I went through all four mid-season 2019 negotiation weeks without picking up any new players. I just don’t need them. I do all my important shopping in the off-season nowadays. Mid-season is ideal for newer teams that need to accumulate cash through the playing of games in the first half of the season. By this stage of an ML career, 13 seasons in, mid-season is just an annoyance that makes you have to temporarily disable autosave and press X four times to navigate through. There was a time when I looked forward to the mid-season negotiations period as a starving man looks forward to food, but lately I’m just glad to get it out of the way.

Game 16 was tough. My opponents were average mid-table fodder—I forget exactly who they were—and I went 0-1 down early on. I had to fight doggedly to get it back to 1-1, which was how it ended. I felt fortunate to have got the draw. At least I hadn’t lost. One of my aims this season is to remain unbeaten in the league.

Next was the second leg of the Division 1 Cup quarter final against Barcelona. I was 1-2 down after the first leg. At least I had an away goal to carry into this home leg.

It was another tough, tough game where I had to dig in and fight for everything. By the 80th minute nothing had happened for me in front of goal. I thought that was it—the Treble was gone for yet another season. In all this time I’ve only won one Treble, and that was a pretty lucky one. It’s getting embarrassing.

Then I got the ball out wide to Komol up front on the left. I haven’t mentioned Komol for a long time on this blog, but he has been and remains one of my most valuable players, even at the age of 31. In the year 2025 (#if man is still alive#) or soon after, I’ll be selecting an all-time squad of 22 featuring my best players in every position. Komol will have a strong claim to one of the front three positions. He’ll definitely be in the 22. Anyway, enough gushing about an imaginary computer game football player—he got the ball and ran in on goal at an angle. And slotted it into the far corner of the net, low past the keeper’s outstretched hand. I won the match 1-0, making it 2-2 on aggregate. I progressed thanks to the away goal, and thanks to Komol at the end there.

Next in this little trio of games I met Sparta Rotterdam in a league fixture. At the start of this season I absolutely battered them 8-1. This time the game was a rather more sedate affair. I scored early—a nice flicked header from Schwarz—but then had to endure the most turbo-charged, ridiculous spell of CPU God Mode since the last spell. Sparta got their equaliser from a corner before half time. Fine. I wasn’t happy about it but at least now the God Mode should be toned down, or even switched off completely. Right?

No, actually. I should have seen this game coming. By the 70th minute I was 1-3 down and there was no way back for me. The game ended and I’d lost my unbeaten league status (believe me, that hurt). I’d also conceded 3 pretty soft goals. I don’t think I’ll hit my target of conceding less than 20 goals this season either. Never mind—the Treble is the big one, and I’m still on course for that. Fingers crossed.

I moved on to the next games, as I always do, but the Sparta Rotterdam game had left a nastier taste in my mouth than usual. The CPU had pulled some serious funny business.

It seems the only way an experienced player of PES can lose a game against the current PES AI is due to shenanigans going on under the hood. Deep in the bowels of the programming code, certain things have to happen. Translated into plain English, the game thinks something like: “Right, Player 1 has won four games in a row now and scored lots of goals. Okay, I won’t exactly make it impossible for him to score goals in this next match against, ah, Bottom Club FC or whatever they’re called—that’d be far too obvious; no one would play Pro Evo if I did that—but it’ll be very unlikely. He was scoring one chance in three until now. Now he’ll have to really work to score one chance in ten. Hehehe.”

And that’s not all. As well as calculating hidden macro-difficulty levels on a game-by-game basis (what? too paranoid?), the AI has lots of other tricks up its virtual sleeve. From moment to moment in-game, it’s always watching, always assessing, always interfering.

My ‘favourite’ CPU God Mode moment is when it brazenly re-directs your passes to its own players’ feet. This is nowhere more apparent than when you are leading and the CPU wants to get back into the game. Obviously it needs possession of the ball to do that. The simplest way for it to get possession from you is not by tackling your players or intercepting sloppy passes. Nope. That’s too old school for the current PES AI. What it’ll do instead is simply make your most straightforward, short, ABC passes go to its player instead of yours.

Here’s an example illustrated by a sophisticated scientific diagram (left). In the diagram, the blue circles are my three attackers, streaming upfield on a counterattack. The red circles are the CPU’s sole two defenders. The upper blue circle is the ball-carrier. Here, faced with a defender in front of him, the natural and obvious thing to do is to play a simple through-ball to the central striker, who will then have a clean run-in on goal. It’s just a tap of Triangle in his direction. The diagram shows what should happen.

What actually does happen, time and again, is that the ’simple, straightforward’ through-ball will not go the player next to you. Oh no. It’ll mysteriously travel four times as far in the direction of your other, more distant player, who just happens to be closely marked. And the CPU defender will say thank-you very much, and intercept the strangely over-hit and misdirected ball, I have marked this occurrence on sophisticated scientific diagram no. 2 (right) with a cartoon explosion and a humorous KER-POW! Because I’m just so wacky.

