Category Archives: PES2011

Oh the humanity

  By not-Greg | May 24, 2013 - 12:00 |
26 Comments

emergency pes2011

Disaster this morning! Well—more of a mild inconvenience, really. Nothing anywhere near a Hindenburg scale. Just a minor bump in the road. Don’t even know why I even led off with ‘Disaster this morning!‘ as a first sentence. The Good Internet Writing Guide recommends this kind of thing, granted, but it also recommends mentioning Paris Hilton a lot in the opening paragraph (yes, my copy of The Good Internet Writing Guide is from 2008). And mentioning Paris Hilton is something I never do. Don’t even know who he is.

My disaster was that I couldn’t get PESJP2013 to run no matter what I did. I never touched the settings from my last session, so nothing was different there. The bugger just wouldn’t run. It would load to the main ML menu, and then crash, every time.

I gave it about 10 separate goes, twiddling this and that (I know all the tricks, don’t worry).

Admitted defeat, and played some PES2011 instead. That’s where the picture at the top is from—my left-back, Ruskin, tackling Liverpool’s Suarez.

Don’t worry, there’s no chance of yet another lane-change over to PES2011 on PC. It was strictly a stopgap measure in advance of the now-inevitable full reinstallation of PESJP2013 is a more user-friendly fashion that I won’t bore the non-technical reader with.

But I did play two matches on PES2011(PC).

First of all—wow, what a light ball! And what a lenient referee…

Second: that game, PES2011, is rock-hard compared to PES2013. Even on its hardest difficulty with mediocre players, PES2013 is just too easy. There’s no time on the ball in PES2011. That’s the chief way it shapes matches. In PES2013, you can stop, turn inside, check back, retreat, without much danger of the CPU player(s) just barging in and taking the ball. PES2011′s AI is brutal by comparison.

That’s the kind of difficulty I want to have in PESJP2013. I’ll be working on that as and when I finally get the game reinstalled.

There was one magic moment in the two matches on PES2011 that reminded me of just why I play football games, and why I still think football games are almost the perfect computer game.

A high floating ball came into the box. Deegan, my sturdy midfielder, had a chance at a header from the edge of the area, but I decided to nod the ball down sideways for an incoming side-back to volley into the net—and that’s exactly what happened.

The signature moment for any dedicated football gamer is when you’re grinning your head off at seeing and feeling something magical on-screen, after first seeing it in your head.

Betwixt and between

  By not-Greg | March 29, 2013 - 12:00 | , , ,
38 Comments

I’m strenuously resisting the urge to go back to PES2013 for a non-developmental Master League experience. I’m against chopping and changing my football game at a whim and don’t want to encourage bad habits in myself.

It’s a tempting call because I really do think that PES2013 is the apotheosis of next-gen PES. Every good idea they’ve had since 2007 was put into the on-field action. What a shame it was so severely let down by the Master League and other modes. (I don’t regard any kind of online football—or ‘squeezeball’ as I call it—as a football game. I’m sure the people who play it like it. They’re welcome to it.)

Only PES2011 is keeping me from PES2013 again. Only PES2011 is stopping me installing the final WENB patch on the PS3 and setting up again in PES2013 with a new team in a non-dev ML.

I’m nearly at the exciting end of my first season on PES2011. The current table:

PES2011 on PC season 1 after 31

Too many draws have cost me my top-three spot. With three games to go, I could miss out on promotion (although somehow I think I’ll make it).

The final three opponents are all top teams, with at least one of them also vying for promotion:

PES2011 PC season 1 run-in

So I’ve been playing on with PES2011—only a few games per day, on average, but enough to keep the flame alive.

I’m even enjoying nursing a certain Myth from the depths of youthful mediocrity towards being a respectable striker again. This is him after almost one full season. He plays as a sub most of the time and gets the odd goal.

Castolo in PES2011

The 34-year-old Sibon has been hugely disappointing. One goal since he signed mid-season. I marvel at how PES uncannily models the fading performances of a retiring player.

I swear that this game has got the PES ‘X’ factor. I rather misjudged it back in the day. I was too ready to see its gameplay features as insurmountable obstacles rather than as challenges to be dealt with.

I do miss a lot of what came in later PES editions. I sorely miss PES2012/13′s right stick control, especially at corners.

I even miss the ‘send player on run’ feature.

I also miss the L2+directional buttons method of changing the ATT/DEF levels.

On PES2011 you have to awkwardly tilt your controller towards yourself and press SELECT+R1/R2 in order to change the ATT/DEF levels. It’s never a comfortable way of doing it, and I’m not surprised it only lasted one iteration of the series.

Another downside to PES2011 is that I’m playing it on PC. Yes, the novelty has worn off a touch. The PC’s graphics and customisation options are wonderful, but I miss the convenience and routine of the console.

So the arguments to head back to PES2013 are stacking up, but I’m resisting—for now.

I do want to see what happens at the end of this season in PES2011. If I get promoted, I’ll be tempted to play on. But I know that if I play PES2011 into next season and pursue this career, it’ll be a while before I’m ready to look at PES2013 again.

And with so much PES under my belt, would I still want to play PES2013 in a few months’ time?

