PES Chronicles

Confession to make: I’m in the football game doldrums. I’ve been in them for some time, probably from just before the World Cup. I shifted from playing Master League to FIFA10. FIFA10′s Manager Mode let me down quite badly, feeling even worse than ever. I was cut adrift. Then the World Cup got going and took a lot more time away from my football gaming. Football Manager 2010 and a few non-football games have also had an impact. This is definitely the least football-gamey I’ve felt in a long, long time, maybe in years.

I am still playing PES2010/FIFA10 for an hour or so every day. It’s habit more than anything. I tend to skip between the games and dabble in various modes, rarely playing the same thing in consecutive sessions. I’ve even had enjoyable sessions of Manager Mode.

I’m dragging myself through the early parts of a Become A Legend career in PES2010. It’s got quite difficult to keep playing. I mean that it’s got difficult to keep my interest levels high. It’s season 2 and I’m past the early, frustrating period of being on the subs’ bench all the time. Now I’m starting regularly, albeit wth occasional returns to the bench.

My core gaming experience of BaL is just the same, all the time. Go on the pitch, twist and turn for ages, watch the ball, call for the ball, be ignored, keep watching, take up a good position, receive the ball, lay it off tidily or dribble for a bit and then lay it off tidily, rinse, repeat, end of match. I have a shot every now and then. My player is still very young and very below-average, akin to an ML Default player.

I’m oath-sworn to give this mode a chance, at least 5 seasons—but that presupposes a certain base level of enthusiasm remaining constant, and it’s not. It could be that BaL is just not for me, in the same way that Master League is just not for some people. This is by no means the end for me and BaL. Just a signal that I’ll most likely play it occasionally, rather than daily, for the rest of the summer. It could take a while to get through the 5 seasons, but I’ll persist. I’ll persist with BaL solely because of the ML-like devotion that so many PES veterans have for it. I want to peel away the spiky outer layers and get at that soft, nougaty centre, if I can.

Over the past few days I’ve played some of my PES2010 Master League career for the first time in a few weeks. It’s got too easy for me now, but the memory of the 18 seasons I spent playing it at white-hot intensity will never leave me. It still entertains me for a few matches at a time. I scored a stylish volley from a cleared corner with one of my DMFs, the regen Gattuso. Coincidentally, in the previous session I scored a similar volley with a player in my Manager Mode team. What made the FIFA10 volley a bit special was that it came from a fully manual cross that I managed to deliver perfectly for once. Here they both are:

Link:

I’ve come to a weird understanding with Manager Mode. I no longer expect it to take on ML-like proportions. I just play the games, one after the other. I still don’t really check on where my team is in the table, although I believe I’ve got a good chance of promotion with Coventry City in this, my second season. Will I finish the season, though? Unknown. Probably. But possibly not. FIFA10 continues to be dragged down by its career mode, which should be the game’s blazing, shining light. Oh, Manager Mode, if only you were even a bit better!

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This week has seen another stage on the road to PES2011. The new screens and videos and hands-on accounts are all over the PES web—I won’t recap them all here. Except to say that, once again, those of us who play single-player most of the time (all of the time, in my case) have been badly served by the previewers. They’ve all mainly played multiplayer again. Fucking hell.

Their argument (according to one of them, anyway) is that they were only there to analyse the overall way that the game played. Hmmm. That presupposes a lot of things.

A 1p vs 2p match is not a true representation of how a football game plays in single-player. Human players commonly indulge in sprint-clamping, which produces a particular kind of gameplay—a very different kind from single-player where the AI, bless it, rarely indulges in the benighted practice. Most of us still play single-player most of the time. I believe it is a better kind of game than the pressure-fests of multiplayer. The game that we unwrap and play on Day 1 will be qualitatively different from the one that all these previewers are reporting back on.

The infuriating thing is that I’m sure most of the previewers are predominantly single-players as well. And this is only the beginning. We’re coming into the season now where more and more grinning fools will look out at us from Flash video windows, both of them holding 360 controllers in their hands, and they’ll give us ‘the skinny’ on PES2011/FIFA11, having button-mashed one another to death for an hour or two. No, no, no, no, no, no. no, no. NO.

Which is why I’m less and less interested in reading about PES2011 nowadays. I’m just not reading anything about the actual game that I’ll end up playing.

