PES Chronicles

Over the weekend I literally blew the dust off my PSP to play a few matches on PES2008(PSP). I’ve also played another four or five matches in my ML career on PES2010(PS3). I squeezed in a few BaP matches on FIFA10. I’ve played Final Fantasy XIII and Football Manager 2010. I didn’t have time in the end to try out Red Dead Redemption (I should get time later today). Currently I’m enjoying a broader gaming life than I have been able to over the past 6 months, when my PES2010 ML career occupied 99% of my play-time.

My save file for PES2008(PSP) showed the last time I played the game: mid-November 2009. The ML career I’ve got going in it is one of my longer-term ones. I’m in season 2023, having covered roughly the same amount of time as in my PES2010 career. I’ve got an amazing squad of uber-galacticos.

Yes, it’s a very old-school Master League squad. It’s the kind of squad you can only dream about now, in the new age of Master League.

Can you imagine the wages bill for a squad like that in PES2010? The mode’s revamped internal mechanics now pretty much guarantee that a squad like this one would be almost impossible to assemble, much less keep. I say that’s a good thing. If I have a hankering to own every great player there’s ever been, I can always fall back on these older games.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Last-gen PES on the PSP is absolutely wonderful. It plays like a dream. There are a few issues (atrocious loading times; occasional penalty box slowdown) but the issues are nothing compared to the overall package—which is what PES used to be, when you think about it: an unmitigatedly great game with a few annoyances that you could easily overlook.

In my first match against Deportivo la Coruna, I went 0-1 down early on. I didn’t really know what I was doing. The muscle memory that we play individual football games with soon rusts with disuse, as we all know. 0-1 was how it stayed for most of the match. How to play the game returned to me gradually over the 90 minutes, but wouldn’t fully click until my second or third match.

However, in the 91st minute of this first outing, I fed the ball to Schwarz on the edge of the area. I took a pretty speculative shot that curled deliciously around a defender and inside the far post. The keeper never moved. Here’s the replay—wait for the second angle at pitch-level to see the extravagance of the curl:

Link:

I quite enjoyed that. As I did the following few matches: another few League matches that I won comfortably, 3-0 and 2-1; and then a D1 Cup match, which I lost badly, and crashed out of the tournament; and then I lost 0-4 to Benfica in the European Cup.

It’s been a challenging few years for the Pro Evolution Soccer franchise, I think it’s fair to say. But PES2008 is worth buying a PSP for on its own, IMO. Could anybody honestly say the same for the PS3/360 version of PES2008? Or even one of the better versions since? In 2010′s case, Master League, maybe, would be worth it on its own. But not for the core gameplay, not really.

Playing PES2008(PSP) yesterday I couldn’t work out why I’m not always playing it. The reason is that there’s a huge new matte black console on my shelf that demands a newer, shinier, better version of PES than the old-school version. It’s still waiting. We’re still waiting.

A very encouraging end to season 2 in my Master League career—which I started with such pomp back in week 1 of PES2010 (and doesn’t that feel like a long time ago now?)—filled me with confidence for season 3. Too much confidence.

I’ll thumbnail today’s post. At the start of season 3 (2011-2012) I drastically overspent in the transfer market. I put the club in so much debt that when it came to Wages Day (at the end of August in the new ML calendar), the notional board took equally drastic measures to rectify things. I lost all of my staff upgrades and some of my best players. As a result of this and several other factors, I’ve decided to start Master League all over again, from scratch. It’s against my tradition, but now that I’ve done it I feel happy.

I don’t know what happened. I don’t know how I got it so badly wrong. I just thought I’d get in a few more players, and ship out a few of the old ones. The old routine. I didn’t think there’d be a problem. Looking back now, I think the new all-year-round negotiations might have led me into danger. There’s a law of some kind that says ‘negotiations expand to fill the time available’. Now that searching and negotiating can be conducted all season long, it might be too easy to go overboard.

Expected Earnings showed me emerging from Wages Day with a positive £600,000 balance. And yet I was being warned, every week, that I was in debt and would need to remedy matters or else they would be remedied for me. I was confused. What to do, what to trust? I trusted Expected Earnings, of course, and it was my downfall.