All things considered, the only window of opportunity to play a non-dev PES2013 ML might be right now… The decision time is coming.

Hold Onto Your Knees

  By not-Greg | March 27, 2013 - 12:00 | , ,
81 Comments

Clingan up close

Another few days of another few matches. Life is taking me through a spell of busy-ness that will be alleviated by a few days off next week, so I’m looking forward to that.

But even when I have days off I plan to do a lot more in the way of Football Manager and Civilization and general ‘goofing off’ (as I believe the young people still say), than football gaming. I keep wondering why this is.

Around this time last year I was beginning one of the most intensive periods of football gaming in my entire life. PES2012′s second wind carried me through a total of 18 seasons all the way to August. I wonder just what effect that unusual spring-summer schedule had on my general disposition as a football gamer. Usually a football gamer’s schedule is more autumn-winter, and maybe a nibble of spring, with summer as the relaxing downtime.

Like a rogue comet entering a stable star system, PES2012′s unusual timing last year set off perturbations that I’m still feeling today. Mainly in the form of a certain distance from football gaming.

Like every other ageing gamer, I see the loss of will-to-game as an alarming development that should be resisted as much as possible. Like losing your hair or your libido, or your knees (my knees hate going up stairs lately).

PES2011 is fighting the good fight in fine form. I’m still loving its qualities and seeing its annoyances as challenges rather than obstacles to enjoyment. The only thing I ever see dragging me away from PES2011 is a non-developmental Master League in PES2013. I do want to get to that at some point.

Training in PES2011

PES2011′s Master League setup is great, with the only downside being the odd decision to communicate player stats changes in the form of text notifications between weeks.

Bizarre. But the rest of the mode really holds up. I’m still loving the PC gaming revolution too. The likelihood of the PS4/Xbox720 being an automatic day 1 purchase grows fainter with each passing day.

I’ve fallen off the top of the league table, but am still in the top 3 and looking good for promotion. I’m about two-thirds of the way through the season.

I’m still having a few matches every couple of days on my Bootcamped Mac installation of PES5.

Below is a clip (best viewed in 720p) that first shows the notorious thinly-lined pitch that we all hated playing on in PES5. I still hate it, and should get around to removing it from all the teams that use it.

Then see a bizarre goal the CPU scored against me—especially see the famous/notorious ‘check side’ motion of the bouncing ball when it comes back off the post and rolls in:

Is It Really Snow Strange?

  By not-Greg | March 25, 2013 - 12:00 | , ,
74 Comments

Keepers View PES2011

I work weekends and I travel by public transport, so the UK’s mega-snow weekend ate into my free time in a big way. As a result I only played four football matches—two on PES2011 on PC, and the other two on PES5 on… the Macbook Pro.

Yes, I finally did something I always swore I’d never do. Installed Windows, on a Bootcamp partition, on my beloved Mac.

Mac owners will know how pristine and lovely an installation of OSX is—like a pavement of fresh snow that it’s almost a shame to tread upon. For the five years that I’ve been a Mac user I always swore I’d never succumb by installing Windows on a partition, not even for the sake of a technical exercise.

But I finally did it. My current climate of PC experimentation made me curious to see how well the uber-expensive Apple hardware could handle PES.

PES5 on MBP

Bootcamp went fine. Took a few hours to make the Windows partition, as my hard disk was so fragmented after all these years of use, but otherwise it was all straightforward.

Windows on a Mac (predictably) runs better than I’ve ever seen Windows run anywhere. And PES5 runs fine. Better than fine—better than it has any right to. I only have the cheapest 2010 MBP (integrated mobile graphics, slowest processor). I suppose a 2005 game would run superbly on 2010 hardware of any rank.

Apart from some occasional v-sync tearing on some pitches at some times, the game runs like butter. I love PES5, and will always sing of its greatness.

I copied my ML save over from the other PC. I’ll go on doing what I’ve been doing for a few years now: playing PES5 ‘off the books’, and never—or rarely—mentioning it on the blog.

Of course the real test of the MBP’s chops would be how it handled PES2011 or any other more modern PES game.

And I just haven’t had time to test that out yet. I have a feeling it will work, but not on highest settings, which I’ve now got used to on the PC.

McSheffrey shoots PES2011

It’s instructive to play PES5 back-to-back with the likes of PES2011. You can spot the germination of many seeds that would only flower years later. PES2011′s physicality and enforced clumsiness of the players being the main one.

PES5 can handle incredibly clumsily, with players performing the same kind of ‘three-point turns’ as seen in PES2010, for example. And there’s also a version of PES2011′s stumble mechanic too.

I could have played lots and lots of matches on both.

But the snow weekend impacted me severely, and you know what? I didn’t care really.

Again and again in recent years I’ve looked deeply into myself and seen a shrinkage of the will-to-play.

Even at the peak of the footy game year every October/November, I play far less than I did in previous years. This is largely a factor of the passage of time and changing responsibilities and priorities, of course.

There’s no going back to the days of PES5, which I always hark back to as a Golden Age. Back then I could, if I wanted to, play PES for 10 hours a day, easily. And I often did. Those days are long, long gone. Only something crazy like a Lottery win is ever going to bring them back.