—tricks. Plural! Why do football game makers insists on trailing everything about a football game EXCEPT what we most want to see—i.e., ordinary gameplay? Why must we sit through several months of flicks and tricks and nutmegs and lollipops and crap like that, instead of seeing (for example) just a few seconds of ordinary gameplay, say a passing move through midfield leading to a standard shot on goal? Does any other game genre gloss over its core experience so thoroughly for so long during its pre-release cycle?

Anyway. Season 10 in my Master League. PES2010. Here and now.

Last time, I was lightheaded at being top of the table and looking fairly good after 12 matches. Here we go with the next stage of the season. I’ve played another 10 matches, and I’ve passed through the mid-season transfer window.

I experimented with a new formation. 4-3-3 has been my favoured formation in PES for 10 years now (where does that time go?). But this year I’ve found goals harder to come by than before, and it is with regret that I finally acknowledged the 4-3-3—with wide AMFs, and widely-spaced CFs—has run its course. I needed an alternative.

I played 5 of the next 10 matches using a 4-5-1 (pictured left) and then with a version of 4-4-2. The experiment did not go well.

I lost 3 and drew 2—my worst run for a few seasons. I scored just 1 goal in those 5 matches. My rise up the table has been built on pass and move, patience, and being willing to defend 1-0 leads for long periods. With the new formation, I couldn’t pass, could barely move, and I seemed to be defending all the time anyway, whatever the circumstances. Everything that had hoisted me up to the top of the table felt missing. There was no flow.

I had to take remedial action before my fledgling title challenge was seriously compromised. (As it was, I’d do well to recover.) I soon went back to a version of 4-3-3, albeit one tempered by my experiences. The new formation can be seen below at the top of the new squad picture. It handles very much like a 4-5-1 at times, with lots of bodies in midfield. Although it looks narrow, in practice it doesn’t play that way. I adjusted my sliders to favour width. My players seem to go wide when I want them wide, and go narrow when I want them narrow. I had instant success with the new 4-3-3, to counterbalance the poor results. I’m still a bit short on goals, though. The 4-5-1 experiment is by no means over. Long-term, I believe I’ll settle for a 4-4-2 with a diamond midfield. For now I’ve got the above 4-5-1 mapped to a strategy button, and I still activate it for long periods when I feel I need to calm a game down.

My possession stats lately have been extraordinary. In one match against River Plate I had 75% possession at half-time, but ended the match with ‘only’ 69%—and I conceded a typical late goal. But that’s PES for you.

In mid-season I indulged in quite a bit of activity. I bought yet another WF/SS hybrid player, SCOKLANT, for a few hundred thousand. I got rid of my calamity goalkeeper, Jan Kun Mu, who brought in £1.5m. I replaced him with a lanky Free Agent keeper called ZUBERBUHLER, who I negotiated with back in the first weeks of the season. He’s been great since his arrival.

Also in the Free Agents list I found a CF, 85 OVR, named ZAKI… I’ve had nothing but great players from the Free Agents list recently. Why do I even need to look at the proper transfer market? Is this a slight flaw in the new Master League? Only more time will tell. As I (hopefully) get more successful and accumulate more money over the next few seasons, I’ll be able to buy top players on the regular transfer market—if I want to.

The failed experiment with 4-5-1 cost me a few league places, but look here: after 22 matches, almost 2/3rds of the season, I’m still in 4th place, and just 2 points behind the leaders. After everything that’s happened in this long old career, I’ve got to be happy with that. And I am happy.

For various reasons, I’ve broken with my settled tradition by restarting my Master League career in PES. This is the first time ever that I’ve done this. I’ve been playing Master League since 2002. In all that time I’ve sometimes ‘completed’ careers and gone on to start new ones, but I’ve never abandoned my very first one of the PES-year. I had my reasons for jumping ship this time, and they were good ones.

One of the major reasons was that I originally bungled my league setup. I’d foolishly chosen to play in Division 2 with made-up Konami teams. It was amusing at first, but the novelty soon wore off. The other teams might as well all have been called ABCDEFGH UNITED. There was no sense of occasion to any match. In setting up the new career I took great pleasure in hand-picking the teams that would make up my new Division 2. I included one of those made-up Konami teams, just for the hell of it.

