PES Chronicles

Season 11 is over. I have won the title for the second season in succession—but it was close. Very close. Last year I won the league at a canter, with plenty of room to spare. This season, it went to the final fixture (and, oh, how PES loves to make that happen). I lost the match—but still won the title on goal difference. Here’s the final table:

With 9 matches to go I was in 2nd place, two points behind Arsenal. Somehow I contrived to lose 3 of those last 9 matches, including the final fixture. By all rights I should have been long out of contention, but Master League’s notorious league balancing act usually keeps you involved until the death, and so it proved.

The highlight of the run-in, and my game of the season, was an incredible match against Birmingham. Away from home, I was 3-0 down at half time. Birmingham’s play was relentless, their goals clinical. I needed a spectacular comeback—and something told me the game would not look unfavourably upon me coming back. I’m not formally alleging that the game was scripted in my favour, but the ease of my two headed goals that brought it back to 3-2 straight after the interval certainly had me feeling suspicious. My equaliser, making it 3-3 after 85 minutes, was a good goal. And then, with time dribbling out, in the 92nd minute… I scored the winner.

I was shouting, fist-pumping, kissing an imaginary ring on the third finger of my right hand, cupping a hand to my ear, rocking the baby, dog-peeing on an imaginary corner flag, the works. I had won the game 3-4 in the last second. It has to count as my greatest comeback in PES since… probably since ISS98, actually, when I vividly recall coming back from 3-0 down at half time as Turkey against Sweden in an International Cup match.

All I ever played on dear old ISS were those Cup tournaments. My football gaming year back then was composed of trying to win the International Cup, from scratch, using every team in alphabetical order. If I was defeated at any stage, I had to restart from the very beginning in the group stages, every single time (no reloading was allowed, even then). In ISS98 I think I got as far as Ukraine before moving on to the first PS1 ISS Pro Evolution game.

I feel nostalgic now. When will we see ISS98 (or similar) made available as a PSN download? Japan have had it for years. Where’s ours? I don’t think I want to wait very much longer. One of my special projects this summer might be to perform some surgery on my PSP, and then get a nice little copy of ISS98 up and running…

Back in season 11, I lost badly against Manchester City away. Again I was 3-0 down at half time. Hmmm, I thought. This time there was no miracle comeback. Which is a good thing: if I had come back again, I might just have regarded it as an insult. My involvement with PES revolves around not glimpsing any wizards behind any curtains, thank you very much.

Manchester City were in the bottom half of the table—they’ve really declined quite badly. And I was stunned to see Chelsea 5th from bottom. They were safe from relegation, but there they were. I checked out their team, and was aghast to see them still playing Cech and Joe Cole in their First XI, despite both players’ OVR ratings having dropped into the 40s. Seriously, Joe Cole is a 42 OVR rated player in this ML world right now, and he’s still getting a game. The truly bad thing here, of course, will be when I play Chelsea next season. If Joe Cole is in the team, rated 42, he’ll play like a 90-rated superstar. Something in me now hopes to see Joe Cole again next season. I’ll try to remember to keep you posted on that one.

So my league-title-deciding game was against Boca Juniors. They scored a goal after 20 minutes—and that was pretty much the last meaningful goalmouth action for either team. I could not get hold of the ball, and when I did, I lost it, or was ‘tangled’ out of it by swarming defenders… One of those games. All Arsenal would have to do in their match was win, and they’d win the title too. My match ended as a 1-0 defeat, but when my players’ arms went up anyway I knew Arsenal had not won their match.In fact, they had only drawn it. We were level on points, but my superior goal difference handed me the title.

Phew. What a season. I fumbled the Treble after making good progress. And I really thought I was going to do it at the first time of asking. The last two next-gen PESes have conditioned me to expect an instant Treble as soon as it becomes possible. It hasn’t happened.

Here’s a few goals from the end of the season. Zaki’s half-volley at the start is one of my favoutire goals in PES2010 so far. Right at the end of this clip comes the 92nd-minute winner in the match against Birmingham that I’ve spoken about above:

Link:

And so to season 12.

Another end-of-term post today. Tomorrow’s shadow looms large. It’s the UK release of the FIFA10 demo, in case you hadn’t heard.

What will FIFA10 be like? Can the demo possibly live up to the hype? It’s virtually guaranteed that those who are opposed to FIFA as a matter of ideology—and they are many—will be out in force afterwards, proclaiming: “Is that it?”. Perhaps lots of pro-FIFA players will be saying that as well. I just hope the demo does the game justice. The forums will be good reading tomorrow night regardless.