Ahh, the ups and downs of a make-believe career as a solo player on a football computer game… Before I get to those ups and downs, there’s something I forgot to mention last time. I set up my BaL player, not-Greg, as a left-footed AMF. I’ve mentioned before that I like left-footed players in PES. Left-footed strikers in particular have always seemed able to get an extra bit of bend and ‘whip’ on the ball. I don’t know what it is. They just seem more deadly from certain angles and distances.

It’s almost certainly an illusion, but it’s something I believe in regardless. Stoichkov in PES3 was the first time I became aware of a left-footed striker’s added menace. Munitis in my current 2010 Master League career has been a fine exemplar of this phenomenon. I’m not playing as a striker in this BaL career, but as an AMF I hope to get lots of shooting chances (eventually). It’ll be interesting to see how the left-footed thing plays out.

I’m currently a very raw 17-year-old recruit at Stoke. After 4 or 5 ‘B’ team performances I made it to the reserve ‘A’ team again, and after one good performance (6.5, which is good in BaL terms at this stage) I was back on the first team bench again. It was a league match against Wolves. After spending so long in the reserves playing on the training pitch, it’s weird to go back into the full matchday experience, with a tunnel scene and an entrance and commentators and a crowd and everything. It made me nervous. If I messed this up—and I might only get 15 minutes not to mess it up—I’d probably be back in the reserves and facing another struggle to get back out.

I was surprised to be brought on at half time. You know when you’re coming on at half-time because the screen goes black for a few extra seconds. When it brightens again, there you are, on the pitch, and then the game pauses to show you a formation diagram that tells you where you’re playing. For some reason Stoke love to play me, a left-footed AMF, on the right side of central midfield in a 4-4-2. Which is fine, I suppose. That’s my club’s favoured system and I, a green teen, have got to accommodate myself to it. But in times to come I’ll want to seek out a club that’ll play me as the advanced attacking midfielder I know I was born to be.

It was our kick-off. I got a touch, played a solid pass to a team-mate, and then there was a minute or two when the game seemed to become a whirlwind going on around me without my involvement. I know enough about BaL by now not to chase the ball down all over the place. Sit tight. Bide your time. Patience.

One of our defenders thumped a clearance up the pitch and I sprinted after it. I was looking for the knock-down, a rich source of opportunities in BaL. But a Wolves defender got there first, collected, and ran diagonally across me. I squeezed down on the sprint button and gave chase, lining up a slide-tackle. I was beaten for pace—everybody can beat me for pace at the moment—but I slide-tackled anyway, hoping to induce a panicky clearance. You can do this is PES. Deliberately slide-tackling thin air in the vicinity of a CPU-controlled player can make them thump the ball anywhere.

Alas, I slide-tackled an innocent bystander, another Wolves player entirely, and he went flying. I don’t know where he came from. I expected a yellow card, but the referee came over and held up a RED card. It was harsh, I thought. It wasn’t a tackle from behind. I suppose it was more for effectively karate-kicking a player who didn’t have the ball and was nowhere near the ball.

The clock in the corner of the screen said 48:23. I had been on the pitch for a little more than 3 in-game minutes. It was stupid. I was stupid. And I got dropped back to the reserves immediately.

And of course BaL had to rub my nose in it and make me watch the rest of the match. I can’t just choose a menu option and skip to the end. Even at x2 speed it took far too long to play out (a 0-1 defeat). This aspect of Become A Legend is its gigantic Achilles’ heel, for me. I only get an hour or so of gaming time a day at the moment, with one thing and another. I really don’t want to be spending a significant chunk of that hour watching CPU vs CPU action. I need to get past this stage of BaL as quickly as possible.

I’ve been playing my PES2010 Master League career again—it’s season 19, in the year 2028. That’s the kind of year that tech-thriller writers of today are setting their gritty near-future stories in, but the year’ll be here soon enough. When we get to 2028 and there are no hovering aircraft carriers and no United States of South America or whatever, who’s going to look silly then?

Zaki, my number one number 9 for most of this ML career, is no more. I released him way back. He was in his late 30s and in sharp decline, down to a 71 OVR rating. He wasn’t getting any games and he was just a drain on the finances with his mammoth salary of £9m a year. From the outset I’ve found the finances in the all-new Master League to be so tight that I can’t afford the luxury of keeping players who aren’t doing anything.