I took my time over the formation and First XI. Once gain I’d promoted Oscar and Schwarz from the Youth team, and there was a starting place for both. (I’ll be more careful with Oscar this time around.) The formation is a slightly tweaked 4-4-2 with wingers slightly pushed forward and the defenders slightly withdrawn—a FIFA-style 4-4-2, dare I say it. If the aborted career taught me anything it’s that I’m nowhere near ready to play 4-3-3 just yet.

Game 1 was against Dinamo Zagreb. I was in for a nasty surprise before kick-off. The game froze on me and I had to restart the PS3. Again. This does keep happening to me with PES2010. Not very often, but often enough for it to be annoying. If it’s going to happen, it always happens in the first game of a session, and always at the same place—when the players are lining up in the tunnel, as pictured.

I hear this is a recurrent problem on the PS3, but possibly just on some models. Mine is a repaired 60GB original. I’ve taken to pressing START immediately to make the game skip loading the intro scenes, and that seems to have alleviated the problem.

I won that first match against Dinamo Zagreb. It was a really good match, one of the best kind of Default matches, with all players fit and in form. I played really well, and had several epiphanies abut the PES2010 gameplay that I’ll talk about next week. (It’s all about the passing and the players.)

Game 1 with a new Master League team often goes suspiciously well, so I’m not planning the open-topped bus parade just yet. Gutierrez—the new outstanding hero of Master League, IMO—got the only goal.

And things continued pretty well. I’ve started this new career a lot better than I started (or finished) my last one. Scoring goals is still a problem, but I’m defending better. I’m in 10th position after 7 matches.

I’ve learned a harsh lesson from the financial fiasco that helped bring down the curtain on my last career. I’ll be very careful about bringing in any new players until I know exactly where I stand. The new scouting/negotiation system means I have the leisure to spend the whole season looking at players and making offers. I’ll take my time.

In other news, there’s a surprising new hero to stand alongside Gutierrez up front. That player’s name is… Castolo. Regular readers will know that I have no time and no patience whatsoever for the stubborn myth of Castolo. But when Ordaz was out injured for several weeks, I picked Castolo. He was the scorer of my other goal so far, and generally he’s handled pretty well out there on the pitch. If he wasn’t 34 years old he’d almost be a prospect. I’ll still sell him at the first opporutnity I get, but I might look out for him as a Regen and see what new stories I can create with him in the future.

Assuming, of course, that I’m still playing this career by that stage. I think I will be.

Back in December 2007, while praising FIFA08 I described it as the Ninja Gaiden of football games. For those unacquainted with Ninja Gaiden, I don’t mean the original, classic NES game(s). I mean the forbiddingly difficult action adventure game on the original Xbox. (NG enjoys cult status because of its eye-wateringly steep learning curve and unforgiving boss fights. The first random enemies on the first levels of that game are as hard as many final boss fights in other, lesser games.)

FIFA09 is also the Ninja Gaiden of football games—perhaps even more so. (It’d be more symmetrical to call it the Ninja Gaiden 2, but the sequel was not a worthy follow-up to the original, in my opinion. Perhaps it’s the Ninja Gaiden Sigma…)

I’ve been playing FIFA09 a lot for almost exactly one month now. A few weeks ago I thought I had it licked. Not literally—that would be both disgusting and pointless. I mean figuratively, in the sense of ‘I know how this game plays now, and my continued playing of it will be just be a variation of everything I have experienced thus far’.

How wrong I was. Of course, if you play FIFA09 as it comes out of the box—or entirely online, as many people do—then no, after a while it won’t have much else to show you.

The tipping point came with the switch to semi-manual and manual controls. That on its own was enough to completely transform the game that comes out of the box. I’ve posted a lot about the satisfying nature of playing with different control settings. But perhaps the ultimate game-changer for FIFA09 comes when you start to play with bad players. Yes. I have begun a new career with Coventry City.

I’m playing on World Class difficulty—but maybe not for much longer. I have so far played 5, lost 4, drew 1. I’ve only scored two goals. I’m playing so badly. It’s not even the end of August yet and I’ve had a warning from the board.

And I’m playing with what for me is a pretty conservative formation. I usually like a nice 4-3-3. Eight years of PES left me all but unable to play with anything else. Here I’m using a modified 4-4-2. I’ve pushed the wide midfielders forward, and dropped one of the central midfielders slightly deeper. Playing with Atletico Madrid in my other, much more successful MM career, it works brilliantly well. Alas, with Coventry City it’s proving a pretty poor formation. I might try a 4-5-1 or something. If that doesn’t bring me any joy I’ll switch to a 4-3-3, or even a 3-4-3. Might as well go out all guns blazing.