FIFA and I are not on speaking terms at the moment. My belated discovery of the scandal regarding the lack of midweek night matches in Manager Mode’s lower leagues is still fresh in my mind. Sadly, it seems ‘the community’ has largely moved on and let EA off the hook (after they promised and everything). Although I wonder how many people have missed the news completely, as I did, and still don’t know?

For most people the argument ‘gameplay is all’ is the beginning, middle, and end of the matter. That’s pretty much the case for me as well, but for various reasons I need a sturdy, realistic, offline career mode. That’s the only mode I’ve ever played and it’s likely all that I’ll ever play. I’ve waited two long years for a Manager Mode even close to the standard of FIFA’s overall gameplay. The night matches issue in FIFA10 is like a sucker-punch in the stomach. I think it’ll turn out to be forgivable in the long run, as the lower league teams teams can be assigned to night-enabled stadia, but it’s a nasty turd to find in the punchbowl.

I’ve still been playing football games over the past week. I’ve been getting my kicks from the Xbox 360 version of PES6—I’ll come to that later. First, I’ve acquired a handheld emulator and a stack of games, among them the SNES version of ISS Deluxe.

I picked up a Wiz games console a while back. It’s not available in any shops. Its primary function is the emulation of old games and platforms. And thus have I rediscovered a universal truth of gaming: old games are rubbish.

Seriously: back in the day, I thought European PGA Tour II on the MegaDrive was the greatest golf game/greatest game I’d ever played. I played it again the other day for the first time in about ten years and… I was shocked. It was really, really bad in every way. Remember the first generation of Java games on mobile phones? Worse than that. NHL94 and FIFA97, both decent games in their day, also seem poor now. I had a few minutes on FIFA97, playing in the celebrated indoor arena, but had to switch it off. FIFA has certainly come a long, long way since then.

Only the wonderful Cannon Fodder really stands the test of time. And, over on the SNES side of things, International Superstar Soccer Deluxe.

This short clip is out of focus almost all the way through. Sorry about that, but you can make out what’s happening on-screen:

Link:

I never played ISS Deluxe the first time around. The 1990s was mostly a games-free decade for me. I’ve played just about every other ISS/PES game in existence.

ISS Deluxe is a cracking game! Okay, it’s primitive even by the standards of the first ISS game on the PS1. But it handles decently, and it does to perfection what I first loved about ISS all those years ago: it forces you to pass the ball around and look for space and probe for openings. Wonder-dribbling—of the kind that has sadly infected the PES side of the family tree in recent years—is nowhere to be seen (except on the very lowest difficulty levels, which is fair enough).

I’ve played a few Tournaments. Naturally, the lasting appeal is limited. How could it not be? But I’m glad to have filled in one of my ISS/PES blanks. Now I do believe the only blank left is the mobile phone version of PES2008. Give me some time…

My main gaming time has been spent on PES6(360). I’m back in love with it. I’ve really got back into its rhythms. Dare I say it, I’ve really got back into a PES groove. Like its humble SNES ancestor, it forces a more pass-and-move style of play, but still allows you to dribble with certain players under certain conditions. It’s great.

The lack of Editing is a pain. I’m still not used to seeing my Master League team called PES United.

To finish off today, here’s a compilation video of some recent goals in PES6(360). To forestall the ‘licensed music ban fairy’ that haunts every video-hosting website nowadays, I’ve tacked on a classical tune that is presumably out of copyright.

NB: these goals are all at PES6’s actual game speed. If PES2010 is faster than this, I for one will be extremely disappointed. (Also—after some computer maintenance, I’m temporarily running a browser without an ad-blocker for the first time in years. Have floating adverts always randomly appeared on Sevenload clips?!)

Link:

My two favourite goals appear together late on. First at around 0:55 there’s a vintage strike from Mathieu, which had me sitting up and punching the air. It’s a good strike in its own right, but in context it was a GREAT strike. I was 0-1 down to West Midlands Village and despite having all the possession and all the chances it was one of those PES games when nothing would go right. In the 89th minute I thought ‘I’m not having this’, and you can see me adjusting Mathieu’s run to take the venomous shot… That, in a nutshell, is the famous ’special feeling’ of PES that people keep banging on about. Good old PES.

Immediately afterwards comes probably my favourite goal overall so far in PES6. It’s a flowing movement that culminates in a delicate through-ball that sets up a first-time rifled shot high into the corner.