What was it, a bug? I’m capable of reading numbers on a screen and understanding the difference between positive and negative, and I am 100% sure that Expected Earnings promised me I’d get through Wages day with plenty of room to spare.

Whatever happened, the outcome was pretty catastrophic. I was something like £2,000,000 in debt. The board swung into action. It all goes ahead without any input from you. I had all my backroom staff downgraded to level 1, their starting level. And I had players sold without notice. I could live with the likes of Macco and one or two other Defaulters being sold. But they only raised about £150,000 between them.

My most valuable player was worth a cool £1.2m. That player was Oscar. They sold Oscar too. The bastards got rid of Oscar, the one player I was taking delight in nurturing and developing. The left-footed, play-anywhere midfielder who was holding my team together. My bottom lip quivered…

But I carried on. I created new home & away kits, and I just got on with it. I’ve actually been in worse corners in Master League down the years, and come out the other side. I still had some decent players. Those new players who had cost me so much were actually better than Schwarz and Oscar had been. So I could still do things, right?

No, apparently. The downgrading of my staff seemed to have a palpable effect on the pitch. Suddenly it was like playing in season 1 again, albeit with slightly better players. All the form arrows went back to being blue or purple a lot of the time. Some matches I was forced to play with only a couple of green-arrowed players.

My progress of last season might as well have never happened. I was lucky to get shots. My game was suddenly all over the place. I began to obsess about restarting Master League

There were other factors pointing towards the simple logic of a restart. I’d come to really dislike—bordering on outright hate—the made-up teams in Division 2. I just wasn’t noticing who I was playing from week to week. “Oh, it’s another game against a team called a bunch of random letters…” Yatherplop Unitedpool FC. Rimmagong Athletique. I had thought this was lovable Japanese whimsy. I don’t think that now.

There were other things. It took me a while to fully grasp the ins and outs of the tactical and strategic systems in PES2010. I still haven’t fully grasped them, but I’ve got a good working knowledge now that would make a new ML a lot cleaner, unlike my initial fumbling around in this career. Another thing I regret from my setup was choosing to play English-style one-off cup matches instead of the traditional Master League two-legged affairs. It didn’t feel right, and of course this wasn’t helped by Konami getting things badly wrong by having those cup ties played at a neutral venue (at Wembley Stadium, for God’s sake).

I played as well as I could. I got a few precious wins, but mostly slumped to tame defeats and suffered through tedious 0-0 draws. In truth my motivation had gone. The thought of restarting was just too attractive and wouldn’t leave me alone.

And so I’ve decided—that’s it, it’s back to the start for me. It goes against my settled tradition, but so what. I’m setting up a new Master League with a proper array of teams in Division 2. It’ll be super-hard. I’m going to start on Top Player difficulty and leave it there. I’m going to have traditional two-legged Cup ties. I’m impatient to get going. I regard this suspended career as time wasted, really. I’ll hold onto the save file. Possibly I’ll return to it, out of curiousity, at some point in the future.

Before signing off this career, I present one final goal replay from it. Gutierrez, the new superstar of the Defaults, got me a great goal in this accursed season. It had me on my feet and gesticulating at the blank walls. “Ha-haaa! Suck on that, you, you… wall…” The replay shows the standard view and then a slow-mo pitch-level view that beautifully captures the flight of the ball.

Also, popping up after Gutierrez’s goal replays, there’s a bonus item. I have played several matches of my old PES2008(PSP) Master League career, which is now in season 2024. My team of galacticos feels familiar and strange at the same time, thanks to the long breaks between sessions. I should play PES2008(PSP) more: it’s one of the great classic PES games, in my opinion. I rate it above PES6.

The PES2008(PSP) goal on show is a very sharp goal I scored with Del Piero. I had tried to pass to another player completely, but the pass went astray. So far so Pro Evo, hey? Then Del Piero, ghosting in from the wing, was perfectly placed to deliver one of my favourite kinds of PES goal: the first-timer with placement into the top corner of the net. Players with Del Piero’s technique can produce goals that just feel exquisite.

Link:

FIFA10 has its own unique ‘feel’, its very own way of doing things, its very own pluses and minuses, and so—undoubtedly—will PES2010. Many football game fans believe that one of them must be bad in order for the other to be good. I strongly disagree with that position. The signs are good for me liking both games, a lot, this year.

