PES Chronicles

Season 13 has ended. I’ve really zipped through this one. The League was safe. I won it for the fourth time in a row. The latter part of the season was all about my Champions League adventure. Unlike last season and the season before, I had a decent run in the knockout stages. No, I have not won the thing, but I got as far as the semi-final this time. Here is a very brief highlights package—including, at the end, a really awful goal that helped to knock me out:

Link:

My first knockout opponents were Stade Rennais. It was really scary given that at the same stage in two previous seasons I’ve been eliminated by supposedly minor French sides. Indeed the first leg was one of the toughest matches I can ever remember playing in PES, ever. It really is the case that the AI’s speed and overall toughness gets ratcheted up in the knockout stages. Whether this is in keeping with real life or not is another debate.

Personally I like the added difficulty, but has there got to be so much SPEED? This is true for the whole game, not just in the Champions League sections of it. All last summer we heard great things about how PES2010 was finally a proper, grown-up, slowed-down effort. Again and again (and again), that was what the previewers said: PES2010 was a slow game. You get time on the ball. Rejoice!

But then the game came out and, speed-wise, it was a great disappointment. It’s often far too fast for it to be anything but a minus point in the overall scheme of things. Konami simply didn’t have the balls to stick with the code that was shown to previewers, something I hope those previewers will remember this coming summer. We can only hope that everybody holds onto their respective balls for PES2011.

So I beat Stade Rennais 2-1 at home, and then lost 1-2 at their place. With ten minutes to go, extra time was beckoning, but then I got the winner.

Next up in the quarter finals were Porto, my divisional rivals. They were absolute monsters. I thought the speed was 100mph against Stade Rennais; here, it felt more like 1000mph. Once again after two legs we were tied at 2-2, and this time I went into extra time. Penalties were just around the corner. I haven’t taken more than two penalties in all 13 seasons of Master League so far. I’ve never been in a penalty shootout. I didn’t fancy my chances. With seconds left I lobbed a hopeful aerial through-ball in the general direction of Munitis. One fortunate bounce later, I took a potshot, and the ball hit a defender’s knee and looped over the Porto keeper into the net… Yesssssss.

My semi-final opponents were a team called ZAR BLANCO/AZUL. I’d never heard of them before I met them here, although it seems they do have quite a profile in their native – er – where the hell are they from? Google is not my friend in this instance. It seems they’re from Pro Evolution Soccer land(?), although other results indicate… Uruguay? Can this be right?

That’s their First XI, on the left. They wore purple, or dark pink depending on your perspective, and just like their predecessors they were beasts to play against, only even more so.

I did well to limit the damage in the first leg at their place, which I lost 2-0. Once again the game felt as if it was on fast-forward. A million miles an hour. In the second leg, just as frantic and stupidly fast, I did get an early goal to give myself a massive chance. But as is so often the way with me and PES2010, I then conceded a goal straight from their kick-off. That was bad enough, but just seconds later I conceded yet another one, and it was the killer. It’s the final goal in the clip above, and it was a proper howler. The score was 1-3 on the day, 1-5 on aggregate. That’s how it ended.

In the League, I romped to the title with a few games to spare. The chief interest in the closing stages was whether I could win my first Golden Boot with Zaki. It wasn’t to be, sadly. I scored a few, but the AI player at the head of the queue did as well.

I won the title by 9 points, but my goals-scored tally was the worst it’s been for a few seasons. I’ll have to keep an eye on that situation and go hunting for a top striker if required. Here’s the full final league table—which shows an interesting turn of events for Manchester City, Chelsea, and Liverpool:

The team of the season was a nice bonus: my created player, ‘not-Greg’, won player of the year. I had three players in the overall Division 1 First XI. My two full-backs are both Youth team promotees. I’m proud of them. Proud!

And so that’s that. Season 13 done and dusted, on with season 14. Year 2022-2023. The quest for the Treble continues.

For the year 2010 my PES resolution is: get promoted from Division 2 in Master League, for the love of all that’s holy...

Season 7 is my best opportunity yet. Something has subtly shifted. I’m playing better and scoring a few more goals—not many more, but a few more. I believe this slight upturn is due to the acquisition of a few better players.