So. On the eve of the long-awaited FIFA10 demo, I’m seriously hacked off with FIFA, and I’ve fallen back in love with PES. Interesting times indeed.

Speak, memory… An extra special Saturday post for this Bank Holiday weekend, to mark a very special occasion. In town the other day, I popped into one of those ‘Cash Generator’-type stores on the off-chance that they’d have a copy of NHL09, which I’m still hunting high and low for. On my way out, for some reason I glanced at the store’s Retro games shelf. Among the Mega Drive FIFAs and the Dreamcast Ecco the Dolphins and the like, I saw a lone PlayStation game.

It was… International Superstar Soccer Pro. The legend itself.

I picked up the box and looked at the price on the back. £1.99—bargain. I thought that even if I got it home and only played it once, and then never again, it’d be worth two quid. Let me put it another way: if I was walking along a street, and I saw a magic door with a sign on it that said ***STEP INSIDE AND PLAY ONE MATCH ON THE ORIGINAL PLAYSTATION VERSION OF INTERNATIONAL SUPERSTAR SOCCER PRO FOR JUST TWO POUNDS***, I’d be straight in there.

I took the game to the counter and paid. The usual kind of spiky-haired kid behind the counter bagged it up. I couldn’t contain my delight. “Two quid for this is a bargain!” I said, with what may have come across as psychotic glee.

On my way home I realised I should have checked the state of the disc. It had to be over a decade old. How many owners? Likely dozens. And, unless they’d all been the kind of gamers who scrupulously held their discs by the edges and never left them lying around and always replaced them in their own boxes (gamers like me, in other words), this ISS Pro disc was likely to be in a fearful state. And, sadly, it was:

The picture doesn’t do it the full (in)justice. The surface was probably the worst condition I’ve ever seen a game disc in. What do some people do with their discs? I once lent a much-loved copy of Tiger Woods 2003 to a work colleague for a single weekend. When I handed it over it was in spotless, mint condition—literally as good as the day I bought it. When I got it back it looked like the cratered surface of the Moon. I just don’t get it.

Was I really going to put this thing inside my PlayStation3? Would it work? I would have to see.

The instruction manual triggered faint memories. I remembered, very dimly, chuckling about the pitch diagram, with its ‘corner posts’ and ‘goal nets’…

Tee-hee. Ohhh, memories. Speaking of which. Here is the intro. Turn up your volume for an instant nostalgic trip back in time:

There was no need to worry about the state of the disc. It worked perfectly.

And now here’s a gameplay snippet. I played my traditional opening fixture, England vs. Scotland (still the classic International fixture, and in dire need of a revival IMO). Using my new camera I recorded a whole half of play. The resulting AVI file was about 350MB. Er… So I snipped out this 30-second clip from the start of the second half:

Hey, I hadn’t played this game for 10 years or more. ISS98 and its successors, and then the PES series, have all taken me to other places in the meantime.

The graphics were the most shocking thing at first. These clips actually make its graphics look a lot better than they are. I watched the teams coming out, and then the first few seconds of play, and felt utter dismay. Were graphics really this bad on the PlayStation? I’m certainly no graphics snob, not really, but I’m clearly not a born Retro gamer either.

The prototypical ISS gameplay is there. You remember it (you feel it) within a few seconds of starting to play. ISS Pro, in its day, was a huge paradigm shift in football gaming. It’s the Citizen Kane of football gaming. After ISS Pro, nothing was the same again. It took FIFA over 10 years to catch up. That’s how good ISS Pro was.

So many things feel weird about it now. Aerial through-balls… maybe it was me, but I couldn’t work out how to do them. Maybe they didn’t exist in ISS Pro. And for another thing, you can’t change direction whilst sprinting. That was very weird. Early on in the clip you can see me running at the Scotland defence. I try to change direction, but nothing happens and I just run into a defender.

I lost this match 1-2. It was on the Medium difficulty level (there are only three). Here’s one of Scotland’s goals. My keeper gets a hand to it, but it goes in anyway. The pause at the start is due to me trying to figure out which button did what in the replay controls. It turned out that the Replay playback button was Triangle in ISS Pro. Ten years consumes a lot of memories…

I did score a goal, just to make me feel good. Shooting in ISS Pro feels HEAVY compared to the latest PES games. I had quite a few shots but just couldn’t seem to hit any sweet spots. I barely managed to get any shot above knee-height. Here’s one that I at least placed reasonably well—well enough for the keeper to fumble it into the net. The keepers were pretty solid overall. The two goals I’ve posted here make them seem like PES2008 keepers (the version that must not be named), but they were actually pretty solid:

And that was that. I finished the match, removed the disc, put it back in its box, and it’s still there now. I’d like to be able to report that my brief game inspired me to start playing ISS Pro on the PS3, but it hasn’t. I’ve got too many games to play, great games, modern games, and I want to play them. Retro gaming is all very well as an occasional one-off, like reading a classic book, watching a classic film, etc., but I’m far more interested in contemporary games and would never pretend otherwise.