All this week I’ve had a new morning routine: a long session of FIFA10, followed by a game or two on the PES2010 demo. I’m really blown away by both games so far this year. It’s a (possible) win-win scenario. The full game of PES2010 has yet to arrive, of course, so I’ll keep the party hats and streamers in the cupboard for now.

I’ve seen the PES2010 reviews. They’re a mixed bunch. I had to smile at the hissing fanboy fights that subsequently broke out across the web. It was carnage in some places. Predictably, FIFA10 was the focus for a lot of the catfighting. It seems that FIFA10 is a pick-up-and-play game for children who like to look at licensed kits. Oh dear. In some places, it’s always 2004.

Sevens and eights out of ten for PES2010 are good scores, actually, but they’re a touch below what I was expecting. I’m only going by my estimation of the demo, which is a high one. I have an optimistic theory. Remember two years ago and those bizarrely great reviews for next-gen PES2008? The after-effects of that scandalous non-performance by the reviewers are being felt to this day. PES has had a rough critical ride ever since.

This was supposed to be the console generation where PES would amaze like the most amazing thing since amazement was born… In other words, PES reviews, weighted down by two years of anti-climax, tend to flatten out and occupy the troughs; FIFA reviews, buoyed by two years of progress and positivity, tend towards the peaks.

That’s my fanwank of the review situation. It’s got the whiff of PES fanboyism about it, but I’m hopeful. I’ve really enjoyed the PES2010 demo. I really believe the PES2010 reviews have got PES2008 at the back of their collective minds.

Meanwhile, back on FIFA10, I am seeing dimensions in the gameplay I never dreamed could exist. I took on Arsenal in a pre-season friendly just this morning. I’m still amost dizzy from the high quality of the gameplay. It ended 1-1 with Arsenal playing a dreamy, total football style. The overall quality of the gameplay I’m seeing in FIFA10 at the moment is of a very, very high quality indeed.

I am still forging ahead with that Manager Mode career. I haven’t gone into detail yet because there’s a patch in the offing that might reset everything to zero. And there’s a PES2010 in the offing as well. Nobody can predict the future. So far—touch wood—I haven’t had a truly show-stopping bug in Manager Mode, and I’m ignoring its other shortcomings for now. I’m pretty much addicted to the FIFA10 gameplay at the moment. It’s great. I can’t get over how great it is.

You know, there are times when FIFA10 utterly amazes me with how heavenly it is. At other times, granted, it’s a button-mashing hell. At the moment for me the split is about 85/15 between heaven/hell. And much like the real heaven and hell, it’s up to me which one I inhabit. Loss of attention leads to button-mashing. Concentration, focus, and patience lead to heaven. This is exactly like the dualistic moral Universe, when you think about it. God must be very happy with FIFA10.

If I had to pick on something to carp at in FIFA10 (and my PES genes insist that I do so, right NOW), I’m very annoyed with the slide tackling. You can make a perfect slide-tackle, but it won’t win you the ball. Oh no. You might think it should, but you would be wrong. Your player will get up and run away from the ball. You only get the loose ball if you’ve got another player close enough to come and collect it before the other team’s player (who, remember, you’ve successfully tackled) gets up and gets to it first. Utterly stupid and wrong and I hate it I hate I hate it.

That and many more on-pitch annoyances will have their equivalents in PES2010. But will they be deemed valid reasons to dismiss PES2010 as a serious football game? Of course not—because PES is all warm and fluffy, and it’s allowed to have stupid moments on the pitch. FIFA is all grey and evil and it isn’t allowed to put a single foot wrong, ever.

The great things in FIFA10 easily outweigh the small things. (For now. Let’s see how I’m liking that slide-tackle thing in January, hmmm…?)

I’ve mentioned the eternal quest for the killer pass in FIFA10. You can pass the ball around for 10, 20, 30 passes, and not spot an opening, or lose the ball and have to defend. Sometimes, though, you do spot the run. It’s a huge element of FIFA10′s core gameplay, this possession, passing, and eagle-eyed spotting thing. Here’s a killer pass in action, which came at the end of a typical FIFA10 extra-long bout of possession:

Link:

Yes, the finish was a FIFA09-style ‘hook shot’ into the opposite side of the goal, with the shooter executing the telltale falling-backwards animation. The great thing here for me was the killer pass. Loved this goal, one of my favourites on FIFA10 so far.

