PES Chronicles

Typical. I wait ages to score a good goal in FIFA09, and then two come along at once. I’ve taken up FIFA09 again after playing PES2009 for most of this football year so far. Currently I’m coping with its dismal Manager Mode because I’m finding the gameplay—on World Class difficulty, with a mixture of semi-assisted and full manual control settings—so engaging. I love how tough I’m finding it just to create a goal-scoring opportunity, never mind actually trouble the goalkeeper.

Last week I was struggling to score goals. I went several games in succession without scoring. Then I netted a peach of a curler. And now I’ve scored a screamer from distance. Without further preamble, here it is:

It doesn’t look even a fraction of how good it felt to score it ‘live’. I’m not happy with the viewing angle I chose for the replay. The height of the camera fails to convey the sweet placement of the shot, which is indeed right in the ‘postage stamp’ corner of the net. I was in a bit of space with Aguero, and I decided to just let one rip. There’s no finesse—it’s a full-blooded shot, or a ‘laces’ shot as EA Canada calls it. The ball flies far and true into the net. I was very happy indeed. It was, incredibly, the first such goal I have scored on FIFA09.

FIFA09 has a problem, I think, with the consistency of distance shooting. It seems to me that the ball too often flies way, way over the bar at one end of the spectrum, or trickles tamely to the keeper at the other end. The middle ground—where you have a chance of scoring a goal like this one—is hard to locate. It’s definitely there. It definitely exists (viz. the goal in the replay above). But that sweet spot is so tiny, and finding it probably depends on so many other factors—ball speed, angle from player to goal, angle from player to ball, player stats, button-press timing and duration, whether the wind is blowing from the south-east, etc.—that long-distance goals are and will probably remain a rarity. But maybe this will change with time. We’ll see.

I finished this season 5th in the table. I fell out of the European Cup qualifying places with some poor late-season performances. I did win the Spanish Cup (on penalties), so it wasn’t a complete disappointment. Now I just have to decide whether to play another season with Atletico, or finally get around to starting Manager Mode again as Coventry City. I think I’ll go for the latter option. Before I do that, though, I’m going back to play another few sessions of Valkyria Chronicles. I wasn’t lying when I said it takes me ages to play through these ‘proper’ games.

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Speaking of those proper games, I have just today had time to download and play the much-heralded Killzone 2 demo for the PlayStation3. It’s been a long time in coming. I vividly remember where I was when the infamous pre-rendered footage was released in 2005. It made the BBC evening news. I remember arguing about it with a work colleague at the time after he contended that such graphics were impossible and it was all fake.

It seemed that the next generation of gaming would take us to places we never dreamed possible. And now here we are—was it worth the wait? Killzone 2 seems to be a decent game, and the graphics are indeed lovely. But it’s just another generic FPS to me. I cannot shake the feeling that games just aren’t made for me any more. The wants and desires of some notional 17-year-old from middle America have shaped Killzone 2, as they have done all of its many, many FPS predecessors (and successors).

So, no, I’m not thrilled by Killzone 2. But I’m going to wait and see. The demo of Valkyria Chronicles left me underwhelmed, but I would argue that it’s the best exclusive game on the PS3—better even than MGS4. I’ll watch Penny Arcade and other forums and see what the reaction is to Killzone 2 after full release. But I have an awful feeling that Killzone 2 is a colour-by-numbers FPS with more than one eye on ‘the demographic’.

This is Catherine O’Hara. She’s a sniper. She’s a key member of Squad 7—of my Squad 7, I should say—which is a militia unit fighting in a war in a game called Valkyria Chronicles. This game is exclusive to the PlayStation3, a games console with a singular lack of great exclusive games—until now.

The genius of Valkyria Chronicles is in the whole package, not just in the shooting. The turn-based/real-time battling is plenty good enough on its own. But the way the story and characters merge with the battles to create a unified whole is something I’ve rarely come across before.

I try to keep two snipers in my Squad 7 at all times. You can pick and choose your squad selection, mixing it up between various unit classes. (Scouts, Shocktroopers, Lancers, Snipers, Engineers.) Valkyria Chronicles shows its quality in the flexibility it permits you, the many routes you can take to achieve your goal. You could play the whole game without ever meeting Catherine O’Hara. You have to choose her from the list of available recruits.

Catherine takes her shot—with you aiming for her, and pulling the trigger—and if she hits her target she usually kills it. Then she hoists her rifle onto her shoulders and says, “I’m not done yet.” If you don’t grin and/or punch the air at least once when this happens, you may not be human. If she misses her shot, well, she misses. She does sometimes miss. It depends on various factors—the distance of the target, its type, the conditions, the terrain, how she’s feeling. This is the RPG side of the game.