During the nine months that this blog has been going, several recurring themes have emerged—scripting is one of the major ones. But it might seem that I’m a lot more annoyed about scripting/God Mode than I really am. If the frequency with which I return to the topic in my posts is any guide, I spend 90% of my time whilst playing the game just frothing at the mouth and heaping curses upon the hapless head of Seabass & Co. While it’s certainly true that I do heap those curses upon the poor fellow, it actually accounts for roughly 2% of my playing experience. Not 90% or more…

There are several good reasons why I keep returning to the topic of scripting here on this blog. First and foremost, it doesn’t belong in the game. I think we can all agree on that (those of us who agree that it exists, of course). PES would be a better football game without the AI’s God Mode. PES was a better football game without it. I’m sure that scripting existed to some degree before PES4, but I never really noticed it. I don’t recall it being a hot topic of discussion and debate among the PES community back then (in the mists of time…). But it is now.

The second major reason why I keep banging on about scripting is that it furnishes me with something to talk about. Let’s face it. The daily chronicling of how I play a computer game is only interesting—if it’s interesting at all—if I come into conflict with the game, or with myself, or with both. Without conflict I’d have nothing here. Scripting is the narrative dynamo that drives my entire blog. Well, maybe that’s an exaggeration. But it’s not much of an exaggeration.

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.

Frack it! I drew a game against Heracles Almelo—one of the most annoying teams in the league—which allowed Real Madrid to overtake me at the top of the table. How could I let this happen? Here in Week 25 there’s not much room for manoeuvre.

It’s season 2015 of my first career on the excellent so-called ‘last-gen’ version of PES2008. I’m playing the PS2 version on the PlayStation3, and transferring my save file to the PSP, and back again, as required. I’m going for the Treble this season—League, Cup, European Cup—after failing dismally last season. I’m an average PES player and it’s taken me until now to assemble a squad that could (should) allow my limited talents to be successful. (One day soon I’m going to rearrange the side-bar and have a ‘Previously on PES Chronicles’-type spiel sitting just to the right there. It’ll save me feeling I have to recap for new readers every couple of posts.)

I’ve got a veritable ton of great players. One of those great players is a made-up Konami player that I’ve never come across before until this year. His name is Komol and he’s one the best strikers I’ve ever played with. Particularly in his mid-20s, when I could rely on getting a hat-trick with him if I concentrated hard and really went for it.

Komol isn’t among the very greatest of strikers. It has to be said. He’s not in that very top tier, the domain of legends. He’s small and he lacks real pace. He’s not quite as lightweight on the ball as Shimizu; nor is he as lumberingly slow as Schwarz—but he’s in that whole general area. Despite these drawbacks I’ve loved playing with him and scoring all the goals that he’s scored (including one of my greatest-ever PES goals).

I got him way, way back, towards the start of this career. I think you never forget the strikers who were with you at or near the start, the ones who set you on the road to glory (if that’s the road I’m on). No matter how devastatingly brilliant any of your later uber-strikers in your galactico squads can be, they never quite manage to erase from memory those early journeymen—the above-average, and the merely very good players who first started knocking in the goals for you.

Komol is still playing a key role even now, today. He’s in my First XI for more than sentimental reasons. He plays solidly and reliably, game in, game out—although Giggs is almost ready to take that first-choice place up there on the left.

I met Real Madrid in the Quarter Final of the WEFA Championships. The first leg was away, at their place, so I was hungry for some away goal, and a clean sheet wouldn’t go amiss either. Like Barcelona, I haven’t really had any trouble getting results against Real Madird so far. This match was more of the same. I won it easily, 0-2 to me. Komol got both goals.

That was the first of three consecutive games against Real Madrid. I also played them in the league in between the two European games. I dislike it when that happens. It’s bad enough in real life, when the two teams—usually heavyweights—become so familiar with one another that they cancel one another out and the games become dull technical exercises with few goals and little goalmouth action (Arsenal-Liverpool earlier this season springs to mind).

In the return leg of the WEFA Championship, I won comfortably again, and again by the same scoreline—2-0. Komol only got one goal in this one, a tap-in from a low cross. Schwarz bagged himself the other, a classic centre-forward’s header from a high, looping cross that I sent over by accident. I favour the double-tap low crosses, but neglected to double-tap on this occasion, and there was Schwarz to rise and meet the high ball.

In the league game against Real Madrid, at my ground, I also won 2-0 and managed to regain my #1 league position. That’s three games in a row against the same team that I’ve won by the same scoreline. Strange. I think that this league encounter was the biggest game of my season, and by winning it I may have placed at least one hand on the Treble. There’s no guarantee that I’ll avoid dropping points against other teams for the last 5 games, but I won the six-pointer against Real Madrid. They’ll have to win all their games to keep up with me. The pressure is on both of us equally—or it would be if my rivals weren’t really just a load of calculations spinning around in some microcircuitry, but hey, suspension of disbelief and all that.