So I jettisoned Zaki and the plan was to bring in some new talent. I play with a front 3, and I like to use a traditional centre-forward in the central attacking role. I have Morientes, but he’s not presently that kind of striker. For me a great PES central striker is very much in the mould of PES5/6-era Schwarz or Vieri: big, strong, having a bit of pace when needed, and packing a shot like a cannonball. Morientes is big and strong, certainly, but he moves at a crawl and his shot power is more like a balloon in a gust of wind than a cannonball.

I did look for such a striker. Gilardino, who I had on loan a few seasons back, would have fit the bill, but I couldn’t prise him away from his club for anything. A shame. I paid so much attention to the effort that the season got started and the transfer wiidnow closed without me signing anyone. This is a common error I make in the new Master League. I’m still not used to being able to conduct negotiations all-year-round. It’s been over 300 hours now, but I still tend to operate as if it’s old-style Master League where you had to wait to do anything transfer-related until the window opened. A wise player of the new Master League is negotiating in February for the player(s) he’ll get in August. I’ve not been very wise through all this career so far.

So I’ve been making do with what I’ve got. Morientes is playing in that central striker role, for better or worse. Mostly worse: he’s got about 2 goals in 20-odd matches so far. Yet I’m winning most of my matches by a bundle of goals. Most goals come from Munitis, from Nakamura, from Pires, and from ‘me’ (my created player). I find PES2010 to be a very easy game now. I should restart Master League and do it all over again from scratch. And I might just do that. I think I’m waiting for the World Cup to end so my attention can be fully focused on football gaming once more.

As things stand, I genuinely have no idea what I’ll play tomorrow. Become A Legend? Manager Mode? Onward with Master League? Be A Pro? Not a clue. At least this way I have the opportunity to experience something new. I might as well take it. Could I, should I, play online—?! Never say never…

Two more sleeps to the World Cup! I’ve taken time off work. I’ve got not one, but two World Cup wallcharts. (Actual paper ones. I’m old-school.) I’ve bet £20 at 5/1 on the USA to beat England on Saturday. If England win, I’ll be happy. If the USA win, I’ll be £120 richer and happy. Naturally, it’ll be a 1-1 draw and I won’t be happy.

I hardly ever talk about real football on this blog. It’s not banned, as such, but the blog is all about football gaming and that’s what I like to focus on. Nowadays I’m far more interested in football gaming than I am in real football. Is that a shocking admission to make? Possibly, but it’s the truth.

But the prospect of the World Cup is already taking me back to a time—not so long ago—when the only important thing in my life was the real-life beautiful game. The World Cup is the only really meaningful sporting occasion on the planet. Even my football-hating friends and colleagues acknowledge this truth. The Olympics are nothing compared to the World Cup.

The tournament will probably take time away from my gaming. As things stand I’m playing PES & FIFA a lot less right now than I was just a few weeks ago. This is due to a few factors. Other interests have crowded in and taken up room. I had a huge end-of-year essay to complete for an Open University course. I’m playing other games, notably Final Fantasy XIII. And Football Manager 2010, which is a beast. It’s alive, I tell you. Alive.

I’m still playing season 19 in my long-running Master League career in PES2010. Over the past few seasons I won a Treble and then a Double. Then I took a short break during which I dabbled with FIFA10. My time with FIFA10 didn’t really work out, but that story’s not over by a long way.

I came back to Master League (as I always will, I suspect) and picked up where I’d left off. And at the moment I’m top of the league and still firing on all cylinders in all competitions. I suffered a disastrous opening to my Champions League campaign. I lost the first two matches, but then won the remaning four to qualify in 1st place. I’m top of the league by 2 points. I’m still in the D1 Cup. The game feels fairly easy to me now, but after nearly 300 hours’ play that’s not too surprising.

I have a feeling I’m going to give FIFA10′s much-maligned Manager Mode one more chance. I actually liked playing it last year and the year before. Yes, it’s an empty shell, but it is what it is. I just need to give it some time. I might pick up my Coventry City career where I left off.

Or I might play Become A Legend in PES2010. I always experience an intial burst of enthusiasm for these solo-player modes in PES and FIFA, but the enthusiasm is never sustained for more than a season or two.

I don’t know yet what I’ll do. The PES2011 and (today) FIFA11 news has me looking forward more than I’m focused on the here and now. That’s a bad thing for a football gamer, who must play his games with the games he has, not the games he’s going to have in the mythical future.

I’ll have made my decision by Friday—World Cup kickoff day! Friday’s post will either be about Master League, BaL, or Manager Mode. Whichever one of them I go for will likely be what I play for the next month at least.