I’ve managed to get Catherine killed quite a lot. I lost her at least once during every mission, in the early days, although I’m a lot better now. I know. I’m rubbish. It shouldn’t be happening at all. But it does, because I take foolish risks. I move her out into the open where enemy snipers can pick her off. Or I move her too close to the enemy shocktroopers. Because this is turn-based strategy RPG, you can do nothing during the enemy’s turn except watch it take advantage of your errors and missteps. I hate watching Catherine being machine-gunned to death.

If I don’t get to her within three turns or before an enemy reaches her body, that’s it, she’s gone. Dead for good. Gone from the whole game. I’ve already lost two valued squad members in this way. Aisha, a fine shocktrooper, died in one of the early missions. She begged piteously not to be allowed to die. I stared at the screen, helpless, as she died anyway. Then I lost one of my Engineers, just a few turns later (that mission was a disaster). I was still in actual shock from Aisha’s death and I’m almost ashamed to say I’ve forgotten the Engineer’s name. War doesn’t change.

But if you get to your fallen comrades before the enemy does, you can rescue them. When Catherine falls, all my mission goals are temporarily suspended. It’s all about rescuing Catherine. I have always done it so far. I don’t know what I would do if I failed. If Catherine died for good, I’d probably break one of my cardinal rules of gaming, and reload an old save to get a different outcome. I pray God it never comes to that…

How about a whistlestop tour of my gaming history? I want to give some flavour of my gaming tastes and habits. They’re peculiar in some ways, as today’s post title may suggest…

I’m primarily a console gamer. The only PC gaming I tend to do is on strategy games, with the likes of Civilization III and IV, Hearts of Iron 2, and even older titles like the Combat Mission series being particular favourites.

I entered the next generation of console gaming in August 2007. That was when I finally buckled under the pressure and headed into town and returned with a gleaming new PlayStation3, looking forward to the day—not far off—when PES2008 would arrive and be the Best Football Game Ever. I know that I wasn’t alone in this. How many thousands—or tens of thousands—of consoles were snapped up by PES fans in that period? How naive and trusting we were back then. Sigh. I just don’t like to think about it now.

The next generation is now the current generation. PES seems to be withering on the vine, but that’s another story (one to be revisited as 2009 unfolds). Over the past 18 months I’ve spent hundreds of hours playing PES and FIFA and assorted other football games (hence the blog, natch). But somehow—I don’t know how—I’ve found time to play other games as well. In no particular order, I have completed (or ‘beat’, as American gamers say) Bioshock, Metal Gear Solid 4, Portal, Mirror’s Edge, Uncharted, and no doubt several others that I’ve forgotten about for now.

In addition I have played pieces (bits and bobs; odds and ends) of many, many other games. I played over 30 hours of Oblivion before stopping suddenly. Things came crashing to a halt when I suddenly needed a lot of money to bribe a key character in a crucial mission. I didn’t have the money and it would have taken me an hour or two to get it by playing another few missions. I saved my game and meant to come back, but I kept putting it off and putting it off, and that was over a year ago now.

This is one of the perils of being  a mature gamer with a full-time job and lots of other commitments besides. You end up gaming in fragments, playing bits of games here and there, never settling into one game and just playing that one alone to completion. After a certain amount of time away from a game, you are less likely to go back to it. Which is why I have been—and still am—so attracted to the pick-up-and-play ethos of sports games, in particular football games. There’s no story to remember. No fiddly controls to relearn after a week or two of letting them go rusty. Oh, yes, that button brings up the map. Now, what zooms in? Oh, crap, I’ve accidentally sold the Amulet of Rathgorn. Uh? Who’s this Breenow the Bold fellow, and why have I got to kill him? Oh, where’s my PES2009 disc… So it goes, with me anyway.

The best game I’ve played on the current generation of consoles is, without question, Bioshock. That game still awes me just to think about it, and there are only two or three other games I’d ever say that about. Yes, Bioshock’s last hour is weak in comparison to everything that preceded it. The story twists are predictable. The final boss battle is surprisingly easy. But, oh my God, look at the whole. Look at the package. I have to think back to Metal Gear Solid 3 on the PS2 for a comparable feeling of being immersed in the kind of gaming experience that I play games for.

It’s tempting to go off into some kind of top-5 list of My Best Games Ever, but I won’t. I have peculiar tastes in games. For one example, one of my most favourite-ever games, even more of a favourite than Bioshock, is, wait for it, Final Fantasy VIII.

Yes, I said Final Fantasy EIGHT. You know, that one. The Final Fantasy that people love to hate. Speaking personally, I’d put FFVIII in my top 3 games of all time. I loved it in a way that I never loved FFVII—the one you’re supposed to revere without question. And I did love FFVII, but I loved FFVIII more. I loved the battle system, the magic system, the Triple Triad card game. I even loved the love story. I’m a hard-hearted, unsentimental son of a bitch—but I loved this computer game’s soppy love story.

