It’s time now on this blog for me officially to say goodbye to a great game. Well, not so much ‘goodbye’ as ’see you later, probably’. I’m talking about the PS2/PSP version of PES2008, which I have been playing, more or less continuously, since March of this year. For the benefit of any new readers (randomly Googling ‘PES2009′ as the nights draw in), a few paragraphs of back-story are in order.

Gary Neville>Pele? What the - ?

It’s been almost a year since I started playing the much-anticipated ‘next-gen’ PES2008 on my then brand-new, sparkling PlayStation3. I think every PES fan knows how that one turned out. I have to admit that for a month or so I thought the game was absolutely fine. Really I did. Yes, it was lacking in so many areas but it’d do, I thought. Then I discovered the notorious ‘wonder dribble’, as I came to call it—the ability to dribble the full length of the pitch, with almost any player, on the hardest difficulty level, and score goals at will.

I had never played PES like that before. I had always been a pass-and-move player. It was a rare day that I dribbled for more than a few yards or went past more than one player. I wasn’t used to dribbling entire pitches and beating entire teams. I completely despised the PS3 version of PES2008 for letting me do that without even trying, and I still do.

There were lots of other reasons to despise it, of course. The slowdown for one. The lack of pre-game kit selection for two. The horrific nature of online multiplayer for three. (I wasn’t much of an online player. Thanks to PES2008, that’s how I’ve stayed.) The goalkeepers for four… The list is long and shameful.

What is to be done?

So, around the turn of the year, I abandoned the game. I’d tried playing with custom rules designed to limit the regular 6-3 scorelines, but my mounting disgust just got too much. Whatever else that game was, it wasn’t a PES game. It left me in a quandary: for the first time in a decade, I didn’t have an ISS/PES game to play all year. Oh, and I’d only gone and chosen this year, of all years, to start a blog about my daily PES-playing habit… Whoops.

It was nearly Subbuteo

I dallied with various other games. Football Manager. Sensible Soccer. FIFA08 looked as if it would become my main game, and that I would spend the remainder of the year on it. That would have been no bad thing. Ah, but then I decided I might as well try out the last-gen version of PES2008 before finally moving on.

And I was glad I did. My posts from that time record my delight with the game, my happiness with the classic gameplay, my relief at finding a PES to play for the rest of the 2008 season. Yes, granted, as time went on I experienced the usual frustrations with in-game scripting (it exists and no one and nothing will ever persuade me otherwise). But at its core it was the gameplay I had come to know and love and regard as being part of my daily life.

My first post about the PSP version of PES2008 was gushing, but cautious. I’d been burned so badly by the next-gen version that I was paranoid and suspicious. As if I expected the game to turn back into a pumpkin at midnight. I didn’t want to get hurt again.

Time passed, and I decided to pick up the PS2 version. I hated the idea of giving Konami and Seabass another penny after their uber-cynical, premature release of an unfinished, broken game, so I picked it up cheap from a bargain bucket. I loved having a ‘proper’ PES playing on my TV screen again.

I started a new Master League career and struggled for several seasons. I didn’t win a single game in my first season. I only won a handful of games in the seasons immediately after. Then the old routine kicked in. After acquiring a certain amount of decent and good players, I started winning. Promotion soon followed. Up in the big division, it took me a few seasons to find my form. Then league titles and cups rolled in. Then the Treble. Over time I had a squad of galacticos, one of the best squads I think I’ve ever had in any PES. The game was still diverting, but no longer really challenging. And so we come to today.

Footballers’ apostrophes

Right now in my Master League, it’s season 2022. I picked up a young Kaka’ in the pre-season negotiations, to add to my already staggering squad. I didn’t need him. I just wanted him, is all. It’s Kaka’! Incidentally, is the apostrophe in his name the most peculiar footballer’s apostrophe since that of Stephane Guivarc’h? I think that it is.

The End of Days

It’s the end of the 2008 season as far as football games go. In less than a week from today, next-gen gamers will have their hands on the demo version of FIFA09—and PES2009 (I heard this evening, after typing up most of this post. I love rewriting, me!). Thursday September 11th 2008 is one of the most keenly-awaited days of the gaming year so far—for football gamers, at least. And so I’ve decided that, as of now, it’s time to move on. At least as far as the blog is concerned I’ll be dealing exclusively with the next-gen 2009 set of games from now on.

As for the PS2/PSP version of PES2008… What’s my final verdict? Not that it really matters what I think of it. I’m under no illusions there. But I’ve played it as intensively as any other version of the game, albeit over a shorter timescale. After several months’ continuous play, where does it stand in my personal list of favourite PES instalments?

Psssst

(I should add here that although I’m treating them as the same game, there are enough differences between the PS2 and PSP versions for them possibly to warrant separate treatment. The PSP has major control issues—lacks the second shoulder buttons, and it has a cramped face buttons setup, etc. The PS2 version, played on a big screen with the full-sized controller, is a qualitatively different experience. But I talk too much as it is and don’t want to type the extra 500 words that treating them separately would require.)

The all-important, world-shattering final verdict

Here’s where PES2008, on the PlayStation2 and PSP, stands for me. I don’t like it as much as I remember liking PES5. So I have to be strict and leave PES5 where I have consistently claimed it is—at the top of my list of favourites.