I know: in PES, that’d be a fairly typical moment. Just another through-ball leading to just another typical chance. Nothing special. But that’s precisely what is so special about FIFA10. The mundane has been made marvellous again. PES2010 will have to be a great game to tear me away from FIFA10 at the moment.

What a weekend that was. The long-awaited first peek at PES2010 appeared in a PSM3 magazine article. It wasn’t the most encouraging article in the world, it has to be said. It kicked off the most intense weekend of activity across the PES forums since… Since last year, actually. Why, PES? Why can things never be simple and straightforward with you any more? Why can’t you just be routinely great every year, as before? Why can’t it just be like 2004 again?

In Wednesday’s post, I’ll kick through the ashes and doubtless end up looking on the bright side. There really is a long way to go before I’m ready to turn my back on new Pro Evolution Soccer games. I still have a crazy hope that just won’t die.

For today, though, it’s a FIFA09 goals post. Perhaps this is very appropriate. If the sum of all fears comes to pass, FIFA and I will be spending a lot of time in one another’s company in the months and years to come.

I’ve assembled three goals from a single session played on Saturday morning in my Manager Mode career. Before I started the session, I’d made up my mind to save every half-decent goal I scored. There were four goals, but I messed up one of the uploads and only saved the celebration and subsequent kick-off. You can see loads of those kinds of cock-ups at any one time on EA Sportsworld. Now I’ve done one too.

(NB: All goals scored using my usual controls set-up, which features semi-assisted shooting.)

First up is a rare dribble. It’s not rare because it’s Maradona-esque (it’s not). The only rare thing about it is that it’s a dribble, by me. Seasoned dribblers may smile indulgently, but this was a different kind of goal for me and I enjoyed it.

I got the ball with Pavlyuchenko and just headed for goal (laying off the sprint button). Big Pav is my favourite striker in either of the next-gen FIFAs. I really rate him. He’s got the lot: strength, height, speed, skill. He’s the Schwarz of FIFA09 for me.

Link:

Next up is a fairly standard shot with my skilful Brazilian midfielder—who goes by the singular name of Joao Luis Locke. This was notable for being outside the box, and being driven quite hard and low. All three (outside of the box, hard, low) are tricky to pull off in FIFA09:

Link:

And now finally—a goal from ‘me’. Way back in November or thereabouts, I set up a Be A Pro career. I only played a few games of it. The player I created, ‘not-Greg’, was allowed to join Coventry City at the start of this Manager Mode career. ‘I’ have cheerfully played in the first team, in various midfield berths, ever since. I’ve got pretty good too. Arsenal offered to buy me for £4m in the last transfer window.

This season I’ve moved myself back to central midfield after a few seasons out wide. I’ve scored a few goals. This goal was scored from a lay-off from a  free kick. I’ve kind of specialised in these goals over the months of FIFA09:

Link:

The opponents in that match were Bayern Munich. It was a must-win final group match in the Champions League-equivalent. I won the match 3-0, but got knocked out anyway when the other result didn’t go my way.

I’ll probably only play Manager Mode until I win the Treble—League, Cup, European Cup—with my Coventry City team. I could have a team of galacticos if I wanted them. But I’m sticking with my existing squad. Pavlyuchenko and Bojan up front. Djemba Djemba and ‘not-Greg’ in the centre of midfield. A couple of bog-standard wingers on the flanks. Some journeymen central defenders. Lahm at right back. A 31-year-old Ashley Cole at left back. A good goalkeeper.

That’s the peculiar thing about Manager Mode: the lack of immersion. I’m playing and enjoying Manager Mode, but I don’t really care about my team (Pavlyuchenko excepted). In Master League I’d know all my players’ names. Sitting here now, I can’t remember my Manager Mode goalkeeper’s name, and I’ve had him for a few seasons. He’s pretty good too, a Casillas-type who’s rated 85 overall. Not the tallest, but a great shot-stopper. Manager Mode—and next-gen FIFA—won’t have really, really arrived for me until I know all my players’ names without trying to remember them. FIFA10, I await your pleasure…