PES Chronicles

It’s been a really tough few days. Maybe I should have made more of a fuss about getting in on the Beta. I mean, maybe I should have shamelessly touted myself in Konami’s face as a long-term PES/Master League blogger. I should have tried to blag my way into the Beta via the back entrance.

Maybe I could still try it—but no, I won’t. Not my style. I’d feel embarrassed, weirdly. I bet Jon Murphy’s not even looking at his email or Twitter accounts, knowing that they’ll be full of begging letters.

I’ll just live with my pain. The Beta will be over soon enough, and then all of us who didn’t get in can be happy again. Happy…

It’s been hard to look on from the sidelines. Hard to watch the videos and read the testimonies from the front line. But it’s character-building, is what it is. It’s an opportunity to be philosophical about shit.

Having other things to do helps. Dwarf Fortress! On Monday night the disappointment of Monday morning was crushed beneath the weight of a five-hour Dwarf Fortress session. I’m starting to glimpse the frightening reality behind this celebrated quote from the DF forums: “I play Dwarf Fortress. I wish I was a meth addict instead.”

And there’s also been PES6(360), and PES2010(PS3).

I played a session of PES6(360) yesterday morning. I was still hurting about the PES2011 Beta, and there wasn’t much conviction in my play, alas. I lost all three of my opening group matches in the European Championships. Even three good wins in my remaining fixtures won’t guarantee me scraping through to the knockouts. The Treble might be over.

After that, I took a look back at PES2010(PS3). With all the talk about PES2011 I thought it might soothe my pain to have a go on the most recent PES. And I’m coming up to my end-of-year review of the game, so it’s only right to refresh my memory. I played two ML matches and won them 3-0 and 4-0. It had been five weeks since my last game.

Despite this, I enjoyed myself. As I’ve said before, I regret ever leaving PES2010 behind. I know I could have played Master League all year in some form. I went off to dabble with FIFA10 because I felt that I should. I will never repeat that mistake again.

I’ll play Master League for the whole 2010-2011 football game year if that’s what I want to do. But will I be playing Master League Online? Early reports have not been inspiring. Never say never, of course, but I doubt it’ll be for me.

Master League Online sounds just like FIFA’s Ultimate Team. Playing one-off matches against random opponents isn’t really what I envisioned when I thought about ML Online. It sounds to me as if they’ve just created an Ultimate Team clone and grafted the Master League name onto it. But we’ll see. As the novelty of playing PES2011 wears off for the lucky Beta testers, they’ll start drilling down into ML Online. Maybe there’s gold in there.

At least PES2011′s gameplay looks good and sounds good. Some of the videos have looked amazing, some have been average, and some portions of some matches looked really poor. Overall, though, yes, it looks like PES2011 is finally a departure point for PES in the next-generation.

So could the Great Anguish, as the period 2007-2009 may come to be known in PES lore, be over? Will PES2011 halt that decline? Reverse it? Cancel it out completely?

If I’d been in the Beta I think I’d have a good idea by now, which is frustrating. The upcoming demo won’t really tell me anything. 2-minute matches with a small selection of teams makes for a very distorted impression of the game, as last year’s PES2010 showed. (Great demo, not-so-great final game.) So it’s looking like it’ll be October, and mid-to-late October at that, before I get the answer to the burning question.

So, I’ve been playing some Dwarf Fortress. It’s renowned as the hardest computer game in the world, with a learning curve like a sheer vertical cliff face. And it uses pure ASCII graphics. I grabbed a Mac client with a graphical tileset already built in (like a true wuss). I started with a step-by-step newbie guide open in a browser window.

After half an hour, I was kind of ‘digging it’, and after several hours, I think I’m hooked. My first fortress is hilariously bad. That’s the terrible surface area pictured—my first goblin invaders are going to just walk right in, and I don’t know how to stop them yet. There are several lower levels to the structure, all just as cack-handed. (DF veterans, please don’t judge me. That’s literally Day 1, Hour 1 work.)

But I suppose you have to fail in order to succeed. (Seabass’s next-gen journey in a nutshell?) So far Dwarf Fortress has been a delight. I was looking forward to spending much quality time with it until PES2011 happens along.

But now another factor has entered play. Could I be playing PES2011 on Monday? This Monday coming?!

A full Beta test for PES2011′s Master League Online mode will start this Monday, the 16th of August. It ends on Sunday 29th of August. I have duly put my name down. Successful (i.e. lucky) applicants will be informed on Monday morning via email. I’m one of thousands of hopefuls all waiting to see if our Wonka bar’s got a golden ticket inside.