Pre-Master League, using regular teams in other modes, I found PES2010 at times almost embarrassingly easy. It’s not the core game mechanic of PES2010 that’s left me marooned down in Division 2 all this time. No: it’s all Master League. The players with lesser ability—the Defaults, and the ones in the next bracket or two upward—are below my PES competency threshold. With lesser players I am fated through individual skill (or lack of it) to struggle at playing PES2010. Now, with a few slightly better players, I’m starting to nuzzle at that threshold and occasionally poke my nose above it. Possibly—this season?—I’ll burst through.

I hope so. I’m still enjoying Master League and, through it, PES2010. But I’m impatient to get up to Division 1 now and take things to another level. I could see myself getting weary if it all goes on for much longer.

So much for ad hoc analysis anyway. On with the show. On with season 7.

Something I forgot to mention last time: The Myth of Castolo has reappeared in my Youth Team. (I’ve decided that from now on I will call Castolo ‘The Myth of Castolo’. I’m definitely not a fan.)

The Myth of Castolo regenned into my Youth Team aged 17 and with an OVR rating of 51. That’s poor, even for my low-rated Youth setup. I’m reluctant to bring him in and spend good wages on him at this stage. I always said that when he showed up again aged 17 I’d get him. I’d see if I could turn him into the player that many PES players stubbornly continue to believe he is. When I said that, I believed I’d eventually get The Myth of Castolo as a side-project, something to amuse myself with at an advanced stage of my ML journey. Right now, the gritty kitchen-sink reality is that I’m stuck in Division 2, trying my damnedest to get out of it, and I’m pretty much broke. So I’m going to leave The Myth of Castolo where he is for now. I might pick him up in mid-season. I might pick him up at the end of the season. I might just forget about him totally. He is just a myth, after all.

My star players this season so far? They’re not-Greg (he’s my created player), Nakamura, Iakovenko, and Palmieri. They’re the pick of the bunch. All in all I am playing better, as shown in a very one-sided game against Hull (see picture). I’m already wondering when I’ll have to go back up to Top Player difficulty—but that wondering is very premature. As the current table shows, I’m doing well, but still not exactly demolishing everything in front of me:

(Yes… I am trying to jazz up the league table pictures a bit. There are just so many of them, appearing in post after post lately.)

Here’s a short clip showing two notable goals from recent matches. In the first, I loved the first-time shot that brought the goal. In the second, another first-timer, I love the clipped nature of the shot—a vintage PES moment:

Link:

First-time shots in PES2010 aren’t new for me, by the way. They haven’t been suddenly enabled by the mythical 1.03 patch. I’ve been first-time shooting since Day 1 of PES2010.

I don’t believe that there was a 1.03 gameplay patch. 1.03 was all about DLC: boots and balls and formation menu fixes—nothing more. PES2010 is the same game for me today that it was in October. I’ve now played vanilla PES2010 for over 150 hours. Only an official statement from Konami that there was a patch bundled in with 1.03 would convince me that this game has been patched. But there hasn’t been a word from Konami about a gameplay patch. The most credible explanation for this is that there was no gameplay patch in the 1.03 update.

Konami, some say, would never want to confirm it, because that would be admitting the game was flawed at release. When you think about a proposition like that, it makes no sense whatsoever. But that’s the Internet, and the PES fanbase, for you. Just one big crazy family. Happy New Year to all.

And it was all going so well.

After 5 struggling seasons in Divison 2 in my Master League career, I’d attained some degree of form. I was holding steady in 3rd place at the mid-season point. Come the transfer window I brought in a coupe of new players. Not as many as I would have liked, and not as good as I would have liked. I brought in TAFER (71 OVR), TREJO (72 OVR), and OJAROIZ (56 OVR). The first two were picked up from the free agents list. They’re both pretty decent, but that’s all. Tafer is a dedicated CF and Trejo is one of those useful CMF/SMF/AMF/SS/CF hybrids who are so common in PES2010. (Or am I just noticing them more, because of the new positional system?)