After PES5 would come PES3. I always meant to get around to replaying PES3 this year, but never had time. (Maybe—no, definitely—next year. At some point.)

And after PES3 comes PES2008. Just ahead of PES6, which I know is many people’s pick for Best PES Game Ever.

After PES6 comes PES2, then PES4, then poor old PES1 trails in last. (I won’t offer next-gen PES2008 any kind of place on this personal ranking. As far as I’m concerned it doesn’t even deserve to be considered a PES game.)

Now. Most reviews—and my blogging about the game constitutes a year-long review, of sorts—end with a score. A rating out of 10 or 100, or a percentage. That kind of thing.

I won’t beat around any more bushes. I’m giving the PS2 and PSP version of PES2008, jointly, a strong 9/10 score. For me, an 8/10 would be too low, and 10/10 ridiculously too high. The game just became too easy, in the long run, to warrant a fat 10. But in terms of its more-ish playability, it’s right up there with any of my other favourite versions.

I’ll be back, Osasuna…

None of this means that I am saying a final goodbye to PES2008. My bringing-down-the-curtain finality of tone is misleading. PES2008 will almost certainly remain my sole portable football game for the next year. I doubt very much that I will get the PSP version of PES2009. I will certainly return to my ML career and take my team on towards 2030 and beyond.

And I’ll mention it on the blog from time to time.

*cringes with shame*

Yes. I lost 8-1. The CPU put eight goals past me. I conceded EIGHT times in Pro Evolution Soccer—a resounding first and, I hope, a last. I don’t know how I even managed to get 1. Take a look at the CPU’s Shots on goal…

Now is it obvious that I’ve never been ‘playful with the truth’ by saying I’m only an average PES player? At the moment I’m not even average. I’m way below average. I’m playing terribly.

In mitigation (there isn’t much), I was playing on the PSP for the first time after a long weekend on the PS2 version (played on my PS3). The game is just different enough on the two consoles for things to feel awkward immediately after a transition from one to the other.

It still doesn’t excuse the scoreline. Nothing excuses it. Not even my new slimmed-down squad can really be seen as a reason why I lost 8-1. The screenshot on the left shows exactly what I see when I look for substitutes mid-game—it’s scary stuff, having so few players to choose from.

But this was the first game of the season and none of my First XI—all decent players—were even tired. No excuses there.

I was hoping for a good start after having to lay off a load of players to avoid a Game Over after last season. And this is what I get. 8-1.

I also had four players sent off. It was due to my old bad habit of getting one sent off, and going a few goals behind, and trying too hard to get a goal back while defending deperately, and having another sent off, and conceding more goals, and losing all hope and discipline…

When I was 6-0 down I received my fourth red card—Handanovic, my keeper, dismissed for bringing down a Sparta player in the box. I was so befuddled and demoralised that I let Jaric go in goal for the rest of the game.

With 7 men on the pitch I did try my best to get another one sent off and the game abandoned. Would the CPU have been awarded ‘only’ a 3-0 win? I never got to find out. The CPU scored another two goals, and I somehow got a consolation goal, and that was humiliatingly that.

At times in PES you just have to lick your wounds and get on with it. I played game 2 of the new season straightaway. Things couldn’t get any worse. Could they?

It was tricky to field a team. Four of my players were suspended. Lehmann stepped into goal. Don’t get him sent off whatever you do, I told myself. I had to play Che Hyon-Hon at left back.

With my trimmed-down team and squad, I dug deep. I concentrated. I defended with discipline and care , and ground out a precious 2-1 victory.

I’m 6th in the table, just 3 points from the top, although my goal difference is naturally the worst in Division 2 by a long way. I could still do something this season, I think. But will those 8 goals conceded cost me at season’s end?

I drew 0-0 in the opening game of season 2010. It was a respectable enough start. I was pleased with the clean sheet and the point. I had a man sent off in the game and felt I’d got away with it slightly.

But then I lost my second game to RC Strasbourg (yet another bogey team candidate). The score? 1-5. Oh dear…

The pattern for me and PES2008 on PSP/PS2 is becoming clear.

Either I concentrate and defend properly—standing off attackers, bringing across a second defender, executing perfect sliding challenges, shepherding the CPU away from danger areas—and thus keep a clean sheet, or I cave in after I concede just one goal, and go on to concede a hatful of goals.

It’s all to do with my current lack of patience that I mentioned a few days ago.

When I go 1-0 down in this last-gen version of the game, my next-gen version instincts kick in and I start to play as if this PSP/PS2 version is the same quasi-arcadey mess that the PS3/360 game was and is. (Sorry to all fans of next-gen PES2008. This is just my opinion, of course.)

I tear forward recklessly, losing the ball often and inviting the pressure that leads to the hatfuls of CPU goals.

I need to wake up and accept that I’m not playing the PS3 version any more. The PSP/PS2 version is a ‘proper’ PES game, i.e. there has to be some semblance of realistic football gameplay involved.

In the end it does all come down to that one word: patience. Before this year I had it in abundance for nigh on 7 years of continuous PES gaming. And then the so-called next generation came along and I unlearned all of my patience—the core of my PES nous, if you will. I need to relearn it again, in full, and fast.