I await Monday morning with interest. Will I be checking my email at 11 a.m.? Will I? Will I?

I have no idea what criteria Konami will use for invitations. The only information you have to provide is PSN/XBL username, email address, and date of birth. Hopefully it’s a purely random selection and I’ve got as much of a chance as anyone. Hopefully it’s a simple lottery. There are whispers of a ‘first come, first served’ system, in which case I’m probably out of luck. Registration was up and running for about 9 hours before I cottoned on.

If I get in, the nature of this blog will change pretty abruptly for the period of the Beta. This gentle winding-down of the 2009-2010 gaming year will come to a crashing halt as I go all-in with my beloved Master League mode’s latest adventure. Poor old PES6(360) might suffer yet another ignominious, premature abandonment.

Part of me hopes I don’t get into the Beta. The edge would be taken off my excitement in the weeks and days before PES2011′s release. And I’ve got a fledgling dwarven fortress to look after.

How will Online Master League work? Will there be persistent worlds, a la Football Manager Live, with a set pool of players for everybody to battle over and with? (I.e., if you have Schwarz, nobody else has him.) Or will it function more like FIFA’s Ultimate Team, where anybody can have any player at any time? I hope it’s the former.

Monday’s regular noon post will be an episode of Loss Time. It’s pretty much a placeholder while I wait to see which way the Beta wind will blow.

Briefly, PES6(360) is still going great. I’m gathering the goals for the planned mini-compilation in a week or two. I’ve won most of my next batch of games in the league and Europe. I’ve qualified for the full European Championships. I’m 2nd in the league table. The Treble is still very much on.

But will the hand of Fate let me finish it? Probably it will, yes. I need to be lucky to get into the ML Online Beta and I’m rarely lucky with such things. We’ll see.

Things are slowing down, but in a good way. I’ve just taken a few days off PES2010 to attend to some real-life business. That business is ongoing—I’ve got a big assignment to put together for a course I’m doing. All told, I think I’ll be playing fewer matches over a longer period of time for the near future. I’m not stopping or anything. Just taking a bit longer. Where I usually get through a whole season in three or four posts, I think it’ll now take five or six posts, on average.

Not only have I got life stuff to attend to, but there’s a World Cup looming. And I want to play other games as well. I’m 21 hours into Final Fantasy XIII and still liking it. Uncharted 2 is still waiting for attention. And I’ve more or less made my mind up to give FIFA10 some belated attention at the end of my current season in PES2010, whatever happens.

In that season—season 18 of my most epic Master League career since 2005—I’m looking good for a second successive Treble at the moment. I’m still in the D1 Cup. I’ve qualified from my Champions League group stage with ease. At the halfway stage in the title race, I’m 9 points clear at the top of the table. I’ve never had a cushion like this at this stage before. I’m suspicious before every match that the game will be out to get me. And indeed, in one game it was out to get me: Liverpool thumped me 3-1, but in truth I played badly.

One of the most interesting aspects of my long career is the progress of Castolo. I’ve got him as a Regen at the moment. I detest the toxic Myth that surrounds his piss-poor Default original, and was accordingly biased against his Regen for a long time… Until he started getting good.

Now he’s rated a 73 OVR, and seems to gain a couple of points every season. I play him every chance I get. It’s addictive, seeing how good he can become. He’s no longer a passenger in matches—no longer the player you grudgingly bring on for a while just to give him some experience. He’s a talented player in his own right.

Castolo is getting goals. Most are poacher’s efforts, but this next one is a bit special. It came about after a ball over the top, a diagonal aerial through-ball from my full-back. This was a favourite move of mine in PESes past, but it’s been nerfed so much in recent PESes (and probably rightly so) that I rarely try it now. But sometimes I do, almost for old time’s sake, and when it comes off…

Link:

The close-up portion of the replay is awkward viewing for all PES fans. Look carefully and you’ll see that the ball drops through Castolo’s upper torso and neck before he hits the volley. I winced to see it. But it didn’t really spoil my overall enjoyment of the goal, and that’s got to be a worry in itself. Something like the above is so common in PES that it’s become an accepted part of the package. Which is not a good situation for the game to be in.

I happened to be listening to WENB’s current podcast while playing this match. Just before the goal I’d got to the part where the guest speaker was saying it’d actually be okay if Konami completely dismantled the archaeological layers of code that PES is built upon, and started again from scratch. When you look at collision non-detection like the above, it’s hard to disagree.

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.