I can see myself being sacked soon and having to restart. And I can see this happening not just once or twice, but many, many times. The game is just bloody tough. I cannot emphasise enough how hard it is to play FIFA09 with an average set of players on World Class difficulty using semi-manual and manual controls!

I’m struggling to muster any real joy out of playing any of the games. This is the most worrying thing for me. I think I’m still playing as if my players are world-beaters. I have to slow down and not be so anxious to do spectacular things with the ball. The through-ball bug is really, well, bugging me right now. I’ll have some more to say about that tomorrow. I’ll also post my full First XI and their Overall ratings.

Barcelona—it was the first time that we met. Barcelona—how can I forget? The moment that you stepped into the room you—

That’s quite enough of that. Within a few weeks, Barcelona have been my opponents five times: once in the league, twice in the Division 1 Cup, and twice in the European Championships.

I’m finding that Barcelona are a strange package in this Master League career. I rarely have trouble beating them and they never seem to do anything special in the league. At the end of each season they’re usually hanging around in the top 6, but nowhere near challenging for the title. And I think it might all be my fault.

When I set up this league I omitted the English clubs. This sent all the English clubs’ players onto the open market, from where the existing clubs—spread across all four leagues—snapped them up. The end result is that in many cases the English club players seem to have diluted the strength of some clubs, Barcelona being one of them. Jamie Carragher is currently at Barcelona in my Master League. Now, I think Jamie Carragher in real life is a fine player, but in PES he could only really be considered an above-average player. Although Real Madrid, for one, seem to have been peculiarly boosted by their acquisition of the likes of Mark Noble (yes, Mark Noble).

I don’t know. Maybe Barcelona being mediocre isn’t all my fault. They sure are easy to beat, though. Most of the time. I beat them in the League. I absolutely thumped them in the Division 1 Cup. Leathered them. Hammered them into oblivion—as per the screenshot. (That’s a 9-3 scoreline to me, if it’s a bit too blurry.)

In the first of our two European group games, things weren’t much different—it was an easy 3-0 to me. In the second tie, though… I had a nightmare, and went down 0-1 early on. Then I started hacking away at the opposition as I like to do sometimes. Cutting to the chase, I was down to eight men by the second half. I was 0-1 behind and three players down against Barcelona. Even an average Barcelona should romp home to victory now. Things were not looking good.

But, while it was still only 0-1 to Barca, there was always a chance… I came to my senses. I rejigged my formation into an emergency 3-3-1, as seen in the diagram. I went with three CBs and pulled my DMF all the way back—as far back as he would go on the formation screen—to sit just in front of them. I pulled my two AMFs all the way back as well, to sit just behind the halfway line. I had a lone CF—Kim Cyun Hi—who was also sitting as deep as possible.

I brought on Komol to play as the left-sided AMF, despite it not being one of his positions. I’ve played with Komol for almost ten seasons now and I know I can rely on him to get me out of a tight spot. Immediately I took him off on a swashbuckling run across the pitch that led to a shot that hit the post… And Kim Cyun Hi was on hand to knock in the rebound.

1-1, and I was prepared to settle for that. I set my ATT/DEF level to full defence and prepared to see out the remaining ten minutes. I anticipated it being difficult. My plan was to defend doggedly and try to hold up the ball in midfield whenever I got possession. I would just run down the clock if I could.

However. Camacho—dear old Camacho (he’s 27 now!)—had the ball in the wide AMF position. The entire Barcelona team seemed to be swarming around my few attackers. The replay shows how many they were and how few I was. I felt in my water that Barca would win the ball back from me in a moment if I tried to keep passing it around. In PES, you end up just knowing when the CPU has decided to get the ball back. So I took a shot with Camacho, a speculative shot:

Yessssss……. 2-1 to me it ended. I’d scored twice in the second half whilst 0-1 down and having had three players sent off. Despite the sheer unrealism of it all, I was delirious. This is the kind of thing that I play PES for. I’d hate it if it happened too often, of course. But once in a while? It’s the feeling I get from occasions like those that keeps me playing PES.