Still, it’s nice to have ISS Pro there if I want it. I have no idea what happened to my original copy all those years ago. I must have traded it in for ISS98. I was poor back then. There was no sense in keeping a game on the shelf when it could be traded in. It’s always possible, of course, that this copy of ISS Pro is my original copy, returned to me via a devious route….

Why isn’t this game (or ISS98) out for download on the PSN yet? If I had ISS Pro available to play on my PSP I think I’d draw a big fat line under my gaming history so far, and declare myself completely satified with everything.

I’ll get straight to it. In times of yore, the Vertical Long camera provided a zoomed-out viewpoint from behind your goal for the whole of a match. But we haven’t seen what I regard as a ‘proper’ Vertical Long camera in PES for over a decade now. In every version since ISS98, the Vertical Long camera has forced you to play ‘downscreen’ for one half of a match. And I hate playing downscreen in a Vertical view. So I’ve stuck entirely with the default horizontal Wide view for a decade—and now I want my old Vertical Long camera back.

I want PES2009 to have a Vertical Long camera that allows me to play ‘upscreen’ in both halves. I think I remember reading a month or so ago that the game will permit this feature for the first time in a decade. I keep wondering if it’s true, and hoping.

The 2009 batch of football games are so close that I really don’t think I can function properly until I get my hands on them. The FIFA09 demo will be available a week tomorrow; the full game is only a month away. PES2009 (and its demo) is now only 6 weeks away. Or 7 weeks—it all depends what release date you believe.

I don’t know whether I am coming or going. It’s all producing some strange symptoms…

The other day I spent an hour in town walking between various shops, hunting for a PS1 copy of ISS98. I didn’t find it. I could easily get it from eBay, but I think I’ll just leave it now. I’ll hang on for FIFA09. And I suspect that it’s only a matter of time before ISS98 (or any one of those early ISS titles) pops up as a PSP download on the PlayStation Network. In which case I would be at the front of the queue.

I’ve mentioned on several occasions that ISS98 is one of my favourite versions of ISS/PES. ISS98 was the one with Fabrizio Ravanelli and Paul Ince eyeballing one another on the cover. Back in 1998 I played it almost into the ground on my old PlayStation—whilst wearing short trousers… (Not really. I was twenty-something in 1998, but it was so long ago now that it feels as if I should have been wearing short trousers.)

No doubt the mists of memory are being kinder to ISS98 than it deserves. No doubt I’ll reel in horror, if/when I ever get to play it again.

Ah, but it had that 100%, ‘proper’ Vertical Long camera… If it is indeed back for PES2009 then I can see me and Pro Evo getting very cosy together again. There’s something about playing vertically, directly attacking a goal ‘upscreen’ that makes an already immersive game even more so. Shooting in particular when using a Vertical camera is extremely satisfying. Aiming is so much more intuitive.

If anyone has any concrete information about the Vertical camera in PES2009, I’d love to hear about it. Remember that it has to point towards the opponent’s goal in both halves. Otherwise, I’m not interested.

I doubt that any of the early playtesters—at Leipzig and elsewhere—took the trouble to test all the camera modes. Even if they did, I bet none of them played with the Vertical Long camera. And even if they did, I bet they never used it for the whole match. When the big PES websites—PESfan, WENB, that lot—start getting their promo copies of the game, I’ll post a question for them. But will I get my question answered? Those Q&A threads are nightmarishly fast and furious. I think I’ll end up finding this one out for myself.

———————–

In my next post I’ll be bringing down the curtain on the game that has occupied most of my football game year. I’m talking about the PS2/PSP version of PES2008. Old faithful.

FIFA08 ran it close. I have played loads of FIFA08, more now than ever. But that shabby, classico version of PES2008 just edges it in terms of hours played. And I owe it a special post to discuss my current state of play, what I think of it overall as a PES game, and whether or not I will continue my ML career on the PSP version over the coming year.

On my next FIFA Sunday I’ll also be doing a similar summing-it-all-up post about FIFA08. That game has been another faithful servant in this grim year for PES fans.