The pick of the three, though, for now at least, is Ojaroiz. He’s a young player straight from the Youth team. He’s a dedicated right-sided SB. Now I can move Duffy back to his rightful place as DMF, and pretty much dispense with Griersen altogether. Ojaroiz started out as a 56-rated player but within 5 matches he shot up to 59 OVR. His form arrow is nearly always either red or orange; I think it’s been green once. I’ve never seen it blue or purple. And he has fantastic stamina. He’s a clone of Duffy in that respect, a very important respect.

With my new players added to my rather threadbare squad, I forged ahead. Ojaroiz was a revelation—but that was the one bright spot. Has anyone else ever had a run of form like this:

All of those league draws were 0-0 scorelines. I didn’t score any kind of goal for an entire session of play. It was massively frustrating.

And the worst of them all was embedded in that run, in the shape of the first leg of the Cup semi-final at the start of March. I played Tottenham Hotspur—you know, ‘Spurs’—at their ground.

Now, in all my years playing PES, I’ve taken a few beatings from the CPU teams. You don’t get to be an average player, as I certainly am, without suffering. In the two years I’ve been doing this blog, an 8-1 drubbing on PES2008(PS2/PSP) back in March 2008 sticks out in my mind. That was bad.

But this? This was the worst ever.

I lost 7-0. They got seven. I got nil. The score was seven-nil.

I was shellshocked. Not just by the scoreline, but by the whole pattern of play throughout the match. I should mention here that I’m still playing 10-minute matches. I barely had a kick of the ball during this match. The sheer pace of the play was absolutely dizzying. Which reminds me of something. Remember this?

I hope we all do remember that controversial clip from July this year, featuring PES2010 being played out on a Konami office monitor at 100mph. Remember how it panicked the community, and then how it was quickly brushed off? There was nothing at all to worry about, we were told, it was ‘definitely’ just a ‘programmer debugging thing’. There was no way the final game was going to be as fast as that. And if it wasn’t a ‘debugging thing’ then it was definitely the way the video was encoded/uploaded/whatever—everybody said so, and anyway somebody had heard from somebody on a forum who’d emailed PESfan or whoever, so it was definitely true that the final game would be nowhere near as fast…

I believed at the time that it was communal self-delusion. But I went along with it because I was deluded too. Nay, I wanted to be deluded. Perhaps I still am.

The uncomfortable truth about PES2010 is that, a lot of the time, the gameplay is far too fast. The crazy thing about the cubicle video above is that it’s actually pretty sedate compared to the bonkers 200mph gameplay in the final game of PES2010. Particularly when up against top teams. All summer long we were promised a slowed-down PES, and we didn’t really get it.

I couldn’t cope with the supercharged nature of the gameplay against Spurs, really I couldn’t. I spent long periods like a dog chasing a tennis ball around a circle of kids. Unlike the dog in that scenario, I wasn’t happy about it. My tail wasn’t wagging. If that Spurs match was indicative of what I can expect in Division 1—and in European competition further down the line—I’m not sure I ever want to get out of Division 2.

Still: 7-0, how did it happen? How could I have been so careless? It might be assumed that the 7-0 only came about due to me mentally turning off after 4 or 5 goals and conceding the last few in a kind of trance. Not the case at all. I kept trying to play my game—such as it is, such as it is—until the final whistle. I was well beaten. I was thumped, and I deserved it, even if Spurs did seem to have 11 Buster Keatons on amphetamines instead of football players. And so I crashed out of the Cup. I simmed the return leg, which the game was kind enough to declare a 1-1 result.

Now I could concentrate on the league, right? Well… uh, here’s the league table right now:

Not too bad, and it’s certainly looked a lot worse at this stage in seasons past, but with only 7 matches left it’s looking ominous. I finally started scoring again, but it’s still not enough.

I wonder: is something within me disconnecting itself from PES2010? Not really, not yet. The 7-0 was dispiriting, certainly, but more because of the insanely fast gameplay I witnessed than the actual result. My distaste was compounded when I fired up FIFA10 for a few matches for the first time in a long while. I can’t believe I ever thought FIFA10 was a fast game. Next to PES2010, it almost feels like slow-motion. A big thumbs-up to FIFA10 on that front at least.