I replayed Final Fantasy VIII three times in total, each replay lasting about 40-60 hours. I’ve never even considered replaying any of the other Final Fantasy games. I’ve never actually completed either FFX or FFXII, and I’m not looking forward to FFXIII (the phrase ‘action RPG’ makes me feel ill).

After that wander down memory lane, back to my recent gaming history. Over Christmas I completed Mirror’s Edge—a great gaming experience for two-thirds of the time, but a curiously empty-feeling and frustrating one for the other third. It deserved its slew of lukewarm reviews, but it was still well worth playing and I don’t regret paying full price for it on release day. (I also got a free promotional t-shirt that remains in its cellophane wrapper to this day. I doubt it’ll ever come out. I think that if I ever unwrapped it, much less wore it, I would instantly morph into Comic Bookstore Guy from The Simpsons.)

Just in the last week I completed Uncharted. I will talk about this amazing game in its own post, but I just have to say—what a criminally neglected masterpiece this is.

And then in the middle of last year there was Metal Gear Solid 4. Another great but flawed masterpiece. Even I, a dedicated Metal Gear aficionado, grew weary of MGS4’s aimless, rambling cutscenes towards the end, and the boss fights were the weakest in the whole MGS canon. But the game, what there was of it, was excellent.

And that is mostly that. This summing-up post is not the shape of things to come for the blog. I’ve got a backlog of unplayed games like you wouldn’t believe. What I intend is to work my way through them, one by one. I will treat my games-in-progress in much the same way as I treated my PES Master Leagues. I’ll blog about exactly what I’m up to, how I’m enjoying things, and so forth. We’ll see how the PES Chronicles format holds up.

First out of the blocks, naturally, is the game I’m playing at the moment, right now at the end of January 2009. Valkyria Chronicles, half of whose name is shared auspiciously with this blog, has got the PlayStation3 community buzzing. Could this game be the platform exclusive that we have been waiting for? Or, like Uncharted, is it doomed to inhabit the ‘cult classic’ niche?

It’s time to get into FIFA09’s career mode in a big way. I’ve had my few getting-to-know-you weeks. I’ve also spent several days playing PES2009 just to see if things could be like they were between me and PES again (no, they can’t—not at the moment, anyway). It’s time to put my money where my mouth is. Time to walk the walk. I’m heading into Manager Mode, or as I will try to make it: Manager League Mode.

This name reflects that I will be playing with House Rules designed to make the experience as much like PES’s Master League as possible. I know—it’s absolutely crazy that the PES career mode is more realistic in many ways than its supposedly fully-licensed, official, FIFA equivalent, but there you go. Life’s not obliged to be consistent.

I’ll expand on my House Rules for Manager Mode over the coming days and weeks. They’re not that complex. There’ll be no consulting a rulebook every time I want to make a substitution. Most of my House rules will limit my coaching staff upgrades and my acquisition of new players on the transfer market. After 4 seasons in my Manager Mode career on FIFA08, I had Michael Owen, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Jesus Navas playing up front for Coventry City. I won’t let that happen this year.

I’ll be playing again as Coventry City on the PlayStation3 version of the game. Yes, the PS3—the console with the dreaded through-ball bug. It’s still not patched. Doubtless I’ll be moaning my head off incessantly about it until it is patched. I have noticed fewer issues since I switched to manual through-balls, but it’s early days.

I’ve mostly played FIFA09 so far on the Xbox360. The game is—just slightly—a better game on the 360. Better graphics, and better overall pace. Just better. Sadly, my 360 would seem to be on its last legs (after just 14 months, and relatively little use) and it’s not reliable enough for me to trust it. I have little enough time as it is. Constantly restarting after freezes and crashes is not something I can be bothered with.

I’ve been playing as Atletico Madrid in the Spanish league on the 360. I’ve just finished my first season and ended up in 4th place. The whole season was played on Professional difficulty. Early on I switched from all-Assisted controls to a mixed bag of semi-manual, manual, and assisted. This instantly made the game harder for me without having to change the difficulty level.

It turned out to be a rollercoaster of a season. Going over to semi-manual shooting in particular saw my goals dry up, and I slipped down the table. I rallied toward the end of the season and but for a few poor performances I might even have challenged for the title in the closing weeks.

What can I say about my Atletico players? I’ve loved playing with them. Forlan. Aguero. Maxi Rodriguez. And quite a few more. I think I’ve loved this season with Atletico so much because it’s been one of discovery for me. I taught myself how to shoot straight without the game helping me so much. Semi-manual shooting makes even the most straightforward goal something that you really have to work for. For example, this goal—

—is the quintessence of a bread and butter goal. But when using a manual through-ball, and semi-manual shooting, I was grinning as if I’d just netted a 40-yard screamer. The ordinary can feel that good in FIFA09. I can’t wait to see how my Coventry City career shapes up.