So what is going on here? Am I preparing the ground for an abandonment—even a temporary one—of PES2010? No, not at all. I’m in this Master League for the long haul. My plan was always to take the career to its first huge milestone—that first Treble—before possibly going back to play FIFA10 for a bit. At the time of writing, that’s still my plan. But if/when I ever do get out of Division 2 and in amongst the big boys, I just hope I don’t see the insanely fast gameplay, because things can always change.

Next time on PES Chronicles: the end of season 5. Will I make a final swashbuckling run up into the promotion spots? Or will it be another mid-table damp squib of a finish? Friday’s post will have it all.

The PES2010 previews were good news, in my view. On my first read-throughs of all the articles I only skimmed the lengthy parts about tactics and sliders and cards and whatnot. The gameplay is what it’s all about. But after I caught up on the extra information…

Suffice to say that the small, mad hope I’ve been nursing for the past few months is now threatening to grow out of control. I’m keeping a lid on it, because I have real concerns about setting myself up for another crushing disappointment.

It’s all about the core gameplay. If that’s wrong for any reason, nothing else matters. For me, this means that PES2010 must be a SLOW game relative to its predecessors. It absolutely must be. This is non-negotiable.

I was very happy with what I heard about the gameplay. I was particularly happy to hear the in-depth discussion of the slower gameplay in the WENB podcast. PES Gaming’s preview article was the most interesting of the lot. PESfan’s was the most generic. Taken as one giant preview, podcast included, it’s been an encouraging week.

The only thing I’m worried about is complacency. The appearance on Tuesday of a certain video, shot over the shoulder of a Konami employee who was showing off some of the new tactics features, is playing on my mind:

The gameplay shown there is worryingly fast. That’s almost a PES2008 level of pace.

There’s been a surprisingly relaxed reaction to this footage across the PESverse. Within minutes it had been decided that this was some kind of fast-forwarded special kind of debugging/coding thing that was going on, instead of actual footage of the actual game speed we’re going to get in the final game. People with knowledge of the programming/gaming industry claimed to recognise the type of display.

I bow to their greater knowledge, and fervently hope they are correct. Because if PES2010 pops out of hiding with anything even close to the speed in that montage, it’s all over for me. Kaput. Instant franchise-death.

After the previews came out, it was noted that all the previewers had ‘confirmed’ that the gameplay speed was slow. So that was that. Everything was fine. Nothing to see here. Konami couldn’t possibly decide to speed up the gameplay in a later build for soulless mass-marketing reasons, could they? Because when have Konami ever let us down…?

I hope that I’m worrying over nothing. I think that I am worrying over nothing. Even if Konami do decide to speed up the game between its 55% complete stage and next month’s almost-100% stage, it’ll probably be a negligible tweak.

————–

After losing my FIFA09 gamesave I went a bit crazy. I dug out my PS3 copy to see if I had an old save I could resume there. I didn’t have one. I hadn’t played the PS3 version of FIFA09 since November last year. After all this time playing the 360 version, the PS3 one looks and plays a lot worse.

I played a game online (yes, I was going really crazy). I randomly met an opponent who picked Manchester United. I picked Manchester City.

His entire game revolved around feeding the ball to Cristiano Ronaldo and running and running and running. I scored first, and gave up a tame equaliser in the second half. Extra time came, and Ronaldo was clean through with a minute to go. In a thoroughly bad mood with everything, I took diabolical pleasure in brutally hacking him down from behind. I got a red card, and the game went to penalties. I won. My opponent quit the moment my winning penalty went in.

After calming down, I started a new Manager Mode career back on the 360. I played a few matches as Coventry City from the start, but abandoned the attempt. It’s not good going back to a Default-like squad after getting used to playing at an advanced difficulty level with much better players.

I’ve restarted Manager Mode again, playing as Atletico Madrid using all the same settings (World Class, mix of manual and semi-manual controls, etc.). It’s bloody hard. I’m finding it harder than I did with my Coventry City squad just before the end. In the first transfer window I felt I had to buy my star striker from the old save, Pavlyuchenko. As could only be expected, it’s taking time for him to become the player he was. I’m persevering. It’s very odd seeing him in the Atletico strip. I suppose I’ll get used to it.

And, yes, I’m keeping backup saves.